I remember going to the Radio Shack in the early 80s and seeing dozens of different Atari carts, priced at like $4.99 (which was a lot more then, ofc, but it still felt cheap), pretty much all of which were garbage.
It pulled down the price that good games could charge and killed the industry for a bit. I feel like peer communication is for now easier, so games like BG3 can still command a price premium given their quality, but the slop cannon is not a good thing for the industry generally or Valve in particular.
It does feel like we are barrelling headfirst into another gaming industry collapse, doesn’t it?
Between the whole soulless, overpriced, MTX-riddled “AAAA” crap crowding out the top, tonnes of AI-slip flooding the bottom-end, and the antagonism towards physical media - it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time.
Especially given how there is a literal lifetime’s backlog of quality titles from half a dozen console generations - gamers could survive an ice-age. Developers and publishers can’t.
I’ve thought for a while they should put the AI disclaimers at the top of the pages instead of at the end of the game’s description and you have to click ‘See More’
Actually, seems like you don’t have to press ‘read more.’ But I always think you do.
Stringent labeling rules are a must. Not just on Steam but on everything “si” slop based.
Slop intelligence.
For now, for players browsing the thousands of Next Fest demos, finding genuine, hand-crafted games has become an exhausting chore. On the other hand, indie devs are afraid of AI-generated copycat games and some go as far as pulling out of Steam Next Fest to avoid getting their game stolen.
Any small game developer would have to be a fool to use Next Fest as is. This is awful.
Are games required to disclose? There are some aggressively AI looking games with no mention in their description. I genuinely ask since a filter would do nothing if it’s not enforced.
First, we are updating the Content Survey that developers fill out when submitting to Steam. The survey now includes a new AI disclosure section, where you’ll need to describe how you are using AI in the development and execution of your game.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618
But Valve has never been one for actually moderating their store or forums, that would require actual investment of both money and time.
I wonder if this will finally make them act.
even flash games from the early 00s had soul in them
And now they’re ported to rust and hosted on steam! :cry😢
If you’re proud of your use of LLMs, you’d want to promote it. The only legitimate reason to conceal it is you consider it problematic.
LLMs are a competency solvent and credibility chipper. It’s bad enough if you can afford sacrificing some slack, but a lobotomy it’s catastrophic if you haven’t.
The only legitimate reason to conceal it is you consider it problematic.
I get what you mean, and agree that the AI slop is bad and should be declared… But I’d argue that "considering it problematic isn’t the only reason to conceal it.
There obvious financial motives. If you don’t think it’s problematic, but think it’ll hurt sales then that is a “legitimate” reason. It’s a morally shitty reason, but it makes sense.
Distinction sans difference, it’s still considered problematic.
If anything, including a financial element in the calculation makes it more problematic.
Hurting sales is the only problem that corporations care about.
Tech management types are, by and large, moral and ethical vacuums. They see artists going broke as a Good Thing.
Does it count if I’m not proud of my use of LLMs?
I just used gemini to make a mod for Total War, Warhammer 3, because the mod I wanted was not available anywhere. It had to have been the most annoying modding I have ever done. I thought it would save time, it ended up just being me telling the llm that it was making shit up 80% of the time. I finally got working code after what felt like 6 hours of supervising the dumbest programming intern on the floor. My take away, is that I could beg for code better next time, but it did not improve my own ability by much at all. In fairness it would have probably taken me the same amount of time or longer, but the integrity of the code would be higher. I have to believe Claude or GPT are better for this task.
I disclosed that I used AI to make the mod, and for the artwork. I feel like I put an unnecessary target on my back with the declaration considering like 99.999999% of the billion mods for this game are AI slop and AI assisted and do not make similar disclosures though AI use is obvious.
Thanks for providing valuable training data to AI corporations. Your labour will never be acknowledged or compensated and your resources will be stolen.
