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Valve responds to Steam devs getting extortion emails threatening AI clones of their games
(www.tweaktown.com)
What an awful time to be alive.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Don't worry, it'll get worse before it gets better!
It'll get better?!
Eventually, and maybe not with humans in the picture. That'd kinda be the ideal for the planet.
Only if the AI was retrained, they have traines ans tweaked it for capitalistic reasons.
This planet needs either much smarter humans, or a lot dumber ones. But we're right in the "fuck up the planet for everyone else" zone.
Well in the last 42 years every single day has been worse than the last one in many ways. So "getting better" is simply a fallacy at this point. Shit hasn't gotten better since fucking ww2, and that was short lived.
What happened 43 years ago?
I was born.
So this is all your fault?
/jk
Fuck I hope so. This is all just me hating our species with the fury of a thousand suns.
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One day, we will all be dead!
If it gets bad enough, giant asteroid 2028 is technically better I suppose.
Who would have thought that the same, morally bankrupt, unintelligent, Dunning-Kruger addled, narcissistic and sociopathic people who suddenly see a chance to "play with the big boys" just without knowing anything or putting effort into it would resort to something like this?
Their failure is never their own fault, or their lack of work they put into learning things, always -others- holding them and their -amazing- (read: shitty/crap) ideas back.
I hate this timeline with a passion. Social media gave all the trolls and village idiots a platform, and now "AI" -seemingly- allows the eternally inept to feel like a programmer or designer or artist, w/o the effort and the results of course.
Their clueless reactions to the backlash to their slop is evidence enough that the light may be on, but absolutely nobody is home
I was trying to have a coffee yesterday while two guys next to me were having the most mind numbing conversation about AI.
The worst part is that when they go on about "spinning up agents", discussing which models are better than others, someone listening in might be tricked into thinking they're actually intelligent or understand something complicated. It's already developed a jargon that obfuscates the fact that they're just typing brain dead prompts into a chatbox and pretending they're wizards.
Turns out the guy wanted to give Claude full disk access so it can automatically download/upload videos he's editing from remote storage. I sincerely hope the fucker loses all his data.
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While people doing this extortion scheme are self-deluded that their AI slop can be on par with the real deal, the real threats are either market saturation, or people will think your game is a ripoff of that AI slop.
Their clueless reactions to the backlash to their slop is evidence enough that the light may be on, but absolutely nobody is home
Man, at least there is still a backlash at all.
morally bankrupt, unintelligent, Dunning-Kruger addled, narcissistic and sociopathic people who suddenly see a chance to "play with the big boys"
I love this definition. Spot on. Here's a real human-generated em dash — for the real homies, as a thanks.
Incredibly well said.
People just need to start sueing for copyright infringement, only way to deal with this tbh.
Copyrights won't help you here. It's not the same code or assets
How will copyright not help here? You don't have to use the same code or assets for something to be copyright infringement. It's one thing if you personally don't believe in copyright, but just claiming that it has nothing to do with copyright because it's not a 1:1 copy is just not true.
If you made something that "just happens to look like that other thing", you'll have a hard time defending that in court (especially if you extort them beforehand). Heck, there have been copyright lawsuits over musicians using similar lyrics or melodies since forever.
That copyright protection is only against using recognisable characters, samples etc and has a high evidentiary requirement. It doesn't apply to art styles, prose, game mechanics and so on.
Fair, I'm not saying it would be easy to prove in general (if you have an extortion letter, however, it should be fairly easy), but that's what courts are for. Also this is not about copying a style or game mechanic, but the whole game. Then again, copyright law differs quite a bit between countries, so overall it depends, but saying this does not involve copyright is just not true.
It's a very muddy area. Game clones have existed ever since video games existed and using copyrights to fight this is imho going to cause a lot more problems than it solves. Sure, go after the extortionists, but stretching copyright law to do it, is going to fuck us all over.
Training data is based on copyrighted material that is stolen. Someone should be made to pay somewhere. The theft of human thought cannot be allowed to be exploited.
Copyright violations aren't stealing. Human thought cannot be "stolen", only shared.
Human thought shared between humans cannot be stolen. A billionaire's company feeding a machine all human thought for purposes of replacing said human is absolutely theft.
As for copyright, tell that to all the people fined for piracy.
Copyright violation is punishable by law, yes. But it's it's not theft.
A billionaire's company feeding a machine all human thought for purposes of replacing said human is absolutely theft.
It's immoral sure, but not theft. We don't need to equivocate to pass moral judgement.
Fair enough
To any indie devs hit by this: send me an e-mail (address should be in my profile), maybe I can do something about it.
Are you from steam support or are one of the hitmen they hire to deal with those situations?
When the laws don't help, when the community guidelines don't help, you do it yourself.
Dragon's Chronicles developer Takashi Mochibe received a demand for $200 in Steam items within 24 hours to prevent an alleged AI-made SRPG clone from launching first on Steam. He suspected the email was bulk spam; similar demands targeted developers of Iron Pilgrim and Circusar, and no payments were reported.
It seems like it would be easy to play along and set up a sting. Get the info for the mule account, send the items, report the mule account to steam, and steam can nab everyone based on where the mule transfers items to.
What kind of shit crap fucking garbage article is this
Is there supposed to be an article? Shit just goes to an RSS feed with nothing but headlines.
Link goes to an article for me
No idea what the issue is for you, but I see an article.
What a bizarre thing. Why does this even matter?
If someone makes a bad clone of someone else's game concept will they have succeeded in anything? Shitty games are shitty games.
If someone makes a good clone of someone else's game concept they have beaten them to the market and that's how capitalism works.
If you don't like that, don't complain about AI. Complain about capitalism!
The problem is that the original game gets buried. There are a million Needle in a Haystack games now and it is difficult to find the original.
The meta level of this comment is just... Chef's 👌
Keep up the good work 👍
I honestly can't imagine anyone demanding $200 in extortion money would ever be able to follow through with that threat.
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A trades group should be formed for Indie Devs to join that provides pooled funding for litigation. I have Nintendo's methods, but slop makers might hold back if there were potential consequences where infringement occurs.
This assumes of course we eventually get some kind of real AI regulation.
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