It's a very Valve answer, and it's likely the correct one. It feels very similar to their stance on piracy - it's a service problem. If you make the experience good enough people wont do it.
I actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.
The quality of games became so bad that I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis, scrolling through the catalog without finding anything I want to play...
I find myself going back to titles that are over 10 years old over and over again. Every new game I've bought in the recent years I have regretted buying shortly after.
Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore. I mostly play Indie games now, but even those are rarely anything special now. Back to Terraria I guess...
I think it is mostly temporal filtering (due to rosy retrospection and survivorship bias combined with Sturgeon’s Law) that we all naturally fall into.
Most games 5+ years ago were also bad, but you remember the small set that were good and completely forget all the bad, and this builds an impression that games in the past were so much better. The same applies to movies, music, books, etc.
Of course, in the age of AI, a lot more (in absolute terms) shovelware content is likely to be made than ever before, so it'll probably hyper-accelerate the impact of this phenomenon.
Maybe you would like Hardspace Shipbreaker? That's a good game with unusual mechanics. Or maybe Factorio if you enjoy Terraria. Maybe Ark Raiders or Valheim if you like action multiplayer games?
I think its easier to discover a game with a good story then a game with novel mechanics, but they exist.
There's truth to what you're saying, but for some perspective: catalogers identify about 400 games published for the 2600 over its entire lifespan; Steam has about that many new releases every week.
That difference in volume, which improvements in AI workflow will keep accelerating, really does point towards personal curation being far more overwhelming than it had been.
With the 2600, you and your friends would probably have a ready working memory of pretty much most of the good stuff, most of the awful stuff, and some insight into the publishers and presentation/packaging cues that point one way or another for an unfamiliar title.
With Steam, if you want to be able to find very personal idiosyncratic gems, instead of just following social media buzz or AAA PR -- one of the most exciting benefits to today's massive catalog -- you have to wade through an increasingly unfathomable amount of slop.
I've never used the Steam for browsing for games to buy. I've only bought stuff there after finding the games some place else (reviews, word-of-mouth). Using it for that has been a terrible experience since the day they opened the floodgates, since there's just too many damn games out there, even ignoring the slop (even without AI, there's still the Unity asset flip to flood the store).
Steam can't not have a store front, but it wouldn't matter to me if they removed 95% of it and just reduced it to a search bar with and a list with some basic results to know I'm actually buying the right game (think $Name, $Dev, $Date-of-release, $Probably-some-other-values-to-prevent-obvious-copycats). I'd use it in functionally the same way as I do know, and I wouldn't by any less because of it.
I don't want to say you're holding it wrong, but I question your tactics if your goal is to find new games you want to play.
This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)
Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?
>Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore.
Denshattack!, ballxpit, blue prince, balatro, outer wilds, pipistrello... There's plenty of quality there too!
It's true that the average quality we're exposed to is lower, because there's so many random pet projects and big players take fewer risks. Relying on word of mouth or gaming reviewers you trust is important nowadays. But I'm convinced it's a matter of discovery rather than existence.
This isn't much of a response, what they said amounts to that you should work harder to cultivate a community that you can then funnel into their platform. "Launching isn't the finish line" is obviously true but what has been happening is that people are sniped before launch based on their demo and marketing material, so it's not still that relevant.
It seemed to me like they're hedging until they know which side is more profitable to support. We don't know yet if slop will be widely embraced by consumers. Valve will be happy to profit from AI if it takes over from real developers.
As far as I can tell, "slop" doesn't have a clear definition. It seems to just mean "AI used poorly or obviously". Nobody cares if a developer of a game uses AI as long as it's done well. They might not even know.
The idea that there is a future where game devs don't use AI, while the rest of the industry does, is absurd. We do know that AI will be widely embraced in gaming, because the alternative is, what? The honor system?
Valve has ignored the quality problem of submissions for years. Lazy asset flips of demo levels have been common for years. It's less of a hedge and more of a restatement of what their position has been since they opened the floodgates. AI just made the bad stuff look better than it used to, so people have to relearn how to filter.