I recently used one of the heavier ChatGPT models to make a mod pack for Minecraft, fixing some of the things that prevent me from playing the game (usually I lose interest quickly after starting a new world). I had it stitch a bunch of pre-existing mods together and test that they didn’t conflict or make the game too easy. And I had it make a new mod which added custom villagers to villages who point you to destinations full of tough scary monsters guarding a prize that’s needed to beat a final boss. The villagers only give directions if you use one of the expanded food mods to cook a complex recipe for them. If you defeat the bosses scattered around the world, there’s a distant Mordor-style volcano you can then travel to and defeat the final boss. And the biomes are arranged in a spiral with the size of the biomes increasing the further you get away from spawn. I also had it leave tips and instructions around loot chests around the map to teach me how to use the mods and remind me how to build automated farms. This combination of conditions actually motivates me to play the game because there’s a real goal now and a progression that keeps the game engaging all the way through. I don’t plan on releasing it anywhere because I’ve heard a lot of anecdotes from people who made mods with AI and got yelled at for it. Still cool that I can ask for a complex custom mod pack one evening and start actively playing it the next morning.
If you make more mods using AI, I would definitely recommend utilizing one of the heavier GPT or Claude models to limit the amount of rework. I did give it full access to a laptop I have dedicated to AI agent use so it could test and iterate things without my involvement. Completely understandable to not want to give an AI model that level of control. I have to imagine that if I were running the tests myself, I would have had to hand-hold it quite a lot more than I did. Your mileage may vary.
It’s about context. I’m working on a game right now, an idea I’ve had for decades but has always been out of reach. AI has helped me a lot to develop it quickly while also working a full time job. And I’m also working hard to avoid disclosing the AI use - not because I don’t want people to know but because of the deserved stigma around AI slop.
Steam’s current stance (last time I checked) is that if the AI makes assets the player sees, hears, reads or otherwise experiences first-hand, then you must disclose it. But if the AI is used as a tool to produce the code that runs the game, it does not require disclosure. I personally agree with this and have tried to adhere to these rules.
In practice, it means that rather than having some generative tool make my in-game textures, I instead had AI create code that procedurally looks at 3D assets and defines how an artist would draw lines to represent that object if they saw it in real life. And when it comes to audio, I’m doing my own Foley work. For all of the dialogue in the game, I’m writing it myself, which is going to amount to hundreds of hours of work.
But it’s worth it to produce a game with a human touch to it, which doesn’t need to disclose use of AI-created assets. If there was a requirement to disclose use of an LLM in producing the backend code, I gladly would. AI has saved me countless hours by writing the game’s source code, which would easily have taken a year or more for me to write and debug by hand. I just don’t want my game to be lumped in with games that are churned out from an AI without an eye for quality, completeness, or a unique look and feel to the assets. I’ve put too much work into this game for someone to take one look at an AI tag and decide that it’s low-quality slop.
So, based on how you describe it, you’re trying to avoid having to make a required disclosure by generating code that makes the visuals rather than generating the visuals directly? To put it in the way I see it: you’re willfully trying to find and abuse a loophole in the disclosure policy because you know having that disclosure makes your game less desirable to a potential audience?
This is why there’s very little trust for anyone who uses genAI. Rather than recognize that its use is creatively bankrupt, ethically questionable, and disrespectful towards the art form it’s emulating, they’ll use any little loophole or technicality to justify deceiving their audience.
Respectfully, I get that you have a worthwhile story to tell and are putting a lot of work into the writing, but either make the game with the help of genAI and make the disclosure, or tell the story in a medium using the skills you have without resorting to genAI. Trying to weasel your way out of making the disclosure is, in my opinion, more disrespectful than the low quality spam.
Thanks for an intelligent take in a thread full of slop logic.
I don’t particularly agree with that stance. In terms of what I’m dealing with in the game, there’s really no difference between the developer asking an AI to make an asset filter and them knowing they need to Google kuwahara image abstraction .
