Valve places AI clone responsibility on developers instead of removing games

Valve acknowledged the AI cloning trend during Steam Next Fest at the Oct. 27, 2026 Steam Indie Connect event in South Korea. The company placed responsibility on developers rather than enforcing storefront removal of copycat games. Valve’s Steam business team answered developer questions directly at the session.

Valve co-hosted the event with the Busan Indie Connect Festival Organizing Committee and the Korea Creative Content Agency. Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson took the stage. A localization team member named Matt joined the question-and-answer session.

Giardino said Valve does not want to act as gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or should not use. He framed the position as a matter of developer choice. The statement kept Valve out of the role of inspecting which development tools developers use. ‘We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use,’ Tom Giardino said.

A developer told Valve that indie creators had received extortion emails warning, ‘If you don’t pay, we’ll copy your game with AI and release it first.’ The developer said the threats make indie creators hesitate to share demos and unfinished projects. Rivals could copy ideas and launch first, the developer said.

Tom Giardino said he was hearing about such extortion cases for the first time. He spoke after a developer described the emails during the Q&A.

Valve described extortion and clone threats as closer to law enforcement than a platform issue. The company said it wants to look into reported cases and help. Giardino said Valve’s resources would limit its assistance in law enforcement matters. He encouraged developers to report cases, so the company could look into them.

Valve said it will not ban AI-generated games outright from Steam. Developers must still disclose how they use generative AI in game production.

Valve’s revised disclosure rules say AI coding assistants that help produce software do not require disclosure merely because they assist with code. The requirement targets AI-generated content in the game, store page, marketing, or gameplay output.

Since 2018, Valve has allowed any and all games on Steam except those it decides are illegal or straight-up trolling. The policy dates to 2018 and Valve’s Erik Johnson described it nearly a decade ago as allowing everything except illegal content or straight-up trolling.

Valve said it does not aim to be an arbiter of which titles deserve release. The company compared AI games to earlier Greenlight and Steam Direct controversies. Valve said it has historically improved the shopping experience instead of screening games or turning developers away. That position was applied to Greenlight and Steam Direct as well.

Valve said clone games existed before AI. Generative AI accelerated the pace of copying concepts and chasing trends. Rushing out similar games after spotting a concept at Next Fest predated generative AI, Valve said. AI has made the process faster and cheaper.

Next Fest now features thousands of participating titles. The event has grown from only 50 or 100 titles about three years ago. Valve had to persuade developers to join when the event was that small. The scale has since flipped.

Giardino opened the presentation with audience figures before discussing launch preparation, demos, and Next Fest visibility. Steam launched on September 12, 2003. The platform recently hit 43.5 million concurrent users worldwide. Steam revenue in Korea grew 126% over five years.

During the first two days of Next Fest, Steam shows games to users virtually at random. Personalized recommendations begin after that initial period. Wilkinson said random exposure early in the event stops developers from gaining instant visibility by entering early. It gives every title a fair chance to appear.

Valve acknowledged that the random system can expose low-quality games, including vibe-coded titles (games built with AI coding assistants from plain-language prompts), and said it keeps things fair. Users complained about such titles during the latest Next Fest and called for an AI filter.

‘We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed,’ Marc Wilkinson said. Valve has not announced a specific AI filter or removal policy. Staff are deliberating on how to address low-quality exposure.

Wishlists do not affect Steam visibility. Player purchases and playtime drive exposure. Wilkinson rejected the idea that wishlist counts determine placement. He pointed to titles with millions of wishlists that failed after launch and others with almost none that succeeded.

Personalized Calendar, Steam’s launch-window exposure feature, ends one to two weeks after launch. Only games with an official release date set are visible. After the two-week window, developers must rely on sales, downloadable content, and updates. The calendar surfaces older catalog titles to interested players.

Digital Sun Games, developer of the Moonlighter series, is delaying a public playtest of ReVamp. The studio fears AI clones will beat the studio to launch. It cited the possibility that one or many AI clones could reach the market before ReVamp launches.

Some developers have become hesitant to release demos because of the emerging threat of AI-coded clones. They worry that showing unfinished work publicly makes it easier for others to replicate ideas using AI tools.

Valve advised developers to make games less copyable by building active communities, establishing trust, and shipping updates so players prefer the original. Giardino argued that complex games are more difficult to copy. He offered this as a reason complex titles can remain preferable to imitators when copies appear on the storefront.

Valve said trust built with players is the strongest defense against copies. Steadily adding features, personality, and creativity makes a game harder to replicate than a single mechanic.

Steam users have complained about AI-generated assets in games since at least 2025. The controversy intensified during the most recent Next Fest with vibe-coded titles. Players had to sort through many AI-generated titles at the demo showcase. That led to calls for an AI-based filter.

Tim Sweeney called on Valve to drop its AI labeling policy in an Oct. 23, 2026 post on X. He called it a political act and accused Valve of fomenting an anti-AI hate mob. Sweeney described the policy as a “political act.”