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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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A lot of developers have already pulled their demos from Steam for fear of them being cloned.
Either Valve takes a stance against slop clones, or they're going to alienate indie devs (and probably the big ones too), and with them a lot of their customers.
Valve have to decide if they want Steam to be a thriving games store or an abandoned slop repository.
And “making no decision” is choosing the latter.
I don't think many people here actually read the article, valve said they immediately noticee the takeover of slop during the next fest and have already committed a significant amount of their team to tackling this. All they said was ATM there is no stance/solution. They also mentioned that games with real effort put in will be prioritized.
They aren't letting slop roll them over lol
That's corporate speak for "seen ✅". I know people love Valve, but this is very standard playbook for how they operate in PR. Acknowledge the problem, say they are working on it, maybe in a year or 2 we get a nugget of an attempt to kinda poke at the problem.
Maybe Valve will prove me wrong here since this is ramping up quickly, but this also isn't anything that will threaten their monopoly in short order. If I was GOG, I'd be taking a hard anti-AI stance between Valve's timid response and Tim Sweeney's full on cannonball and reinforce what they already do in curating for handcrafted games.
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And I don't think the rest of their statement is promising. First part (the title) is irrelevant: you don't need to gatekeep tools to gatekeep obvious slop copies of games already announced and upcoming on your platform. Let along a bare quality window. Valve did that gatekeeping for the first 60% of its life. Maybe we need that back.
Second part is borderline tonedeaf :
So, "yeah just market more and work harder". The two expensive parts of making a game. From a billion dollar corporation. If any other AAA studio said this it'd be ratio'd to hell.
They're basically trying to solve a problem that gaming has had for 20 years.
Low quality clones asset flips in cash grabs have always been a problem. It's always been a problem on steam.
The issue is AI just makes it easier to do in faster to do so there's more of them. It's not a new problem though.
They have been trying to solve this problem for a decade. This isn't a problem that's likely actually solvable.
Cuz no matter what you do, you're going to hurt legitimate devs far more than the cash. Grab guys the slop cloners.
You're also going to knock out the slowly growing group of people who are using AI to make their little dream games but actually do it well.
There's not a lot of them but they're popping up on places like itch or just on GitHub pages.
I don't envy valve the fact they're even attempting to tackle while expected because it is their store is also genuinely commendable. Most companies would look at this go f*** that it ain't worth the effort and then f*** off.
They have two options: fix it fast or die.
A store overrun by slop will quickly lose its customers, and with them any developers offering actual games.
Once the ball starts rolling it'll become a vicious cycle, and once enough developers and customers have left there'll be no coming back. And it certainly looks like the ball is picking up speed.
You're right to wait and see, but, at the same time, you amswered for a lot of people here when you said it's ramping up.
Sony's catalogue and PS5Z was literally just a week ago or slightly more than that. Numerous similar cases are breaking out, and, I hate to say it, but other bad actors are also taking this chance as a free for all to target more vulnerable indies.
Valve isn't acting yet presumably because they want to see where this is all heading and then align accordinly. Is there going to be new govie policy? A new breakthrough in AI development? New standardisation on Github? No one knows.
Short of Gaben uploading his own custom made AI into Steam, it really is best to pray things turn out well.
And yet it rolls.
I recently looked up Family Time because of the hype (and the Papa! melted my brovaries), but of course there's a clone with a fox lady already. That made me mad.
At least two of them, apparently, one with even the same exact name 🤮 (how is that allowed?).
Game's not my cup of tea, but I tagged both clones as slop (can't report them because none of the reasons would apply, as this kind of cloning is still legal), not that it'll do any good.
Least Vave could do is add “blatant slop clone” to the reasons to report a game.