In the same vein that having the same name of functions is a copyright violation. People don't understand that good things are meant to be copied so that consumers have the best product
Patents and copyright are there to allow businesses to recoup investment in R&D
The end result of what you're talking about isn't that the innovator will be copied and consumers will benefit.. it's that the innovator will no longer exist and no-one will benefit.
> People don't understand that good things are meant to be copied so that consumers have the best product
I get how my comment comes off that way but I do agree and am broadly in favor of knockoffs. I think there's a distinction between a knockoff and a bootleg, where a knockoff steals ideas and a bootleg steals the execution. And a good game is a tasteful knockoff of a bunch of previous games, great artists steal and such.
Legal depends on details. There are copyright, patent, and trademark laws that apply depending on how the cloning was done. Ask a lawyer for details.
The idea of a game is not protected. The specific graphics, dialog, script, and code are protected. Save the princess in an 8 level game is generic but just a few more details copied and suddenly you are an illegal clone of the NES Mario brothers script...
If you are worried talk to a lawyer about preemptively registering your copyrights (cheap) and trademarks (more expensive).
It's a good question and the answer is mixed. Some of the problem has been directly bootlegging games in other markets like China, so stealing the code and assets outright. That's definitely a copyright violation most places, I would assume it is in China too, but the point is moot without Valve's backing because no indie is going to conduct a lawsuit in a foreign country.
A clean room knockoff isn't but I don't think the cases would necessarily even be brought or won. There's a lot of quick buck artists who see gaming as a soft target. Success is in convincing them there's risk involved rather than actually winning in court or extracting settlements.
That will still leave a lot of AI game development people feel is slop. That's probably the reality going forward. But reducing that to the people who are interested in making games (even if we are unhappy with their results) and removing the people who are revolving through the latest AI get rich quick schemes is probably achievable.
Valve is unlikely to raise a lawsuit in China even if someone releases Half Life 2: Electric Boogaloo. They have no hope of winning, and their position in the country is a miracle as it is.
As for the other cases, I don’t see a realistic path for Valve. Once they start kicking knockoffs they will have to draw a line, and it won’t end up being based on whether the action is actually illegal.
Not in the least. You can make a 2D platformer and Nintendo can't sue you for copying Super Mario (they'd like to, probably).
The only defense against copies has always be the same, be better than the copies in thing the consumer likes. You can't copy a Mario game, you can't copy a Kojima game, you can't copy a game that has been masterfully done and polished. If slop is gonna eat your lunch, it's only because your game is as good as slop.
> Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there.
Why though?
Imagine, there will be an AI agent, which will produce new game everyday and Steam users will like it and keep buying. Steam can only exist if customers keep buying and are not annoyed by games.
I don't think it's a problem of copying, as much as the fact that the signals we use to identify quality are no longer working.
Clones always existed, kids chose pokemon rather than a dollar store dragomons because pokemon became a household name by the time bootlegs appeared, legitimate shops only sold pokemon and the cartridge itself showed a quality difference.
Nowadays the clone can reach people before the original, the store shows everything equally, and the sprites, videos and description can be good enough to fool people. Steam works as a platform for the purchase itself but not as a discovery mechanism, because there's no "seal of quality" you can consider (other than skipping indies entirely).
No one can review at the scale needed, and it's entirely possible for a great game to have devs that are awful at marketing and get buried. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think some kind of threshold is necessary for the shops, or at least for an optional filter.
the notion of "quality" equals very much luxury for many many people... and last time I checked some 90% of the peoples of the world were not concern with it (the lux), but with making ends meet. all opportunities arising would be taken immediately, and if some kid can play a game for 5EUR and likes sit, his father would not rush to get the 80EUR one. of course then comes ingenuity and community, but copyright is so dead, that it cannot be resurrected meaningfully at all perhaps at this moment.
People are not choosing AI due to money here. It's not the 80EUR, AAA games being copied, it's indies that are frequently in the same price range as the original.
What's actually happening is people buying knockoffs not knowing they're knockoffs, or no one buying those but the original being buried in the volume anyway.
