Get rid of the thing that's causing problems is both thoughtful and intelligent when the alternative is either ignore the problem or some as of yet undefined activity that is entirely outside the current scope of business. Steam isn't obligated to accommodate AI-generated games or participate in whatever currently undefined process would be required to make them palatable. That's the studios' responsibility.
Not that I agree with your assessment, but why do we need a thoughtful and intelligent solution here? Seems to me people want a simple, easy solution and bans or required disclosure seems to fit quiet well here
Every major gaming outlet and studio has at one time or another decided to try to play chicken with their customers. This never goes well. Historically Steam has been pretty skilled at not finding a hill to die on so one would assume they'll avoid the obvious blunder of ignoring users preferences here.
This doesn't feel like something I want Steam to do. Valve should not both host the games, profit from sales, and decide winners in the market themselves.
This is really a call for games journalism to step up and try to innovate. Human curators with taste, and a number of them with different mindsets who people can find one that meshes their own, is more important than ever.
Steam can increase the barrier to entry to prevent flooding the market, of course. But AI will facilitate making more games of increasing quality. Today it's all slop, but that may not be the case tomorrow. So what we actually need is a trusted curation system so we can float the garbage out and find the gems.
And as much as I appreciate Gabe, there are enormous financial incentives that make me uncomfortable giving yet more power and dominance to Valve. Especially as he gets older.
So this is a space where games journalism has a space to get back in and try to innovate solutions to a real and growing market problem.
One of the things that captivates many people who play games is imagining building their own.
It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.
At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.
You know it's an interesting question. If an amateur makes a terrible game and puts it on Steam, is that slop? If they use AI to make a better game, is that somehow worse?
Slop isn't only a description of the quality, it's also alluding to a level of cynicism. Someone pouring their soul out into a flaming turd didn't make slop, whereas a professional team using ai to pump out hundreds of fairly well polished, gripping, pleasant games with no new ideas or soul in them are making slop.
I heard writing works the same way. If you actually want to make money, you pick a popular genre, and you write something very predictable.
(Also, turns out making money is non-optional for most creative people. Someone once snapped at me, "is money all you care about!" I replied "yeah, reliable access to food and shelter is pretty important to me.")
It seems to mostly come down to do I want to do the predictable thing in my own kingdom, or as someone else's serf. (Or just yolo it every time. I've been mostly doing that and honestly would not recommend it.)
I don’t have solutions but tagging AI is definitely not easy. A lot of art is expressed via code: particle effects, menu layouts, iconography, animation keyframes. AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning. More recently, Opus 5.5 is clearly a model that started to develop visual taste and can draw images with code, as opposed to outputting images as tokens or via diffusion. And these capability gains are still accelerating.
There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.
Perhaps, but the examples in that article all clearly look like they're using AI-generated art assets. You might as well call that style "slop" in the sense that it is very easy to spot. I don't know if it's possible to create a general AI filter for the actual code, but certainly labelling ones that had AI-made visual and audio assets, with minimal human craftsmanship involved, would be a good first step.
> AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning.
It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
> If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
Here's an 11 year old video trying to educate people who think they "hate CGI" just how much CGI they've been watching, just without realizing it, because it was actually quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
I have not come across a single piece of software that has improved in quality after the developers start using AI. Sure it does have the possibility, but that's not what AI is used for. It's used for moving fast and breaking things. And we are finding out exactly how bad that philosophy sucks.
"I have not come across a single piece of software that has improved in quality after the developers start using AI."
That trivially maps on to the exact argument being made in that video. You think you haven't come across any software that has improved since the developers starting using AI. But if you encounter improved software, you have no mechanism to determine whether or not it was improved by AI. So you decide without even consciously thinking about it that it isn't because of AI. So of course you have not encountered the thing your sensors can not sense.
And just like CGI, there are some characteristic failures that allow you to realize that the failure is due to AI misuse. So you do identify AI failures, and as a result, all the AI you can identify is a failure.
But your sensors could never have given any other result. So it's not a surprise that your sensors give you that result. The result has no meaning.
Virtually all software from all companies is now produced using AI-assistance.
Has all software only gotten worse? Really? I’m not particularly against that worldview, although I would probably argue software was degrading before AI.
The Linux kernel uses AI and it’s patched a lot of vulnerabilities. Is that bad, or lower quality software? No, it’s the opposite.
