Last week, gamers were quick to call foul on a number of games popping up on the latest iteration of Steam Next Fest for appearing to be “AI slop,” and the company behind the PC platform has responded.
Marc Wilkinson, business development at Valve, appeared yesterday at an event in Korea called Steam Indie Connect, and was asked about the hubbub and if the company had plans on how to improve Next Fest the next time it came around.
Wilkinson explained how the visibility structure of the event works, where for the first two days, “games are shown to players on a virtually random basis,” and then personalized recommendations begin to show after that. This may explain why the first few days of the event especially aggravated players.
“We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed,” he said, according to a report from InvenGlobal (via translation). “We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.”
But the AI issues don’t end there for Valve or its developers. At the event, one such dev brought up concerns about how some indie devs have begun receiving extortion emails to the effect of “if you don’t play, we’ll clone your game with AI and release it first.” To this, Valve’s Tom Giardino (Steam Business) said it was the first time he’d heard of that situation, but also noted “we don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”
“Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective,” said Giardino.
Giardino also lamented that chasing trends and “clone games” has always been a thing, but AI has accelerated that pace to breakneck speed. It’s happening everywhere now, with randomly-cobbled together games popping up on social media and going viral, and even full games being cloned into Roblox.
