Valve Responds to Steam's AI Game Flood: No Gatekeeping, and a Fix for the 'AI Garbage' Problem

Valve has publicly addressed the mounting complaints about AI-generated games flooding Steam. Speaking at a Steam indie event in Korea, Steam business team members Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson told developers that Valve has no plans to gatekeep games made with AI — and acknowledged the curation problem head-on.

Valve Won't Gatekeep AI-Made Games

A developer asked the panel whether using AI during development made it harder for a title to stand out as the store grew and AI became more common. Giardino's answer was direct: whether to use AI is each developer's own call.

"We don't want to be the judge telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use," he said. For players, that means Steam will not, in the near term, treat "whether you used AI" as a hard bar for listing or visibility. AI-made titles will keep arriving, and the burden of sorting them out falls on the store's recommendation and filtering systems rather than on a blanket ban.

Why Steam Next Fest Shows Games Randomly First

Another developer raised the "AI garbage" problem, saying their recent Steam Next Fest had underperformed and pointing to social-media complaints about the glut of low-quality games. Wilkinson explained the event's exposure mechanics: games are shown to players in a random order for the first two days, after which personalized recommendations kick in. The random window exists to give every developer a relatively fair share of exposure and to stop studios from gaming early placement.

"We recognize the cost is that some low-quality games get exposure," Wilkinson said. "We're fully aware of this, and there are a lot of people thinking about how to solve this."

Surfacing Better Games, Not Filtering Bad Ones

Giardino pointed out that similar complaints are not new in Steam's history. When Steam Greenlight launched 14 years ago, developers asked whether they could filter out such titles; the same question resurfaced when Steam Direct launched. Valve's stated goal, he said, has always been to improve the store and let better games rise to the top — not to filter out the bad ones.

AI Clone Ransom Emails: A Law-Enforcement Matter

The Q&A also touched on a grimmer problem: developers receiving ransom emails threatening that, unless paid, someone would rush an AI clone of their game to market first. Giardino said Valve would investigate if reports came in, but stressed that ransom is primarily a matter for law enforcement. His advice to developers was to stop relying on a single mechanic that is easy to copy, and instead keep building through features, personality, and their own creative perspective.