Let’s hope GOG takes a better approach
No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.
You can. Add tags/genres to your ignored list, and you won’t see any games marked with them.
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
As far as I can tell, you can only add about 10 tags to the ignore list. That’s way too few for me.
They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.
I’d say not only labelled, but at the very least if we ain’t ostracizing generative ai being used in any part of the process, we should at least have the dignity to have it quarantined. I for one don’t feel like buying and installing malware because a yahoo who cannot actually read their own code decides to upload to Steam, let alone literally any other platform.
You’re already using an operating system where generative AI was being used in some parts of the process and creative tools have had generative AI functions since even before the LLM craze.
so, let the market kill them then. dont buy the stuff and if you do, refund and delete
That’s the entire fucking problem: the market CAN’T kill them because they cost nothing to make.
the market can get them removed from the virtual shelf if left alone long enough
Plans which require everyone to act in unison based on having perfect information are unrealistic.
Also, that system is easy enough to disrupt by bad actors.
A lot of developers have already pulled their demos from Steam for fear of them being cloned.
Either Valve takes a stance against slop clones, or they’re going to alienate indie devs (and probably the big ones too), and with them a lot of their customers.
Valve have to decide if they want Steam to be a thriving games store or an abandoned slop repository.
And “making no decision” is choosing the latter.
I recently looked up Family Time because of the hype (and the Papa! melted my brovaries), but of course there’s a clone with a fox lady already. That made me mad.
I don’t think many people here actually read the article, valve said they immediately noticee the takeover of slop during the next fest and have already committed a significant amount of their team to tackling this. All they said was ATM there is no stance/solution. They also mentioned that games with real effort put in will be prioritized.
They aren’t letting slop roll them over lol
That’s corporate speak for “seen ✅”. I know people love Valve, but this is very standard playbook for how they operate in PR. Acknowledge the problem, say they are working on it, maybe in a year or 2 we get a nugget of an attempt to kinda poke at the problem.
Maybe Valve will prove me wrong here since this is ramping up quickly, but this also isn’t anything that will threaten their monopoly in short order. If I was GOG, I’d be taking a hard anti-AI stance between Valve’s timid response and Tim Sweeney’s full on cannonball and reinforce what they already do in curating for handcrafted games.
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And I don’t think the rest of their statement is promising. First part (the title) is irrelevant: you don’t need to gatekeep tools to gatekeep obvious slop copies of games already announced and upcoming on your platform. Let along a bare quality window. Valve did that gatekeeping for the first 60% of its life. Maybe we need that back.
Second part is borderline tonedeaf :
Noting that games were being cloned long before AI came on the scene—just at a much slower pace—Giardino suggested that developers can protect their work by first building a strong community around it, and then focusing on continual improvements: “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.”
So, “yeah just market more and work harder”. The two expensive parts of making a game. From a billion dollar corporation. If any other AAA studio said this it’d be ratio’d to hell.
They aren’t letting slop roll over them
And yet it rolls.
You don’t have to tell developers anything except that they need to disclose AI use, and then you need to give customers the ability to filter them. For the sake of your platform. Because nobody wants to go through Next Fest and scroll through piles of slop or be duped into buying a sloppy game over and over.
I think filtering is the best thing they could give us as customers. They already have AI disclosures, but I don’t think we have the ability to filter for AI right now.
Gateway proprietor doesn’t want to gatekeep
Gateway
🐮📦
I don’t speak hieroglyphic
Giardino suggested that developers can protect their work by first building a strong community around it, and then focusing on continual improvements: “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.”
Not every game needs a fuckload of features. Not everyone has the time and skill to create and manage a community around their own game.
Steam could at least allow people to vote on whether some games are complete clone garbage or not, have the weight of the vote rely on the account level + age. Or let people indicate the original game on a clone’s page. Like any community feature, I can see this being a vector for abuse, but this AI bullshit is absolutely ruining online trust
online trust
when has this ever been a thing?
Solid win for those of you who like to wade through 200 AI slop titles before finding something good.
I think the problem with a ban is that the creators of AI slop will stop disclosing or tagging it.
Allowing it with tags + letting users filter it out might be the best way to reduce it?
Ironpineapple’s job gonna be very interesting for the next few years.
I’ll take slop by 1 person, over AAA garbage any day
Okay. Gatekeeping sucks. I’m with ya there. But… that doesn’t mean that you can’t make “no ai” (or something) a simple user setting, right? Does something like this already exist? If not, why? (I don’t use Steam, so I genuinely don’t know).
Steam should add a $150k game listing surcharge so there’s no market for crapware.
That would kill literally all indie games
Wrong take…