AI is fundamentally a tool. AI makes it much easier to write higher quality software because you can write more tests, use more comprehensive tests, do more thorough security research, and much more.
Why does that matter? Slop versus non-slop should be marked as such. Like the other commentators said, if it ends up impacting their finances maybe they should just you know... not ship slop.
Slop vs non slop isn't what is getting marked though, AI is. Almost all developers are using AI code tooling now, so its a pretty meaningless marker. We need actual way to mark slop, which requires something a little more complicated than "did they use AI"
I would argue that this could even be detrimental. Using coding agents nowadays has become a matter of survival for indie/solo devs. The moment their product is revealed, nothing is stopping a vibe-coder with a pro license to just copy the game concepts and release it.
Once again, when it comes to consumer protections why should consumers care that a poor business loses business? Not seeing the downside here. After reading other comments in this post I think it should go further and designate any game that uses any instance of LLM tooling as "Assisted with AI."
Consumers absolutely hate AI companies. Consumers hate their leaders, distrust their workers; why shouldn't consumers be allowed to know which companies are eating at the LLM trough and which ones aren't?
The only reasons I see here is that it's bad for those gaming companies, which just leaves me to retort: who cares?
Consumers have a right to know which types of businesses they are supporting. If the business doesn't like it, they are free to do something else.
> why should consumers care that a poor business loses business? Not seeing the downside here
It's okay to disagree with what I'm saying but please acknowledge that you are arguing against a statement different from what I'm saying. I'm claiming that they would not lose business at all. Not that they shouldn't lose business.
I don't care if 90% of new games get tagged as AI, I am simply not interested in them. The developers don't care if they get tagged? Good, at least they'll be honest about it then. And on top I can filter out the 90% of suggestions I am least likely to care about? I don't see the downside.
> it carries no meaning about the quality of the games
If I use Opus 5.5 to spin up a debug session and step through part of the code to recreate a segmentation fault, does the entire project now need a "MADE WITH AI" label on it?
What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
Steam requires any use of AI art or code to be disclosed in the steam description. No vs yes is a simple toggle that can be added, similar to sexual content.
This isn't about a game launcher but said products on said game launcher. Try not to muddy the discourse because it upsets you that consumers have a right to know how their products are being developed.
Just give me the switch to filter it out. I don't care how much AI have you used in your slop. I care if you have used it at all. If I miss on some hidden "gems" that's on me.
You don't miss out on hidden gems, you miss out on ~95% of games. Most programmers are using AI now, and when you get into any game with a significant amount of devs, at least a few of them are using it.
They aren't all slop. An actual programmer using AI to help code can create non slop. E33 is one of the best reviewed games of the decade and it certainly used AI. AI is a tool, tools can be used create slop and they can be used to create good games.
Yeah, what people want is games that aren’t slop. Defining that is probably impossible. We’ve always had shovelware, but the volume now is unsustainable and only going to get worse.
The problem is that in the context of AI, "slop" has lost its definition.
It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.
But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.
What about tools used to make the game? Can they be AI products? What about tools that lint human made code? What if your paint program contains some AI-generated plugins, does that disqualify your game?
What if your music mixer uses an open source library that depends on a math library produced by an author who has an AI image as an avatar on social media?
Anyone who demands purity in all things should have their values questioned. Just look at history for examples of the outcomes of people obsessed with purity.
IMO, We really should be centering these discussions around the lines that separate Remix versus Ripoff. I want to live in an age of less effortful remixes that push the culture forward, but we are mostly getting ripoffs that slopify the culture at the moment. Shun the ripoffs, praise and boost the remixes, same as it ever was.
This is just something I’m starting to ruminate on, so I recommend that you go watch the video. As a lifelong gamer and sometimes game developer, I want to live in a world where everybody and their mother can implement a game idea that they have. we just need better mechanisms to critique those games at a similar scale.
Gamers and game journalists seem to be unaware that most software engineers are using AI now, likely including programmers who work at prestigious AAA games. But they only see the vibecoded slop, and assume that AI=slop, when in reality ~all games use AI coding now, both slop and non-slop.
I'd assume that all major AAA games within few years will have codebase that is heavily generated by Claude/Codex, probably way higher quality than pre-LLM codebases too.
