Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones
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Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers. Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there. It's as much a threat to them as anyone else, and indie studios can figure out for themselves they need to market harder but can't necessarily embark on a lawsuit.
Clones always existed, kids chose pokemon rather than a dollar store dragomons because pokemon became a household name by the time bootlegs appeared, legitimate shops only sold pokemon and the cartridge itself showed a quality difference.
Nowadays the clone can reach people before the original, the store shows everything equally, and the sprites, videos and description can be good enough to fool people. Steam works as a platform for the purchase itself but not as a discovery mechanism, because there's no "seal of quality" you can consider (other than skipping indies entirely).
No one can review at the scale needed, and it's entirely possible for a great game to have devs that are awful at marketing and get buried. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think some kind of threshold is necessary for the shops, or at least for an optional filter.
The issue today is the breathtaking speed with which people can rip you off by simply pointing an agentic coding harness at your original IP and laundering it into 50 copies in the span of a single weekend.
same for many forms of media, and for a lot of physical objects such as luxury items fakes. and we're talking utility here, so I bet lots of people use counterfeit electric equipment because it just works.
of course then comes ingenuity and community, but copyright is so dead, that it cannot be resurrected meaningfully at all perhaps at this moment.
What's actually happening is people buying knockoffs not knowing they're knockoffs, or no one buying those but the original being buried in the volume anyway.
As for the 'think about the non privileged', AI is a pretty poor answer for them. Once we're at a point where the person isn't able to pay for genuine stuff, they might as well go for piracy and emulators rather than a mindless knockoff. A world where the privileged are given intellectually stimulating material and the rest are fed empty slop is the worst possible scenario.
Is cloning the games in this way illegal? Has there been a precedent set?
What could be done is forwarding the complaint to Valve, and ensuring that the bootlegged game put out by those attempting to make good on their threats gets removed, and the developer banned.
> The question regarding AI cloning stemmed from a specific threat. One developer shared that indie developers have recently been receiving extortion emails threatening, "If you don't pay, we'll clone your game with AI and release it first." While understanding the advice to showcase games prior to release, the developer noted that such threats could make creators hesitate and asked if Steam had protective measures in place.
> Tom Giardino expressed regret, noting that this was the first time he had heard of such extortion cases.
> [...]
> While drawing a line on the extortion itself, he kept communication channels open. He noted that such extortion is closer to an issue for law enforcement agencies rather than a game platform to solve
For Valve to remove a game like that could be seen as anti-competitive. They would also have to actually prove this with evidence and so on for it to make sense. And there lies the competitive fog of war which can have consequences among competing games. One competitor saying "I'll make a game if you don't pay me to not make one" to another is not extortion or a threat at all. It's just business. And it can be very scary to be faced with an adversary like that.
What do you think Facebook et al do? They rip each other off through planted employees, poaching, and other shenanigans to find out who is working on what so they can be there before their competitors.
This is why we have other methods (patents, copyright, and so on) that are employed for legal protection. But ideas? Not good enough.
The word "extortion" here is doing so much heavy lifting it's comical.
The idea of a game is not protected. The specific graphics, dialog, script, and code are protected. Save the princess in an 8 level game is generic but just a few more details copied and suddenly you are an illegal clone of the NES Mario brothers script...
If you are worried talk to a lawyer about preemptively registering your copyrights (cheap) and trademarks (more expensive).
A clean room knockoff isn't but I don't think the cases would necessarily even be brought or won. There's a lot of quick buck artists who see gaming as a soft target. Success is in convincing them there's risk involved rather than actually winning in court or extracting settlements.
That will still leave a lot of AI game development people feel is slop. That's probably the reality going forward. But reducing that to the people who are interested in making games (even if we are unhappy with their results) and removing the people who are revolving through the latest AI get rich quick schemes is probably achievable.
As for the other cases, I don’t see a realistic path for Valve. Once they start kicking knockoffs they will have to draw a line, and it won’t end up being based on whether the action is actually illegal.
The only defense against copies has always be the same, be better than the copies in thing the consumer likes. You can't copy a Mario game, you can't copy a Kojima game, you can't copy a game that has been masterfully done and polished. If slop is gonna eat your lunch, it's only because your game is as good as slop.
Sure if you made a name for yourself, you can bank on that. People will buy Slay the Spire 2 instead is cheap copycats.
