Valve admits Steam has an AI slop and cloning problem but won't be a gatekeeper

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Valve has acknowledged one of the biggest frustrations on Steam right now. PC Gamer reports that Valve's Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson discussed the platform's flood of low effort and AI generated games at the Steam Indie Connect event in Busan, South Korea

Steam Next Fest is now flooded with thousands of low effort games and demos, and some developers are nervous about sharing demos at all, in case someone uses AI to clone them. Inven Global reported at least one extortion attempt in which a developer was told to pay up or have their game cloned with AI and released first

Nearly 23,000 games have released on Steam so far in 2026, according to SteamDB. Giardino said Valve does not want to be a gatekeeper telling developers which tools they should or should not use. He pointed out that cloning existed long before AI, and advised developers to build a community and keep adding features and personality to their games

For the first two days of Next Fest, games are shown almost at random to give everyone some visibility, before personalised recommendations take over. Wilkinson admitted that the trade off is some low quality games get exposure, and said a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve the problem

Valve's open approach has helped countless indie games find an audience, so it is understandable that it does not want to start blocking tools. But the volume of low effort releases is making discovery harder for everyone. Developers being afraid to share demos is a worrying sign that something needs to change

Should Valve be stricter about AI generated games? And how can real indie developers stand out on Steam now?

Valve admits Steam has an AI slop and cloning problem, but sayswww.pcgamer.com