The productivity gains are just that immense, ESPECIALLY for the kind of "brainless plumbing" that a majority of AAA gamedev is
Many of the (very successful and well-reviewed) indie devs I follow on social media viscerally hate AI and consider coding and assets to be two parts of the same whole for their (again, very successful) games. So no, far from ~all. That is what they call “wishful thinking.”
80-90% of devs, which will make for 99%+ of games with 5+ developers working on it.
Sure, some solo projects might not use AI, but those are the exact people who i think should be using AI for game dev. Games are often best when a single person can execute their vision, and the productivity gains from AI enable a solo dev to actually execute on a larger vision.
The video game market was already flooded before LLMs. Now, it's much much worse. I'm not sure that "AI" vs. "no AI" is really the right filter, but I do understand the need to filter out the chaff. There's too much content, and too little time. Even for something that you love, there's more out there than can possibly be managed or enjoyed. This problem will get worse.
AI or no AI is the wrong metric, of course. I imagine the way to solve this usefully probably goes through something that looks like Reddit. More "meta-moderation."
The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."
These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)
So what people are really complaining about is the lack of an approval or curation process on Steam’s end. AI is exposing the problem by making it worse.
What? The onus is not on me to wear stab proof clothing, the onus is on society to create a world where the floor is high enough that mugging isn't worth it.
Valve takes a 30% cut and makes eye watering profits. I don't feel it's fair to characterize them as a victim for having to put in some effort to mention a basic standard of quality on their platform.
Valve is a business but they're also a brand. It doesn't help their brand to be bombarded by slop created by a third party. The initial money is a trifle compared to how many refunds they'll have to dish out. It's like a brute force attack, AI is doing it to a lot of industries and fields including mathematics.
I really want to see how this plays out. The impossibility to identify AI work and thus keep users happy, vs profitability and steam actually trying to make things work.
How are they a victim? People aren't going to leave Steam over this. Valve will continue making money regardless from these sales, just as they don't care that they got children addicted to gambling because it also made them money.
As with most app stores, Steam does not aspire to be a curated collection of "good" apps, and discovery features have never been sufficient as substitutes for traditional marketing mechanisms.
AI undoubtedly hurts slop hurts small independent developers who rely more on Steam placement and internal reviews than traditional marketing more than it hurts Steam itself, so if I were a small independent developer, I'd be looking elsewhere for solutions, treating Steam more like larger publishers do, primarily as a distribution mechanism rather than a marketing tool.
They've got a solid return policy, if you've played less then 2 hours they'll refund. They can probably derive a ratio to mint a hiristic and bobs your uncle.
I still stand behind what I said back when they moved to direct publishing. Fee to get on Steam is too cheap. I think it is 100 dollars. Should have been five or ten times of that. And even then I suppose that would have slowed things only a bit.
Use some other marketplace. Offer some type of pre-order campaign. In the end that is not so many copies to sell via other ways if you have something good on your hands.
> There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.
I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.
I think your reply and the op are actually saying the same thing. The is almost 0 chance for a game to be 100% handmade. Even I would want to, I would still use llm to generate tests.
I think the nuance is always there. The disagreement seems to be the semantics.
39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.
Most people only see the slop. They don't have informed opinions. 1 in 5 American adults is functionally illiterate, and they are supposed to have a valid opinion about the usefulness of AI in contexts they can't see?
Most people hate what they (incorrectly) think AI is.
Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell. They see a ton of AI slop everywhere and they think that AI is harmful because it turned every site and every platform and every type of human expression they’ve experienced into endless piles of AI slop. Can you blame them? Are they even wrong?
>Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell.
Yes, I agree. It took science to prove that life doesn't arise from rotting meat. But the fact that populations (even in developed countries) are rapidly getting less and less educated indicates that people are less and less likely to have the critical thinking skills to understand when their eyes are not adequate instruments of observation.
Also AI slop exists, certainly; people aren't wrong to hate AI slop, but you have to agree that slop isn't the entirety of AI.
Somehow I feel like you don't bring this up whenever the general public gets polled and agrees on some other topic with your opinion.
Not even bothering to fight on the original topic and instead retreating to meta-analysis titled "Everyone is stupid anyway, I am the one who's truly informed" doesn't make for a very convincing argument.
