This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Indeed, cloners will find ways to flood the market, because that's the effective way.
As someone who likes to discuss about solutions, time is something the cloners do not have. They are always trying to clone the currently trending things, so they cannot wait for three months or so for the trend to die out.
I would say a mandatory 3 month period of closed beta would help cull many bad actors, with strict requirements as what would suffice. Valve could in the meanwhile scan in case the assets are stolen from another games listed in their store.
I'd be behind spot-checking at the very least. I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
If you get caught, you get perma-banned from Steam.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that's existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
With all due respect, this is exactly what I am talking about.
I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
Enforcing posting code source isn’t viable for many reasons. But one is that spammers are going to hide the vibecoding anyway; this would only catch relatively innocent coding assistants from earnest devs.
It wouldn’t catch anything malicious.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
And again, the point of spamming is to get eyeballs in front of customers. It doesn’t matter if 99% reject it as obvious garbage; if just a few people buy it on chance, it’s worth the minimal effort for the spammer, and it encourages other spammers to come.
…And that would be catastrophic to new devs, anyway. How is anyone new supposed to enter the space and publish their labor of love if everyone assumes new devs are malicious?
Sorry if this comes off as thorny, I feel like commenters here are contorting themselves to excuse a giant corporation.
This is Valve’s storefront. They make mountains of cash from it.
It is their job to filter spam, they need to spend money to do it, and they don’t want to. There is no way around it.
This is like the Wii shovelware era on steroids.
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.
100% this.
if using AI in your product adds so much value to your product, then why are you hiding it??
Why would anyone making AI spam label their spam as AI?
No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.
You can. Add tags/genres to your ignored list, and you won't see any games marked with them.
Been blocking EA games for years.
Individually, or is there a blocking feature I'm unaware of?
You can click on either the publisher or developer and there's a setting to not recommend anything by them. IIRC it's in a gear wheel in the top right of the developer/publisher page
Thank you! Greatly appreciated!
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
As far as I can tell, you can only add about 10 tags to the ignore list. That's way too few for me.
Walmart sells a ton of shit I think is stupid. Sometimes I see it in the store. It really doesn't bother me, I go to the aisle for what I want, consider the options, pick one and buy it.
I'm staunchly against smoking. Cigarettes are sold in many stores, but the packs all have warning labels on them making it very easy for me to make sure I never accidentally buy cigarettes. So far, it's been pretty easy to avoid.
I don't need to talk to the clerk when I walk in and ask them to hide all the products I hate, as long as everything is labeled and I can buy what I intend to buy, it's really not a problem. It's a store.
Let's hope GOG takes a better approach
They don't adopt enough games for it to be problem.
Let's hope that works in their favour
Nope they already using Ai.
They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.
I'd say not only labelled, but at the very least if we ain't ostracizing generative ai being used in any part of the process, we should at least have the dignity to have it quarantined. I for one don't feel like buying and installing malware because a yahoo who cannot actually read their own code decides to upload to Steam, let alone literally any other platform.
