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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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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.