You might not like it, but it doesn't make my argument inaccurate. Every discussion I've had about the topic, anti-AI folks are willing to acknowledge exactly 0 benefits of AI. That is just dumb, because benefits do exist, and it prevents a rational discussion and analysis of costs and benefits.
When a side in a debate cannot or will not acknowledge the strengths of the other side's position, they aren't having an informed argument; they are ranting.
Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
Same as when I got annoyed that library I wanted to use turns out does not check any of the boxes it claims to check, because its pure untested slop. I would have no issues with it being AI if it worked because I used it to make my own versio of that library that in fact works as advertised.
> While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
> Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
> So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
I don't think it does more harm than good. Maybe I'm biased because it's been very good for me and the people around me.
> Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
No. The argument being made in this thread is that people hate AI slop (people just hate slop), rather than AI in general. This poll was linked as evidence that people hate AI. My argument is that the poll is flawed and does nothing to counter the point being made in this thread about slop vs. AI.
As for Steam...ever since they opened up who can publish and how publishing works, there been _a lot_ of slop pre-AI. I'd rather have more interesting and more controvesial filters. People will get surprised how few recent games aren't going to be filtered by "No AI"
I agree with "alot", but i doubt most "hate". Hate is a strong word/emotion that gets thrown around easily for sensationalist or propaganda purposes. Is this an "appeal to hate" argument?
Most people have more going on in their lives than to have chance to hate abstract things.
For most people AI are search results in "human" speech presentation. Or slightly more sophisticated customer service bot. Or the latest form of personalized clipart generator for their group chats.
For most people experiencing AI is not (yet) beyond the experience clash of going from nokia 3310 to a multicamera, ig/fb/doomscroll filled iPhone. Are they seeing much more "slop" in their doomscroll than in 2021? I'd argue not. Social media has been filled with low quality engagement triggering slop way before chatgpt.
> As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop.
That isn't true. AI is overwhelmingly used to create slop, not useful or interesting things. Therefore people hate AI in large part because it is synonymous with slop.
But why are they mad? Why do they ever encounter such games? I interact with Steam daily and before AI vibecoding there were plenty of garbage games out there.
I have no reason to seek them out. The only reason I would ever encounter "Leverage Real Estate Simulator" is because people are "outraged" about it.
Who cares about steam entries for bad games? Who is it hurting?
What a reasonable answer to a ridiculous question — I wish I was more like you, honestly. Most often I would reply something snarky or passive aggressive. Off-topic, sorry.
i think you mean its not a conventional affiliate code, it is still a referral code, there is no hard requirement for a referral code to make money for the referrer, but yes this is indeed a mechanism that steam has and steam tracks these referral IDs
theres an explanation on steamgifts about the referral codes from 6 years ago, explaining the mechanism, and how it tracks the click as a +1 without any sort of purchase a requirement past that, with enough +1's the curator gains more weight over other curators for recommending games, which could be leveraged indirectly by a curator to accept sponsorships to advertise or promote
I think the number of submissions is fine. It's easy to filter by the type of game you're looking for. If you just want to doom scroll, yeah you're going to have a bad time.
They really want a "no dogshit" filter, I imagine. So a filter for actual effort and care.
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
--
As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
Ten years ago, you could already code one tower defense or "farming simulator" or bejeweled-alike game, and then reskin it 6 different ways for cheap and release the "new versions". The only new thing is the quantity of slop, but slop games certainly existed before AI.
So long as user reviews are adequately filtered to be real players, some slight tweaks to the Steam search algorithm should do a good job at handling it.
No one will notice or care if Claude wrote boilerplate code for your game. Everyone will notice if you vibecoded the mechanics whole cloth. The people who don't want to play sloppy games, already are avoiding sloppy games just fine.
Yeah there's entire GDC talks on this, people whose entire business model is "seasonal slop", as it were. But people keep buying it, and man's gotta eat!
In the case of seasonal, it's a couple games a couple times a year, so I'm cool with it — it's not the "I made a cron script to upload ten minesweepers per day" some people seem to be doing.
AFAIS there is no ability to rate a demo, so it’s flooded by low quality demos.
So if they would have rating it wouldn’t be a problem to filter crap off
What Steam users want is a way to filter out crap but crap existed well before AI (trust me, I've spent a _lot_ of time scrolling through games on Steam both for "Fests" and just in general). And unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to filter "crap" out. There as good games that use AI, there are bad games that use AI, there are good games that don't use AI, there are bad games that don't use AI. I don't think "AI" is a good filter.
Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.
Why doesn't Steam's rating system work to filter out the crap? Does this problem only exist for new games, are the ratings being gamed, or is something else going on?
Steam Next Fest is unique in that the first two days of it have the default view for the page be random. This is intended to give more games exposure, and then two days into the Fest they have enough data to start personalizing recommendations. So the event format's design makes slop particularly bad compared to most other places in the storefront.
There theoretically could be - and I don't have an issue with an otherwise competent dev/artist making use of AI tools - but I know no examples of good games that also deserve a "made with AI"/"uses AI" badge.
There is an easy way to filter crap out: crank up the fee charged to developers to submit a game to Steam in order to deter slop and also use the proceeds to cover the cost of more human curation of submissions, also to deter slop. Sometimes the gate does need to be kept.
This is such a tedious argument, "<bad thing> existed before AI too". Yes it did, but there was like 0.1% of it compared to today. Sometimes, a substantial enough different of degree becomes a difference of kind.
Even if the ratio was better for AI, the volume means the filtering has to be better:
Before: 1e6 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 100, but the filter is only 90% accurate so 10 bad games get through.
Now: 1e7 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 1k, and even if the filter is now 95% accurate (or equally if the content is on average twice as likely to be in the "good" range) there's still 50 bad games.
Unfortunately the filtering is also AI, and the filter is at best(!) of a similar kind as will have been used to train the AI which made the slop, so this necessarily goes much worse, and is reasonably likely to pass all 9e6 new vibe-generated games.
I'm participating with my game in this Next Fest and I don't really think this is much of a problem. The amount of games presented doesn't seem significantly higher than last Next Fest. Games that are good get boosted after 2 days (first 2 days everyone gets featured randomly) so low quality AI slop won't get much of attention. And the way they check if a game is popular is wishlist count and player/install count as far as I understand. I don't think low quality slop will get much of boost, and if it does it probably is deserved unless the wishlist count/player count gets botted somehow, but I haven't really seen this happen but who knows. For most people I think it's best to wait until after the second day to see which demo's are worth checking out, there won't be much AI slop there.
This assumes players have infinite time. It does not address the loss of revenue a proper indie game got as a result of being less discoverable in a sea of slop.
I think it works fairly well. Sure, a few players waste a few minutes to hours on the game, but once it has 10 negative reviews that all say it's AI slop, no one will bother to buy it anymore and Steam can rank it accordingly.
Maybe it has to do with people losing their minds at the mention of it? Spend however long on a game, for some random to come out the woodwork and attempt to invalidate everything because you decided to disclose.
An AI filter is in the interest of both sides here because the people who would "lose their minds" over it can just avoid it with the press of a button. And if you want to sell to everyone, then make a product everyone wants.
It’s really to the interest of nobody, because obviously there’s an incentive to be dishonest.
It’s also not particularly helpful, right? Because if I use an LLM to debug a crash report, then that’s the same category as creating a slop game.
So what you would do, realistically, is use the AI to write code, debug, you know typical software development stuff and then just… lie. Your game is closed-source anyway, so nobody is reading the code.
There’s levels to this. AI generated slop assets is one thing. AI-assisted coding describes every software project everywhere in the world.
> Because if I use an LLM to debug a crash report, then that’s the same category as creating a slop game
Steam has clear guidelines on what requires an AI disclosure, and all that people are asking for is that they can filter based on this. It's a tiny change.
> AI-assisted coding describes every software project everywhere in the world
That is simply not true.
> and then just… lie
I'm not a lawyer, but lying about something that influences the customer's purchase decision sounds a bit like fraud and not something I would advise to "just" do. If using AI is so normal then why lie about it?
No, it is. You can ask any software developer working at any company right now if they use AI in their workflow somewhere in the company, either them or other developers. They will say "yes". The only people who think LLMs aren't typically used in software are not software developers. Which I get it, if you don't know then you don't know. So ask. It's not just one or two companies, it's also not 90%. It's 99.99%, I would say 100% but I can't say for sure.
> not something I would advise to "just" do.
Not something I would advise either, but people are going to do it. The difference is indistinguishable and you can't verify it anyway because you typically can't access the source code. So, of course people will lie.
Yeah why would people care about a technology they are already deeply skeptical about and have majority beliefs that said technology will harm humanity and not help it.