However I you are a new indie dev and made a decent game, how can people find you? They can't under the sea of slop. They could scroll and scroll and never find you.
I heart from many game reviewers that they have an harder and harder time finding good games to review. Not because people don't make good games anymore, in fact more good games than ever are made but finding them is harder than ever. Indie devs don't have a giant marketing department.
If steam keeps refusing to curate game the gaming market is going to crash hard.
I get how my comment comes off that way but I do agree and am broadly in favor of knockoffs. I think there's a distinction between a knockoff and a bootleg, where a knockoff steals ideas and a bootleg steals the execution. And a good game is a tasteful knockoff of a bunch of previous games, great artists steal and such.
The end result of what you're talking about isn't that the innovator will be copied and consumers will benefit.. it's that the innovator will no longer exist and no-one will benefit.
Video games have always been about copying the other guy and making it better though. Blizzard famously akways just made the best parts of all other games in the genre packaged up with cool looking cinematics. Every single FPS borrows from every other FPS any time something new comes along. And thankfully when Nintendo tried to stop it with Palworld they (mostly) got egg on their face.
The one famous example that did stick that I can remember is warner bros patented the nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor. Nobody can use that actually rather cool idea until 2036 and it hasn't been used in a decade now. Real cool stuff and definitely pushed the industry forward.
So far, so good. I talk to indie devs all of the time. I remember a husband and wife setting aside a small budget for their passion project. These are people with very limited time and money, so they do not have the resources or expertise for the business and marketing side, and they may also get overwhelmed if somebody just makes a copy and starts spreading it on reddit or elsewhere.
I think Valve is still right in essence but the answer is really "it depends". To me it comes down to relationships and trust: Getting a few early, vetted players, not necessarily going for high volume e.g. 500+ on Discord or whatever. Having people who really care, support and co-create with you. This will probably look a little bit different for every game: Some might run curated spaces, others will just embrace that copying is a thing that may happen. I saw the Xbox Labs announcement lately with even another route: Remixing being part of what they explore as the future.
Valve could just not publish them, they don’t have to risk suing.
Why though?
Imagine, there will be an AI agent, which will produce new game everyday and Steam users will like it and keep buying. Steam can only exist if customers keep buying and are not annoyed by games.
Valve takes a 30% cut of all sales through their platform which is responsible for the majority of their revenue. This is dependent on it being a mutually beneficial relationship for developers and a near monopoly on PC customers eyeballs.
Fantastical examples aside Valve is still dependent on developer good will. The balance of that to the near monopoly is a much more valid point about how far Steam can strain that relationship.
I still don't get it
This has no direct precedents and the case and the lawyers involved need to be chosen carefully, because once the precedent is set it is used by the courts for ruling subsequent cases. You don't want a sloppy lawyer, and the case has to be bullet proof, the judges known in advance (hence why certain districts are chosen for certain types of cases) and so on.
A case of this sort would bring into question so many non-game related things, more related to recent AI copyright and IP theft, that it would far exceed what Valve would be able to bring forward in terms of an argument anyway. Computer game mechanics and game designs are already on thin ice in terms of copyright.
Valve isn't going to fund this, and it is not how legal works.
One case does not a precedent set. Sure one case is a precedent and whichever lawyer it helps will be sure the judge knows about it. However any opposing lawyer will find plenty of details that are "different" and thus the judge should ignore it.
In the US you need to go all the way to the supreme court to get a binding precedent. However the supreme court wants to see a lot of other judge's with lots of different things considered before they set a binding precedent. They are well aware that they don't want to get this wrong and so want to review the thinking of a lot of different judges in lots of different circumstances so they can get the precedent right.
the other way to get a binding precedent is if lots of different cases refer to it and all get the same result and so there is no controversy.
As an aside, other posters keep saying how Valve can regardless finance or file or whatever a lawsuit. Yes. Anyone can. It doesn't mean they will win. Lawsuits happen all the time brought upon by people who are wasting their time and money.
Regardless, I don't see why Valve couldn't fund a lawsuit based on a novel legal theory.
I don't know why people are downvoting me. Folks, Valve aren't going to fund these lawsuits. It's a fantasy.
Edit: I keep trying to reply to you but you keep removing them before I can! It isn't personal in any way. I am simply looking to see what the arguments were and whether it was an already-released game having its assets stolen, vs. a game that is not yet released being knocked off with AI, vs. something else. I wanted to see what the cases actually played out like.
