Game platforms had shovelware issues before AI took off. Now it’s worse and they’re still not doing anything about it.
Steam is working on it but how effective it will be remains to be seen
They’ll only work on a solution as long as customers care. If they notice that AI content will make them money, they will drop it.
A flood of shitty games already killed the video games industry back in the Atari days. It didn’t recover outside of arcades until Nintendo revived it with the NES and a part of that was a licensing system that set a standard for what games could be released.
One direction things could go to save this is curators that sort through the mess and separate the slop from the gems. And even the slop could be further broken down into “uninspired clone just chasing money” and “good game idea by someone that doesn’t have the right skills or resources, so it might improve”. IMO the only way this will work in the long run without getting corrupted is by making the curation a subscription service, otherwise AI “curators” that are really just marketers will dominate.
And then people will slowly realize that any game they try is a gamble with lower and lower odds of finding something good and stop spending money on games. But even then, it might not stop the slop from being generated if the costs are low.
If steam just tries to block the slop, I expect that small indie creators will end up suffering the most, especially as the AI tools improve and it gets harder and harder to tell what is produced by AI.
GabeN has Aston Martins to buy for his son.
What else is going to do with his monopoly?
Little less salt in your breakfast please.
Sorry. I’m just old enough to remember a time before Steam’s monopoly. And watching the generations of G*mers just accept and defend it, is rather annoying.
Maybe steam needs a verge of death system like new grounds. If the Game is downvoted to oblivion, delete it forever. And take their 100 $ submission fee and give it to charity or something so at least something good comes out of this sloppy mess.
Review bombers would love that. The amount of times that feature would get used the way you’d hope would be dwarfed by the field day right wing trolls would have with it.
Yeah maybe a little short sighted, you are right. But watching this also feels like a car accident.
The solution is to immediately demand a refund on any game where you even catch a whiff of genAI. Even if it’s past the usual refund terms, request one. Make it painful for Steam, and they will be much more inspired to solve the problem.
Yeah, down with technology! The witch hunt is on! Can we do electricity next?
Not wanting to buy stuff made unethically, such a witch hunt, very regressive. Go do one.
Right, because all the electronics from factories, and electricity from non-renewable sources (the majority) is totally ethical.
/s
There no need to delete.
LLM slop is the next evolution to asset flips. Fundamentally the same thing.
Steam handles this not by deleting these slops but by hiding them effectively they don’t come up in results unless you search for very specific terms.
Now here comes my controversial opinion which I hope I get downloaded significantly for: currently it costs $200 to submit a game to steam. This problem would go away if they increase that to $2,000.
I get your idea but I don’t think this is the right approach. 2000 $ is a lot of money in some regions where it would hurt solo Indie devs most. At this point I don’t know if there is regional pricing in those areas for submitting. And for every one else: I am not saying that 2000 $ is nothing, but every one who ever worked in a studio knows how much money is burned in games and this amount would be a minor position on the bill but thats another story.
Maybe a stricter policy about disclaiming where your assets come from would help against slop and asset flips.
And please lets make ai opt-in everywhere. Like I get that websites like itch now have a no ai tag, but this should be active by default. I don’t want to opt out actively every time I browse.
You can probably say goodbye to things like LGBT-representation in videogames if that sort of system was implemented.
Fucking AI messing up everything. Some devs might choose to use AI, but others who avoid using it are caught in an increasingly impossible situation. AI pervades everything these days. Want to use some tool or library? Good chance it’s been poisoned by AI. I have used automated translation services in the past, as a first pass with a human doing the next iteration. Those used to be just simple dictionary lookups and old school translation matrices, but now all use AI. Buy an asset collection? Better hope nobody snuck AI generated ones in there without disclosure.
It’s bizarre how quickly our whole world has went to shit with AI. And how many people just go with it. I have people in my life complaining about how expensive computer hardware has become and how they hate Instagram and tiktok being filled with slop, only for these same people rave about how quickly they can make presentations at work with copilot. And how much time they saved with Claude. Like they are part of the problem and don’t even see it.
Last year, Tech Raptor found that around 500 of the nearly 3k games of October Next Fest games had AI disclosures, I can’t imagine it’ll be less this year and there’s no way way to filter them out.
If AI kills indie gaming, I’m gonna be livid
I picked up a bunch of games on sale recently. Every one was a game I had already wishlisted and did research on. I’m not even paying paltry steam sale prices for AI games. All the AI flood has done is make me less likely to impulse buy an indie game because generally I’ll have to look into the company first. I used to just impulse buy a lot of <$10 indie and friend slop games without even reading the reviews. Unfortunately I can’t do that anymore because the whole niche is flooded with AI.
Is the refund policy not good enough to just buy and refund later If it s shit?
My concern is not that the game will be bad, it’s that it’s AI at all. Plenty of AI games just don’t disclose they used AI, or the disclosure is inaccurate. I’m not interested in engaging with AI media at all so I don’t want to buy it in the first place, even if I can return it.
I feel the same way about Apple. They should have a tag for whether the developer used a Mac. We need to pick apart all the tools that developers use and boycott the ones that upset us!