God forbid consumers exercise their rights in the matter.
Ironically what I think people really want here is a better recommendation system, one that almost certainly would need ML algorithms (or 'AI' as we call it nowadays) to implement.
So Valve will need to train on descriptions of games and perhaps demand more out of developers who want to sell games on their platform.
All notable app stores face this already or will face it soon. Maybe the apt GUI for your favourite debian derivative won't get too flooded...
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] threadZ=AI in this case, but lazy solutions are as old as time.
This will cost with low ROI.
If Steam is indeed customer focused, they might but doubtful.
This is really a call for games journalism to step up and try to innovate. Human curators with taste, and a number of them with different mindsets who people can find one that meshes their own, is more important than ever.
People tend to do things unless explictely deterred or not allowed in the first place.
e.g. There is no u-turn sign (though in the area it is illegal) people will make u-turns regardless, unless cops are watching over them.
Same thing here. People will still post AI slops unless there are some watchers.
And as much as I appreciate Gabe, there are enormous financial incentives that make me uncomfortable giving yet more power and dominance to Valve. Especially as he gets older.
So this is a space where games journalism has a space to get back in and try to innovate solutions to a real and growing market problem.
It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.
At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.
(Also, turns out making money is non-optional for most creative people. Someone once snapped at me, "is money all you care about!" I replied "yeah, reliable access to food and shelter is pretty important to me.")
It seems to mostly come down to do I want to do the predictable thing in my own kingdom, or as someone else's serf. (Or just yolo it every time. I've been mostly doing that and honestly would not recommend it.)
There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.
It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
That trivially maps on to the exact argument being made in that video. You think you haven't come across any software that has improved since the developers starting using AI. But if you encounter improved software, you have no mechanism to determine whether or not it was improved by AI. So you decide without even consciously thinking about it that it isn't because of AI. So of course you have not encountered the thing your sensors can not sense.
And just like CGI, there are some characteristic failures that allow you to realize that the failure is due to AI misuse. So you do identify AI failures, and as a result, all the AI you can identify is a failure.
But your sensors could never have given any other result. So it's not a surprise that your sensors give you that result. The result has no meaning.
Has all software only gotten worse? Really? I’m not particularly against that worldview, although I would probably argue software was degrading before AI.
The Linux kernel uses AI and it’s patched a lot of vulnerabilities. Is that bad, or lower quality software? No, it’s the opposite.
AI is fundamentally a tool. AI makes it much easier to write higher quality software because you can write more tests, use more comprehensive tests, do more thorough security research, and much more.
You presume in favor of the existence of non-slop.
Again, I'm saying this would end up not impacting any developers' finances, because nearly no players would take the AI tag seriously.
Consumers absolutely hate AI companies. Consumers hate their leaders, distrust their workers; why shouldn't consumers be allowed to know which companies are eating at the LLM trough and which ones aren't?
The only reasons I see here is that it's bad for those gaming companies, which just leaves me to retort: who cares?
Consumers have a right to know which types of businesses they are supporting. If the business doesn't like it, they are free to do something else.
It's okay to disagree with what I'm saying but please acknowledge that you are arguing against a statement different from what I'm saying. I'm claiming that they would not lose business at all. Not that they shouldn't lose business.
> it carries no meaning about the quality of the games
It doesn't have to, Steam already has reviews.
What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
Does that mean no AI assistance at all? How is that possible to detect for if someone uses it for code generation and compiles it to a binary?
Do they mean no AI artwork? Maybe easier to detect, but mostly based on vibes still.
Do they mean no AI features? But why, wouldn’t an adventure game where you can talk naturally to NPCs be kind of cool?
Madness.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/38624...
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsur...
It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.
But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.
What if your music mixer uses an open source library that depends on a math library produced by an author who has an AI image as an avatar on social media?
Anyone who demands purity in all things should have their values questioned. Just look at history for examples of the outcomes of people obsessed with purity.
AI Used in back-office administration, internal documentation & presentations
AI Used in research
AI Used for generating placeholders
AI Used for Upscaling (DLSS)
AI Used for translations of UI.
AI Used in the final product (assets incl. textures, 3D, sound and voice)
AI Used in final product (code)
To say nothing of the other disciplines of AI like machine vision or voice recognition or dynamically building a story tree or character response.