When it comes to making an asset, I care that someone thought about what it should look like. Having it generate the asset is just hitting shuffle until you stop. Having it build the filter or tool is no different than finding a tool or filter and then using it to make the asset.
It’s not a loophole. It is the actual intent of the AI disclosure rule. Generative AI uses inference to produce visuals. I am using AI to create procedural code that draws lines in the way I want them drawn. Using the curves and styles I have defined. You can argue that you want AI usage in backend code to be disclosed as well, which I would probably agree with. But I don’t agree that building logic to define how 2D lines get rendered is the same as prompting an AI for an image and using that image as an asset in a game. They are completely different ways of producing graphics and look entirely different from one another. I do not want to make a game where the art style looks AI-generated. And mine does not look that way, because the art is not made by AI. Still, I respect and appreciate your opinion on the topic and would be interested in hearing further feedback on the process I’m using.
As much as I agree that there is a difference, it still feels like trying to skirt around the disclosure. Clever way to avoid looking generated at least, I’ll give you that. Agree to disagree on this.
I’m very staunchly against using genAI for anything in the games I play, so if I find out a game uses it in any way my opinion of it and its maker quickly shifts negative. If I played a game that doesn’t disclose any genAI use and later find out genAI was used, I will go out of my way to avoid any further games made by the same people and leave a negative review citing the genAI use as the primary reason.
In my actual opinion, creatives using genAI to do work in the mediums they don’t work in is a betrayal of, and voluntary isolation from, people who should be your peers. I would definitely choose to stop associating with someone I know if they tried to utilize genAI as a part of something creative.
Not everyone has that negative an opinion, or even cares if all the code is generated given they’ll never see or know. It’s a hard-line stance coming from a need I feel to oppose genAI regardless of what it’s generating. Generated code is not something that’s particularly enforceable when it comes to disclosure, anyway.
If you’re following the rules as written then I guess you’re welcome to not disclose genAI use and all I can do is cope.
Yeah, totally understandable. Agree that it’s hard if not impossible to enforce a disclosure on generated code. And also agree that what I’m describing is a code-based means to achieve an art style but a means to skirt disclosure rules that would impact me financially. Both things are true.
I’m hoping they will add a middle ground disclosure where I can differentiate my work from pure genAI slop but also give people like yourself a fair heads up.
On the point about separating ourselves from the people we’re supposed to be working with, I both agree and disagree. In my case, I went to college for animation and game design, but found that none of the jobs I could find out of college would pay enough to cover cost of living. I also heard horror stories about eternal crunch time and studios moving between cities frequently to take advantage of tax incentives. So, I moved home with my parents and got a job at the local computer store. My friend got me a job in a call center as a support technician, but it turned out to be more of a site reliability engineering job under support technician pay. Involved a lot of lateral thinking to solve technical problems and I mostly worked and played video games to try to unwind. I wanted to make something that would allow me to change my circumstances and make money as a creative rather than continually burn out being overworked as a technician. I wrote novels, drew animated shorts, wrote scripts, and made games. But nothing ever felt finished enough to show to other people. I’d always find flaws too deep to fix, or discover it was going to take years to make all the assets I needed and gave up because the work seemed so insurmountable before any payoff was possible. I’ve got about fifteen rich detailed game designs from around twenty years of daydreaming, and not much to show for it.
AI has entirely changed my situation. I left my day job and got a job as a DevOps engineer where I basically has AI teach me all the skills I was missing. I left that job and spent a year trying to build a PaaS. Which like all the other passion projects was aimed at generating enough passive income that I could slow down enough in this rat race and start collaborating with other creatives and get to the point where I can pay them to help me make things.
That PaaS has never been profitable, but it did get me noticed and I’m now a senior software architect at a well-known company. For better or worse, my designs have become central to the product and my work hours have been steadily climbing, currently between 70 and 95 hours per week because so many people depend on my work product for direction and I don’t want to let anyone down. I make enough money to have a house to myself now, but don’t have much time to relax in it. What I can do is set my work laptop on one side, to send it off on AI-driven tasks, while having another laptop on the other side that I give instructions while I wait for my work prompt to come back. I’ve resurrected some of my old ideas and now I’m playing games I was beginning to doubt would ever become a reality.
