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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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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.
It's not possible for Valve to solve with the way Valve usually approaches problems. There's no easy way around it: you gotta scale up and do manual, human review. Algorithms and automation can't make these judgement calls. It's gotta be manual, it's got to be flexible enough to get around trolling and false positives. It won't be perfect, but no one is asking for perfection. Just a proper store and (if caught as a false positive) a reasonable response time.
Yeah - every method to prevent low quality clones would be devastating for games that are cloning the original on a high level or are massively improving on the formula. And the only way to prevent clones at all would be software patents for game mechanics and we really do not want that.
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.