This is just something I’m starting to ruminate on, so I recommend that you go watch the video. As a lifelong gamer and sometimes game developer, I want to live in a world where everybody and their mother can implement a game idea that they have. we just need better mechanisms to critique those games at a similar scale.
Damn. Yeah that sucks.
I'd say his actual problem was lack of visibility. You wanna be in a position where people say, "oh, this is a clone of That Guy's game."
The actual "product" becomes the game dev, and his brand, rather than the actual game.
Or more broadly... marketing is more important than game development. (Or at least as important.)
The productivity gains are just that immense, ESPECIALLY for the kind of "brainless plumbing" that a majority of AAA gamedev is
Sure, some solo projects might not use AI, but those are the exact people who i think should be using AI for game dev. Games are often best when a single person can execute their vision, and the productivity gains from AI enable a solo dev to actually execute on a larger vision.
The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."
This is what people are mad about: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5106420/Leverage_Real_Est... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5155900/Ages_TD_Demo/?cur... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5200920/BATTLE_PARTS__POW... https://store.steampowered.com/app/4609270/Naval_Supremacy/?...
These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)
And there are a lot this year
AI undoubtedly hurts slop hurts small independent developers who rely more on Steam placement and internal reviews than traditional marketing more than it hurts Steam itself, so if I were a small independent developer, I'd be looking elsewhere for solutions, treating Steam more like larger publishers do, primarily as a distribution mechanism rather than a marketing tool.
I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.
I think the nuance is always there. The disagreement seems to be the semantics.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...
39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.
Most people hate what they (incorrectly) think AI is.
Yes, I agree. It took science to prove that life doesn't arise from rotting meat. But the fact that populations (even in developed countries) are rapidly getting less and less educated indicates that people are less and less likely to have the critical thinking skills to understand when their eyes are not adequate instruments of observation.
Also AI slop exists, certainly; people aren't wrong to hate AI slop, but you have to agree that slop isn't the entirety of AI.
Not even bothering to fight on the original topic and instead retreating to meta-analysis titled "Everyone is stupid anyway, I am the one who's truly informed" doesn't make for a very convincing argument.
When a side in a debate cannot or will not acknowledge the strengths of the other side's position, they aren't having an informed argument; they are ranting.
While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
Same as when I got annoyed that library I wanted to use turns out does not check any of the boxes it claims to check, because its pure untested slop. I would have no issues with it being AI if it worked because I used it to make my own versio of that library that in fact works as advertised.
So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
> Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
I don't think it does more harm than good. Maybe I'm biased because it's been very good for me and the people around me.
> Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
No. The argument being made in this thread is that people hate AI slop (people just hate slop), rather than AI in general. This poll was linked as evidence that people hate AI. My argument is that the poll is flawed and does nothing to counter the point being made in this thread about slop vs. AI.
As for Steam...ever since they opened up who can publish and how publishing works, there been _a lot_ of slop pre-AI. I'd rather have more interesting and more controvesial filters. People will get surprised how few recent games aren't going to be filtered by "No AI"
I agree with "alot", but i doubt most "hate". Hate is a strong word/emotion that gets thrown around easily for sensationalist or propaganda purposes. Is this an "appeal to hate" argument?
Most people have more going on in their lives than to have chance to hate abstract things.
For most people AI are search results in "human" speech presentation. Or slightly more sophisticated customer service bot. Or the latest form of personalized clipart generator for their group chats.
For most people experiencing AI is not (yet) beyond the experience clash of going from nokia 3310 to a multicamera, ig/fb/doomscroll filled iPhone. Are they seeing much more "slop" in their doomscroll than in 2021? I'd argue not. Social media has been filled with low quality engagement triggering slop way before chatgpt.
That isn't true. AI is overwhelmingly used to create slop, not useful or interesting things. Therefore people hate AI in large part because it is synonymous with slop.
I have no reason to seek them out. The only reason I would ever encounter "Leverage Real Estate Simulator" is because people are "outraged" about it.
Who cares about steam entries for bad games? Who is it hurting?
