Valve has no intention of taking action against AI Slop and clone games on Steam

Regarding players' concerns about the influx of a large number of AI Slop games on the Steam platform, as well as developers' worries that their game ideas could be cloned, Valve employees responded to this at the Steam Indie Connect event held in South Korea, and the company's position is that it does not intend to take action. Tom Giardino from the Steam Business Team said that Valve's principle is that it does not want to become a gatekeeper restricting which tools developers can use, and whether to use AI is up to the game developers themselves. Cloning game ideas already existed before generative AI became popular; AI has only accelerated this process. Giardino's advice to game developers is not to rely on a single idea, but to add more features, personality, and creativity to their games. Another Valve employee, Marc Wilkinson, talked about the more than 7,000 games that flooded into Steam's recent Next Fest, possibly half of which could be considered AI Slop. Wilkinson explained the Next Fest display mechanism: during the first two days of the event, games are presented to players randomly, after which the system provides personalized recommendations, recommending more games that players may like and purchase. He pointed out that most articles criticizing AI Slop are written based only on the experience of the first two days of the event.