Hopefully, some of these will be profitable enough that I can both support myself and hire creative people to work on more involved projects. I do see your point about AI separating creatives who should be working together. But it also feels like my best odds of having time to collaborate in a healthy creative way is by leveraging AI to make some things on my own first. And not to say I can’t find ways to bring artists in on my projects that I’m working on now.
Despite being made in many different styles and genres, my games tend to have one commonality to them. They introduce some kind of asset submission pipeline where creators can make skins or customizations on top of my games and get paid for their work in a way that fairly balances the time I’ve put in and their submitted work against the benefits our works collectively provide to the player.
Because I am deeply concerned about the direction the world is taking. The ease with which corrupt political parties deceive the populace. The control that the super wealthy have over almost everything. The fact that they will soon be able to do most things without the need for any kind of proletariat. I don’t think the non-wealthy people will get basic income on a platter. They are more likely to be disposed of when they are no longer necessary. It’s already happening.
So, part of my aim is to provide jobs for people in a post-job society. But of course, people without jobs have no money to spend on games. So, the primary purpose of my working insane hours and developing these old game designs is to make money. Specifically, to make enough money that I can leave my job and finish my PaaS. Because that hosting platform will become the foundation of a software creation platform which allows people to democratically create software, in a structure without a competitive hierarchy. One which runs not on capital but collective reasoning between confirmed real humans. And the means of that production as well as the profits of everything produced belong to the ones putting in the work to make the system successful. Those are the rules I need to codify and ensure cannot be corrupted once I allow my system to fork and federate.
And only once we rebuild and improve all of our existing software, currently owned by greedy companies that answer to profit-obsessed shareholders, will the act of living stop funneling profits to the ultra rich. If you can’t change that reality, then it’s only through effective voting and responsible governance that we can regain control of our civilization. And I have stopped holding my breath on that account. These AI companies are spending a lot more than they are making right now because it’s in their best interests to get people hooked and train on the users. It’s only during this window that it’s financially possible for the general populace to create and market tools that will replace the profit-driven platforms of today.
AI does indeed contribute to horrific climate change, enables the ultra rich to disconnect their futures from the existence of the masses, and gets its users addicted in ways that are already hard to reverse. It is nonetheless my opinion that leveraging it heavily in the months and years to come is by far the best shot we have to take the game of the oligarchs and turn it against them. I may be wrong. But you now have all the logic that has brought me to this place.
I can only hope we can find a path that is best for us all.
TL;DR: i think you are correct and most of our differences may be in the perspective from which we view a shared goal
Making the backend does not make you a good game dev, you also have to make a fking game thats enjoyable to play, sht so many games don’t require coding to make, I see no difference between that and directing an ai on the backend. Or do you hate no code engines meant for ppl to make games easily?
Fucksticks attacking you is a reason t want to hide it
Not necessarily true. The legitimate reason to hide it is irrational stigma. Why voluntarily paint a target on your back, if there’s no downside to not doing so? Just refuse to engage in the AI tagging, and all anyone has are unverifiable accusations.
Again, if you’re proud of your use of the grey goo extrusion sphincter, you’ll be able to defend it.
If you care so little about your creative abilities, and choose to abdicate the responsibility to develop them, why would you care what others have to say?
Is that how it works? Here I was thinking I was just a realist, who saw what was coming and got ahead of the curve by getting my MSc in Machine Learning before the future became the present, so I could hold on to a viable career for as long as possible. I’m sure you know better, though.
I literally don’t care. All is (probably) lost, and I’m just surviving as long as possible. I’ve often said, to ridicule although I still still stand by it: the climate is so far gone that if we are to have any solutions it will either come from the culmination of all mankind’s knowledge (AI), or from extraterrestrials. And I’m not seeing any ETs.