One of the threats that is highlighted in the article posted is that they want to extort games which are not yet released. Which is certainly juicy in its own right.
The idea that there is a future where game devs don't use AI, while the rest of the industry does, is absurd. We do know that AI will be widely embraced in gaming, because the alternative is, what? The honor system?
I actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.
I find myself going back to titles that are over 10 years old over and over again. Every new game I've bought in the recent years I have regretted buying shortly after.
Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore. I mostly play Indie games now, but even those are rarely anything special now. Back to Terraria I guess...
I think its easier to discover a game with a good story then a game with novel mechanics, but they exist.
https://arcraiders.com/news/notes-on-the-matchmaking-system
Some people really like it, some do not (I don’t play just have some friends who enjoy it)
I still can't determine if it was the long COVID or staying up until 5am playing this fucking thing that made my coworker act so erratically for months on end.
I woved not to touch that as I prefer to remain employed.
Denshattack!, ballxpit, blue prince, balatro, outer wilds, pipistrello... There's plenty of quality there too!
It's true that the average quality we're exposed to is lower, because there's so many random pet projects and big players take fewer risks. Relying on word of mouth or gaming reviewers you trust is important nowadays. But I'm convinced it's a matter of discovery rather than existence.
I know the other ones, but they really do not appeal to me, except for maybe balatro.
I'd disagree. The shooting itself is as old as space invaders, but there is a neat mechanic there worth exploring regarding the combinations of powerups and 'character powers' IMO. You have to choose what to fuse/powerup to keep the damage scaling well enough (though the amount of combinations isn't large enough to last more than a couple weekends, I'll give you that).
That difference in volume, which improvements in AI workflow will keep accelerating, really does point towards personal curation being far more overwhelming than it had been.
With the 2600, you and your friends would probably have a ready working memory of pretty much most of the good stuff, most of the awful stuff, and some insight into the publishers and presentation/packaging cues that point one way or another for an unfamiliar title.
With Steam, if you want to be able to find very personal idiosyncratic gems, instead of just following social media buzz or AAA PR -- one of the most exciting benefits to today's massive catalog -- you have to wade through an increasingly unfathomable amount of slop.
Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?
I think that's the problem, there are too many to choose from, where you end up overwhelmed and ends up choosing none.
- Has grown up and doesn't actually want to play games anymore (without realizing it)
- Is severely depressed and needs other help than the one games can provide.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that you're an outlier lol
Steam can't not have a store front, but it wouldn't matter to me if they removed 95% of it and just reduced it to a search bar with and a list with some basic results to know I'm actually buying the right game (think $Name, $Dev, $Date-of-release, $Probably-some-other-values-to-prevent-obvious-copycats). I'd use it in functionally the same way as I do know, and I wouldn't by any less because of it.
I don't want to say you're holding it wrong, but I question your tactics if your goal is to find new games you want to play.
I think it is mostly temporal filtering (due to rosy retrospection and survivorship bias combined with Sturgeon’s Law) that we all naturally fall into.
Most games 5+ years ago were also bad, but you remember the small set that were good and completely forget all the bad, and this builds an impression that games in the past were so much better. The same applies to movies, music, books, etc.
Of course, in the age of AI, a lot more (in absolute terms) shovelware content is likely to be made than ever before, so it'll probably hyper-accelerate the impact of this phenomenon.
They created the AI ghetto with their forced disclosure banner but are doing nothing about AI otherwise. They must do better than to basically tell developers that AI cloning is their problem. How about using a bill or two from their huge pile of cash to build a coherent strategy to handle the post-AI game industry?
the big difference is that Valve is private and generally delivers.
what do you expect Valve to do about AI cloning? sue OpenAI?
In a future with millions of games released every day discoverability or curation of the great games will be really important (even more than it is now).
So marketing wins again, I guess.
I'm hopeful that the jewels will rise to the top on their own merits, but with millions of games released every day it's gonna be difficult.
Maybe I'm a romantic but I hope there are some genius game designers in the world that now can release their dream games with the help of AI.
But they are currently doing 'anti-cheat' by far the less worse way and they should teach some others...
I am browsing 'upcoming' games (only native to linux), something happened, there is now many more diarrhea games than before. I suspect AI reverse-engineered slop.