Many shoppers browse nextfest to find cool new indie games. These are being crowded out by AI slop.
well played honestly
theres an explanation on steamgifts about the referral codes from 6 years ago, explaining the mechanism, and how it tracks the click as a +1 without any sort of purchase a requirement past that, with enough +1's the curator gains more weight over other curators for recommending games, which could be leveraged indirectly by a curator to accept sponsorships to advertise or promote
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/3Y4jr/curatorclanid
the link includes a nice way to catch these too with ublock filter
steampowered.com/*?curator_clanid=$document,important
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
--
As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
Ten years ago, you could already code one tower defense or "farming simulator" or bejeweled-alike game, and then reskin it 6 different ways for cheap and release the "new versions". The only new thing is the quantity of slop, but slop games certainly existed before AI.
So long as user reviews are adequately filtered to be real players, some slight tweaks to the Steam search algorithm should do a good job at handling it.
No one will notice or care if Claude wrote boilerplate code for your game. Everyone will notice if you vibecoded the mechanics whole cloth. The people who don't want to play sloppy games, already are avoiding sloppy games just fine.
In the case of seasonal, it's a couple games a couple times a year, so I'm cool with it — it's not the "I made a cron script to upload ten minesweepers per day" some people seem to be doing.
Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.
It's very obvious when looking at the reviews for certain new indie games. All LLM written comments, most short, most low playtime.
Then actual customers come along and buy the game and over the next few weeks the game craters from Mostly Positive to Mostly Negative.
[citation needed]
There theoretically could be - and I don't have an issue with an otherwise competent dev/artist making use of AI tools - but I know no examples of good games that also deserve a "made with AI"/"uses AI" badge.
It’s not exactly what you meant, but I enjoyed this for several hours.
Paradox publicly admit use of AI in various places, yet their games are good.
Before: 1e6 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 100, but the filter is only 90% accurate so 10 bad games get through.
Now: 1e7 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 1k, and even if the filter is now 95% accurate (or equally if the content is on average twice as likely to be in the "good" range) there's still 50 bad games.
Unfortunately the filtering is also AI, and the filter is at best(!) of a similar kind as will have been used to train the AI which made the slop, so this necessarily goes much worse, and is reasonably likely to pass all 9e6 new vibe-generated games.
If I had to guess, bad games to good games ratio has always been like 99 to 1.
Issue is there are more games nowadays obviously, so more slop, though I'd be surprised if the ratio has moved much.
Human made trash has always polluted Steam.
Do people expect Steam to proctor the entire development process?
Issue here is not AI use, but very low amount of creative human effort that went into making some games.
There are three existing realistic solutions for this problem:
- raise SteamWorks deposit of $100 for launching a new game on Steam (to reflect lower cost of making games with coding agents)
- reviews by users and pro game critics
- users can request refunds under 2 hours of playtime
It’s also not particularly helpful, right? Because if I use an LLM to debug a crash report, then that’s the same category as creating a slop game.
So what you would do, realistically, is use the AI to write code, debug, you know typical software development stuff and then just… lie. Your game is closed-source anyway, so nobody is reading the code.
There’s levels to this. AI generated slop assets is one thing. AI-assisted coding describes every software project everywhere in the world.
Steam has clear guidelines on what requires an AI disclosure, and all that people are asking for is that they can filter based on this. It's a tiny change.
> AI-assisted coding describes every software project everywhere in the world
That is simply not true.
> and then just… lie
I'm not a lawyer, but lying about something that influences the customer's purchase decision sounds a bit like fraud and not something I would advise to "just" do. If using AI is so normal then why lie about it?
No, it is. You can ask any software developer working at any company right now if they use AI in their workflow somewhere in the company, either them or other developers. They will say "yes". The only people who think LLMs aren't typically used in software are not software developers. Which I get it, if you don't know then you don't know. So ask. It's not just one or two companies, it's also not 90%. It's 99.99%, I would say 100% but I can't say for sure.
> not something I would advise to "just" do.
Not something I would advise either, but people are going to do it. The difference is indistinguishable and you can't verify it anyway because you typically can't access the source code. So, of course people will lie.
God forbid consumers exercise their rights in the matter.
plenty of games made with AI that are fun.
> plenty of games made with AI that are fun.
That's like saying there is plenty of water in the ocean, so you can drink it.
So Valve will need to train on descriptions of games and perhaps demand more out of developers who want to sell games on their platform.
All notable app stores face this already or will face it soon. Maybe the apt GUI for your favourite debian derivative won't get too flooded...
simple tags and reviews from people with similar profiles as yours. netflix figured this out years ago with their by-mail recommendations.