Honestly, I’m truly sorry you’ve committed so much personal effort to a pseudoscientific field, but on the bright side, that exact field is the current hotness, and usefully ignorant clowns are ripe to extract a career from if you apply yourself. Just look at economists who have been pulling it off for decades.
Hell, maybe you’ll actually discover something that can legitimately be mistaken for an intelligent system, and make me look like a blathering fool.
Wouldn’t that be cool! But no. I only spend about five percent of my time developing systems that use AI. The rest of the time I’m using AI directly in software development. I’d probably really enjoy a job in the Artificial Intelligence industry, and it would probably pay multiple times more than I’m making now, but I have too cushy of a job to consider it. Set my own hours, set my own priorities, friends with all my coworkers - answering to a manager, working with strangers, and having to work a set shift isn’t worth the money. Thanks for the kind thoughts, though.
The climate crisis is caused by machines and automation. I very much doubt it can be solved by more machines and automation…
The climate crisis is caused by capitalism, of which machines and automation are but a fraction.
While this comment has the wrong essence, it does raise a valid concern. There should be some way to detect and ban AI deterministically.
This is impossible.
Thank you for acknowledging the validity of my assessment, even when we disagree on the call to action. I’m afraid, with regards to your own struggles, that your current sole reply is quite correct. It is literally impossible to detect it, as every developer is a literal black box. In the near future the developer themselves could be AI. Instructed to ignore AI disclosures…
Slop games have always been a problem on Steam. I can’t remember who it was since it was forever ago, but I used to watch a YouTuber who would “review” the shovel-ware that would show up on Steam. That being said, LLMs sure make putting out slop so much easier. The skill floor for creating garbage is even lower than it was before, which is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.
Jim Stephanie Sterling?
Before those AI-slop games I think it was asset-flips with tons of achievements. We really need Steam to finally do something.
I don’t think it’s a issue of filtering out games that are bad but more of one making sure the good ones are seen.
I don’t really see the ai games as a new issue but continuation of just slop games in general.
I’m all for a filter, it would help I just don’t think its going to give the result people want. Epic/unreal is going practically full ai, and people are just going to hide the disclosure.
Ai just makes this problem way more obvious because it increases the rate of which these games can be made. It came at a time when indie games are at their strongest and charming friedslop games and endless rougelikes are taking over. its just so many things to look through you could spend a whole day searching for a game to give 30 bucks to, and still feel unsure what to buy. And often I’ll overlook good games because someone made a shitty clone of it and I assumed they’re all the same. Or just the art looks generic or ai when it was actually the game I wanted.
SteamDB has a filter for the AI Content Disclosed tag, which means we can exclude games with it. Now I know some lie, and others also use to state that they don’t use AI, however it’s the best we’ve got for now.
https://steamdb.info/sales/event/713414759190366804/?displayOnly=Demo&tagid=-1368160
This kind of slop isn’t exclusive to AI, it just made the cost of making one less
Just look at the publisher Playway, they were already doing barely functional slop way before
The massively reduced effort and cost is the problem here, though
Not really. Maybe gamers will have to be a little more selective with the games they buy. That would actually work out better than what we had before AI.
Not really, as in its very easy to spot
I have yet to see the actual numbers about this, I’m pretty sure it’s worse than what my gut feeling (and anecdotal observation) tells me: I download a TON of demos during Next Fest, it’s my favourite events of the year, so I tend to browse through hundreds of demos sorted by charts.
