Ok I'm sorry but I'm gonna be the 'Valve fanboy'.
tl;dr There are a whole bunch of falsehoods and misleading statements and claims here.
What the blog author describes as "Valve says its not our problem and have you tried smiling more?"
Their own source:
https://kotaku.com/valve-steam-ai-clone-rip-offs-next-fest-slop-developers-demos-2000750496
Describes as "Valve Knows Steam Has An AI Slop Problem And Has A ‘Significant Number Of People’ Working On It".
There are 2 problems here.
One is that a game demo, that isn't encrypted of obfuscated when its compiled into a binary file... can be fairly easily reverse engineered by throwing enough money at OpenAI or Anthropic.
The author of this Kotaku article I guess expects Valve to... do... what? Prevent this from being possible?
Yeah the advice Valve gave isn't exactly guaranteed to prevent an indie dev from getting fucked... but... what could they actually do?
Does the Kotaku author want ... Valve ... to ... LLM-Reverse-Engineer-Proof all games that get uploaded to them?
This is... not currently known to be possible... from a defensive position... so... what are we mad about here?
Why are the bad guys not... the people who own and operate the reverse-engineering machines?
Why are we instead victim blaming?
The other problem is that a lot of AI slop gets uploaded to Steam. The Kotaku author thinks its a lackluster response for Valve to say 'Well, Next Fest just started'.
The Kotaku author apparently does not understand anything about how Steam works.
Reviews, descriptions of games, associations with certain game features or genres or styles or what not... these are largely crowd sourced, beyond certain disclosures the devs are required to make.
If a bunch of AI slop hits the system, the way the system works is that the crowd, Steam users, will flag these things as they are exposed to it, report undisclosed AI slop, and then Steam's sorting and recommendation systems get better at doing their recommending and categorizing, over time.
If a bunch of people report undisclosed AI use in a game, Valve checks and if, yep its true, those devs/publishers get restricted, fined, banned from being able to use Steam.
So the Kotaku author is basically mad that every single Next Fest game was not rigorously pre-screened, and is not satisfied with the crowd sourced screening process taking some time to work.
And finally, no, its just straight up false to claim Valve said "Its not [our] job to curtail AI slop in Steam."
They did not say that.
What Valve actually said was:
“We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.”
Steam is designed in a way that it already filters and sorts games, in a way that is not perfect, but tries to be fair and not make false bans, and do this at a massive scale... and Valve has stated they are currently working to make that process more efficient and accurate, specifically in regards to AI slop.
As a side note, the Kotaku author also... did not directly state, but implies that Steam makes an outsized amount of its overall profit off of Indie games. This is a misleading insinuation.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Indie-games-accounted-for-25-of-Steam-s-revenue-in-2025.1189429.0.html
Its 25%, 25% of Steam's 2025 revenue came from Indie games. The vast majority of that 25% from Indie games that blow out to over a million sales.
Its also rather misleading to just drop 'Gabe donated $20 million to OpenAI' right alongside a bunch of recent, current things.
Yeah. He did do that.
In 2018, when OpenAI was still a non-profit, back when the explicit goal was to develop this kind of tech in a safe and sane way, before Sam Altman turned it into a private company and began lying his ass off to investors and just everyone in general.
https://gamerant.com/valve-gabe-newell-openai-donation/
This is blog author's own source. I guess blog author didn't... read their own source?
Or is just intentionally leaving out highly relevant details so that their narrative works better.
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