As for the 'think about the non privileged', AI is a pretty poor answer for them. Once we're at a point where the person isn't able to pay for genuine stuff, they might as well go for piracy and emulators rather than a mindless knockoff. A world where the privileged are given intellectually stimulating material and the rest are fed empty slop is the worst possible scenario.
Agreed. Copycatting has existed all the way back to the early Atari days. In fact, Nolan Bushnell used to talk about constantly moving on to new products in order to “eat his own babies.” Swift style.
Always wary of “the jackals” and convinced that the only way to stay ahead of the competition was to introduce new products, Bushnell wanted to discontinue the VCS and move on to the next-generation game console. Bushnell preferred moving to new technologies rather than spending time refining old ideas and letting his competitors catch up to him. He called his philosophy “eating your own babies” and said that if Atari didn’t (eat its own babies), somebody else would.
-- Steven Kent (The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon)
The issue today is the breathtaking speed with which people can rip you off by simply pointing an agentic coding harness at your original IP and laundering it into 50 copies in the span of a single weekend.
The slop has always been there, and Valve makes it easy to refund it. I don't see what more can they do. At the end of the day the players decide what they want to play and pay for. Ideas have always been cheap in this industry. Threes was cloned immediately and most people only know the clone.
"Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers." - yeah good luck on that. no legal framework exists and they actually benefit from it the same way Spotify and YouTube does. In a way they all welcome this move, and eventually may require you to pay on top for them to inform you of slop alongside banners. Otherwise you get the whole package and tis all business as usual.
Arguably some mass market AAA games already were slop.
In a future with millions of games released every day discoverability or curation of the great games will be really important (even more than it is now).
valve isn't doing the best 'linux' job to say the least...
But they are currently doing 'anti-cheat' by far the less worse way and they should teach some others...
I am browsing 'upcoming' games (only native to linux), something happened, there is now many more diarrhea games than before. I suspect AI reverse-engineered slop.
Valve has been doing a lot for Linux lately, especially because of their new hardware. Is there anything in particular you think they could be doing better?
What a bunch of nothing and hand-waivey statements. Valve has issues with cracking down on bad behavior, and this response is rather immature and poorly planned.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 9.2 ms ] threadI actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.
I find myself going back to titles that are over 10 years old over and over again. Every new game I've bought in the recent years I have regretted buying shortly after.
Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore. I mostly play Indie games now, but even those are rarely anything special now. Back to Terraria I guess...
I think it is mostly temporal filtering (due to rosy retrospection and survivorship bias combined with Sturgeon’s Law) that we all naturally fall into.
Most games 5+ years ago were also bad, but you remember the small set that were good and completely forget all the bad, and this builds an impression that games in the past were so much better. The same applies to movies, music, books, etc.
Of course, in the age of AI, a lot more (in absolute terms) shovelware content is likely to be made than ever before, so it'll probably hyper-accelerate the impact of this phenomenon.
I think its easier to discover a game with a good story then a game with novel mechanics, but they exist.
That difference in volume, which improvements in AI workflow will keep accelerating, really does point towards personal curation being far more overwhelming than it had been.
With the 2600, you and your friends would probably have a ready working memory of pretty much most of the good stuff, most of the awful stuff, and some insight into the publishers and presentation/packaging cues that point one way or another for an unfamiliar title.
With Steam, if you want to be able to find very personal idiosyncratic gems, instead of just following social media buzz or AAA PR -- one of the most exciting benefits to today's massive catalog -- you have to wade through an increasingly unfathomable amount of slop.
Steam can't not have a store front, but it wouldn't matter to me if they removed 95% of it and just reduced it to a search bar with and a list with some basic results to know I'm actually buying the right game (think $Name, $Dev, $Date-of-release, $Probably-some-other-values-to-prevent-obvious-copycats). I'd use it in functionally the same way as I do know, and I wouldn't by any less because of it.
I don't want to say you're holding it wrong, but I question your tactics if your goal is to find new games you want to play.
Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?
I think that's the problem, there are too many to choose from, where you end up overwhelmed and ends up choosing none.
- Has grown up and doesn't actually want to play games anymore (without realizing it)
- Is severely depressed and needs other help than the one games can provide.