- February had around 3000 demos and 717 of those has declared using generative AI (keep in mind there’s also a bunch that did NOT declare using it, a lot of Steam capsules artwork are generated by AI despite no disclaimer for example)
- June had 4411 demos (27% more) and 553 of those (12%) has declared using generative AI (27% less) (that can mean either less demos using generative ai OR more demos hiding the fact they’re using generative ai)
- October (current edition) has 6509 registered demos, that’s a huge jump (57% more)
If you ask me the huge jump in committed demos is very likely due to vibe coding quickly becoming the de facto standard over the summer and turning out massive amounts of code in a few hours. I assume many “developers” have already accepted that this is how things are done for the moment and don’t even declare AI use anymore. “I haven’t written a single line of code last month!” is something I keep hearing lately. Even from indie devs who have already launched somewhat successful games on Steam. Some of them seem so happy about it that I wonder if they have any critical thinking skills at all because them essentially not working anymore means they’re all out of the job soon.
Making a game involves a lot more work than just coding. You don’t necessarily have to be out of work due to that. Some people may even be in work due to that, if they had a good strong vision for a game and it’s mechanics but we’re lacking coding skills. Still, it’s a complicated situation so it’s not black and white.
I’m pretty sure its companies capitalising on the hype.
They shit out a 75% complete game, then use AI to wrap models on a skeleton to make a “game”, that makes a good demo. Unfortunately the original company only wrote so much original code, so all these demos really can’t get past that (which makes an insane sales pitch, your hard work finally made your dream come true - just pay us $12.99 a month!).
It’s 8000 actually.
Oh, my source might be wrong then, where did you get the number?
On the Steam nextfest page under the filters section it states number of matches as 7290. SteamDB shows 7291 results.
Using SteamDB’s AI Content Disclosed tag filter, I see 1087. So 1087 out of 7291, or 14.93% have AI disclosures.
From the next fest page.
While I want an AI filter, it isn’t the kind these people want. What I want is an AI that looks at my owned games, reviews, wishlist, and personal sentiments, then assembles a list and calendar of games that I am likely to play.
I enjoy hentai games - but don’t like ladies with big boobs nor thicc butts. Your standard filter wouldn’t be able to understand that.
Ditto for my preference of stylized aesthetic over photorealism. A huge chunk of games would vanish from my sight, with that taken into account.
Doesn’t the new Steam personalized calendar work for you? On paper it sounds like exactly what you’re describing https://store.steampowered.com/personalcalendar/
Not quite. It only takes hashtags, it doesn’t consider things that can be described in plain English. IMO, one of the valuable things about AI is that it can take multiple factors into account and determine whether something is the right mix to interest me.
For example, I like Shoot’em Ups, but only if they got upgrade progression systems similar to Tyrian 2000 and Sky Force. Temporary power ups and roguelike Shmups aren’t my thing. An AI can parse the game description and screenshots, then determine whether it has what I personally enjoy.
Oh that makes sense yeah
Maybe something like the interactive recommender but with a lot more sliders so you can adjust specific aspects https://store.steampowered.com/recommender
GabeN will never allow that because it will eat into his bottom line
You mean the guy who owns and controls the only storefront in the entire industry with a forced AI disclosure?
Login to steam Home>Account>Store Preferences>Tags to exclude I put AI and Artificial Intelligence. It seems to do alright at filtering out the “ai” slop. Doesn’t stop me from checking to see if the ai warning is still there but haven’t seen any in awhile since doing that.
That filters out human-made games that are about AI
Games with no AI… do you know what games are? Because no
those are mostly for gameplay tags, you’re filtering out the Talos Principle games for example
That’s a good start, but it only works with games where AI use is disclosed.
I forgot we could do that. Will definitely enable this filter, the AI generated games are so annoying 😩
Steam/Valve doesn’t care.
Valve loves AI
What makes you say that?
I’m not going to pretend like Valve is some sort of Angel Corp but they also definitely have repeatedly skipped the opportunity to screw their consumers.
*every cooperation loves Ai.
I think at this point there isn’t a single player pushing back against it.
IDK nintendos stance on it, but even Capcom is updating the RE engine to have AI stuff now.
Maybe you who doesn’t understand what it is might be in the wrong?
