Technology

Dear Steam,

Please put a filter tool in so that we, the player, can choose to filter out AI slop.

Thank you.

That's fine and I like that. We, the gamers, we can decide and it should be like that. We just need Valve's assistance by helping us with thorough AI disclosures. We can do the rest by controlling slop and clones with our wallets and filters.

1. Require AI tool disclosure
2. Enforce that. Spot check.
3. Give us a filter to show/hide AI-flagged items

For cloning, I'm not sure of the best solution. Allowing the owner and users to report it is nice. But what happens when people are coincidentally working on a very similar game and release around the same time, even without knowledge of each other?

No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.

I think we're reaching a point where there is going to be so much stuff around be it games, tv, movies, music, etc all made by AI and all just garbage, that it will make curating a huge deal. Like we'll need to have services whose sole purpose is to sift through the marketplaces and find quality stuff to then present to people. So you'll have a two tiered system where on one hand you can browse "everything" and it's just a deluge of stuff and then on the other hand you can go to a curated marketplace that only lists stuff that is known to be high quality. But it's going to take time for those curated places to pop up, and in the mean time we are gonna be swimming in slop.

I can't believe the sentiment in the comments here.

...Y'all think spammers are going to label themselves as "AI generated" if that's detrimental? They will not, and it's not something that can be objectively detected.

Getting customers to moderate this is self defeating, as the whole point of spam is to get in front of buyers' eyeballs.

Valve needs to hire staff to cull this junk, they can afford to, but they don't want to. That's the crux of the issue.

How much does it cost steam a single game? Maybe that is irrelevant, but if not, i doubt many of those games are going to make good sales

Enforce an AI label, abusers get delisted and not allowed to be on steam for 3-5 years. Allow users to block AI labeled games.

Edit: I think the ban should affect the developer and publisher too. That way the publisher makes efforts to prevent release of slop too.

People have been complaining about too many games years before AI, but most don't remember when steam was such a gatekeeper that they didn't even allow visual novels on the store. I think having a way to filter AI generated game assets is enough.

You don't have to tell developers anything except that they need to disclose AI use, and then you need to give customers the ability to filter them. For the sake of your platform. Because nobody wants to go through Next Fest and scroll through piles of slop or be duped into buying a sloppy game over and over.

Honestly if we can just prioritize giving real developers a spotlight to be seen and heard, sorting specifically by no-ai and having awards and events for no-ai, then I could see this being a potentially good thing. The low effort game devs of the past will all naturally sort themselves into slopper categories and out of the market.

The only problem is that perhaps not enough consumers are competent enough to care if a product is slop.

They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.

This is the exact same attitude they had to the deluge of unity store asset flips (well they actually tried to blame unity for that, but I digress)

Steam gets their money either way.

And that's what Lord GabeN needs to buy another super yacht for himself, and more Aston Martins for his son to race.

A lot of developers have already pulled their demos from Steam for fear of them being cloned.

Either Valve takes a stance against slop clones, or they're going to alienate indie devs (and probably the big ones too), and with them a lot of their customers.

Valve have to decide if they want Steam to be a thriving games store or an abandoned slop repository.

And “making no decision” is choosing the latter.

They should just surface the reviews more prominently, and let me buy a Steam Frame. The last part is key.

Giardino suggested that developers can protect their work by first building a strong community around it, and then focusing on continual improvements: "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."

Not every game needs a fuckload of features. Not everyone has the time and skill to create and manage a community around their own game.

Steam could at least allow people to vote on whether some games are complete clone garbage or not, have the weight of the vote rely on the account level + age. Or let people indicate the original game on a clone's page. Like any community feature, I can see this being a vector for abuse, but this AI bullshit is absolutely ruining online trust

Solid win for those of you who like to wade through 200 AI slop titles before finding something good.

Let's hope GOG takes a better approach

This is like the Wii shovelware era on steroids.

They better have a Slopless Award for the next steam awards