THE CRUNCH
Valve has responded to the growing problem of games being cloned with generative AI and sold on Steam, and its answer puts the burden on developers rather than on the platform. Asked at a Steam Indie Connect developer conference in Korea whether Steam had protective measures against AI cloning, business team members Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson reportedly offered no crackdown. Instead, Giardino said developers should build active communities and trust, make the legitimate version of a game the best one available, and keep adding features and personality so the game is harder to copy. "Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective," he reportedly said.
The question came from a developer who described people holding teams to ransom by threatening to clone their games. Giardino said it was the first he had heard of such ransoming, suggested it was probably a matter for law enforcement, and said Valve would "help in whatever way we can". He also underlined the company's hands-off stance on AI tools: "We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."
The comments are reported second-hand via InvenGlobal, whose machine translation was checked with a native Korean speaker, and Eurogamer is seeking clarification from Valve. They follow the widely publicised case of Needle in a Haystack Simulator, a simple indie game that is not even out yet but has been copied so many times it is hard to tell which version is the original. Its developer has taken to joking about adding a mode where players must find the original among the copycats.
There is history here. In 2018, amid concern about what was sold on Steam, Valve's Erik Johnson said: "We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling." More recently the pendulum swung the other way when a broad sweep against 'adult' games caught artistically mature titles alongside crass ones. With more games than ever launching on Steam, moderation is not going away.