Denshattack!, ballxpit, blue prince, balatro, outer wilds, pipistrello... There's plenty of quality there too!
It's true that the average quality we're exposed to is lower, because there's so many random pet projects and big players take fewer risks. Relying on word of mouth or gaming reviewers you trust is important nowadays. But I'm convinced it's a matter of discovery rather than existence.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that you're an outlier lol
The idea that there is a future where game devs don't use AI, while the rest of the industry does, is absurd. We do know that AI will be widely embraced in gaming, because the alternative is, what? The honor system?
Is cloning the games in this way illegal? Has there been a precedent set?
The end result of what you're talking about isn't that the innovator will be copied and consumers will benefit.. it's that the innovator will no longer exist and no-one will benefit.
I get how my comment comes off that way but I do agree and am broadly in favor of knockoffs. I think there's a distinction between a knockoff and a bootleg, where a knockoff steals ideas and a bootleg steals the execution. And a good game is a tasteful knockoff of a bunch of previous games, great artists steal and such.
The idea of a game is not protected. The specific graphics, dialog, script, and code are protected. Save the princess in an 8 level game is generic but just a few more details copied and suddenly you are an illegal clone of the NES Mario brothers script...
If you are worried talk to a lawyer about preemptively registering your copyrights (cheap) and trademarks (more expensive).
A clean room knockoff isn't but I don't think the cases would necessarily even be brought or won. There's a lot of quick buck artists who see gaming as a soft target. Success is in convincing them there's risk involved rather than actually winning in court or extracting settlements.
That will still leave a lot of AI game development people feel is slop. That's probably the reality going forward. But reducing that to the people who are interested in making games (even if we are unhappy with their results) and removing the people who are revolving through the latest AI get rich quick schemes is probably achievable.
As for the other cases, I don’t see a realistic path for Valve. Once they start kicking knockoffs they will have to draw a line, and it won’t end up being based on whether the action is actually illegal.
The only defense against copies has always be the same, be better than the copies in thing the consumer likes. You can't copy a Mario game, you can't copy a Kojima game, you can't copy a game that has been masterfully done and polished. If slop is gonna eat your lunch, it's only because your game is as good as slop.
Why though?
Imagine, there will be an AI agent, which will produce new game everyday and Steam users will like it and keep buying. Steam can only exist if customers keep buying and are not annoyed by games.
Clones always existed, kids chose pokemon rather than a dollar store dragomons because pokemon became a household name by the time bootlegs appeared, legitimate shops only sold pokemon and the cartridge itself showed a quality difference.
Nowadays the clone can reach people before the original, the store shows everything equally, and the sprites, videos and description can be good enough to fool people. Steam works as a platform for the purchase itself but not as a discovery mechanism, because there's no "seal of quality" you can consider (other than skipping indies entirely).
No one can review at the scale needed, and it's entirely possible for a great game to have devs that are awful at marketing and get buried. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think some kind of threshold is necessary for the shops, or at least for an optional filter.
What's actually happening is people buying knockoffs not knowing they're knockoffs, or no one buying those but the original being buried in the volume anyway.
As for the 'think about the non privileged', AI is a pretty poor answer for them. Once we're at a point where the person isn't able to pay for genuine stuff, they might as well go for piracy and emulators rather than a mindless knockoff. A world where the privileged are given intellectually stimulating material and the rest are fed empty slop is the worst possible scenario.
The issue today is the breathtaking speed with which people can rip you off by simply pointing an agentic coding harness at your original IP and laundering it into 50 copies in the span of a single weekend.
In a future with millions of games released every day discoverability or curation of the great games will be really important (even more than it is now).
So marketing wins again, I guess.
I'm hopeful that the jewels will rise to the top on their own merits, but with millions of games released every day it's gonna be difficult.
Maybe I'm a romantic but I hope there are some genius game designers in the world that now can release their dream games with the help of AI.
But they are currently doing 'anti-cheat' by far the less worse way and they should teach some others...
I am browsing 'upcoming' games (only native to linux), something happened, there is now many more diarrhea games than before. I suspect AI reverse-engineered slop.