Valve Admits Steam Has an AI Slop and Cloning Problem, but Won’t Gatekeep Developer Tools
Valve has publicly acknowledged that Steam has a growing AI slop and game cloning problem, but the company says it has no intention of policing which development tools creators are allowed to use. Speaking at the Steam Indie Connect event in Busan, South Korea, Valve’s Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson addressed developer concerns head on, including reports of indie creators receiving outright extortion threats tied to AI clones.
Developers Describe Extortion Threats Tied to AI Clones
According to a report from Inven Global, one developer at the event described indie creators receiving emails that threatened to clone their game with AI and release it first unless they paid up. Giardino said he was hearing about that specific kind of extortion for the first time, and drew a line between it and the broader cloning problem: he views direct extortion as closer to a law enforcement matter than something a storefront can solve on its own, though he said Valve wants developers to report such cases so the company can look into them.
Valve’s comments came during a Steam Indie Connect developer event tied to the same Next Fest window where the AI slop complaints originated.
Valve’s Philosophy: Make the Real Version the Best Version
Giardino was clear that cloning existed on Steam long before generative AI, noting that developers have always risked having a clever mechanic copied quickly once it caught attention at events like Next Fest. What has changed, he said, is the speed. His advice to developers worried about being cloned centers on building a real community around a game and continuously adding features, personality, and creativity that a copycat cannot simply lift wholesale. He compared the approach to Valve’s long standing stance on piracy, where the company has generally favored making the legitimate product the best option rather than leaning on aggressive protection measures.
“We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”
Tom Giardino, Valve
Why Next Fest Looks Flooded With Low Quality Games
Wilkinson also pushed back on the idea that Next Fest itself is broken. During the event’s first two days, Steam shows games to players in something close to random order, specifically so that every participating title gets a fair shot at visibility before the platform leans on personalized recommendations for the rest of the event. He acknowledged the trade off openly: that early randomization is also exactly why a flood of forgettable, low effort games feels so visible to anyone browsing early on. Valve isn’t planning to filter titles out based on how they were made, but Wilkinson said the company is actively thinking about smarter discovery tools rather than gatekeeping at the submission stage.
The scale involved helps explain why the problem feels so acute. Steam has already hosted close to 23,000 game releases in 2026 alone, and Next Fest’s demo count has climbed into the thousands, a very different environment from the event’s earlier years when organizers had to actively court developers to fill out the lineup. The debate also lands in the middle of a broader industry reckoning with AI development tools, one that overlaps with Epic Games’ own recent confirmation that it is now using AI tools to help build Unreal Engine 6 and Fortnite, and with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney’s separate public criticism of Valve’s mandatory AI disclosure requirements for Steam listings.
Valve didn’t offer a concrete fix for either the cloning fears or the slop problem, but it did draw a clear line: developers, not Valve, get to choose their tools, and the platform’s answer to quality control is better discovery rather than fewer doors in.
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Picture Source: Valve / Steam
