These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)
> There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.
I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.
So what people are really complaining about is the lack of an approval or curation process on Steam’s end. AI is exposing the problem by making it worse.
What? The onus is not on me to wear stab proof clothing, the onus is on society to create a world where the floor is high enough that mugging isn't worth it.
I still stand behind what I said back when they moved to direct publishing. Fee to get on Steam is too cheap. I think it is 100 dollars. Should have been five or ten times of that. And even then I suppose that would have slowed things only a bit.
Valve takes a 30% cut and makes eye watering profits. I don't feel it's fair to characterize them as a victim for having to put in some effort to mention a basic standard of quality on their platform.
They've got a solid return policy, if you've played less then 2 hours they'll refund. They can probably derive a ratio to mint a hiristic and bobs your uncle.
How are they a victim? People aren't going to leave Steam over this. Valve will continue making money regardless from these sales, just as they don't care that they got children addicted to gambling because it also made them money.
39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.
Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
Same as when I got annoyed that library I wanted to use turns out does not check any of the boxes it claims to check, because its pure untested slop. I would have no issues with it being AI if it worked because I used it to make my own versio of that library that in fact works as advertised.
> While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
> Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
Most people only see the slop. They don't have informed opinions. 1 in 5 American adults is functionally illiterate, and they are supposed to have a valid opinion about the usefulness of AI in contexts they can't see?
Most people hate what they (incorrectly) think AI is.
Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell. They see a ton of AI slop everywhere and they think that AI is harmful because it turned every site and every platform and every type of human expression they’ve experienced into endless piles of AI slop. Can you blame them? Are they even wrong?
>Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell.
Yes, I agree. It took science to prove that life doesn't arise from rotting meat. But the fact that populations (even in developed countries) are rapidly getting less and less educated indicates that people are less and less likely to have the critical thinking skills to understand when their eyes are not adequate instruments of observation.
Also AI slop exists, certainly; people aren't wrong to hate AI slop, but you have to agree that slop isn't the entirety of AI.
thats funny, because you are moving the goalposts in the argument i made, which is that people who say they hate AI don't know what AI is and think it is only slop, yet you readily agree that AI is more than slop.
> As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop.
That isn't true. AI is overwhelmingly used to create slop, not useful or interesting things. Therefore people hate AI in large part because it is synonymous with slop.
But why are they mad? Why do they ever encounter such games? I interact with Steam daily and before AI vibecoding there were plenty of garbage games out there.
I have no reason to seek them out. The only reason I would ever encounter "Leverage Real Estate Simulator" is because people are "outraged" about it.
Who cares about steam entries for bad games? Who is it hurting?
What Steam users want is a way to filter out crap but crap existed well before AI (trust me, I've spent a _lot_ of time scrolling through games on Steam both for "Fests" and just in general). And unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to filter "crap" out. There as good games that use AI, there are bad games that use AI, there are good games that don't use AI, there are bad games that don't use AI. I don't think "AI" is a good filter.
Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.
This is such a tedious argument, "<bad thing> existed before AI too". Yes it did, but there was like 0.1% of it compared to today. Sometimes, a substantial enough different of degree becomes a difference of kind.
Even if the ratio was better for AI, the volume means the filtering has to be better:
Before: 1e6 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 100, but the filter is only 90% accurate so 10 bad games get through.
Now: 1e7 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 1k, and even if the filter is now 95% accurate (or equally if the content is on average twice as likely to be in the "good" range) there's still 50 bad games.
Unfortunately the filtering is also AI, and the filter is at best(!) of a similar kind as will have been used to train the AI which made the slop, so this necessarily goes much worse, and is reasonably likely to pass all 9e6 new vibe-generated games.
Why doesn't Steam's rating system work to filter out the crap? Does this problem only exist for new games, are the ratings being gamed, or is something else going on?
I really like small indie games, sometimes there just aren't enough reviews or the reviews are inconclusive. Sometimes when I read reviews that are negative they're actually something that I _do_ want in a game, and so it's actually a sign that I do want to play that. So you can't just trust the review #/rating alone. And they're probably being gamed as well.
Someone has to buy the game before they can rate it and there is a threshold before a consensus rating is shown, by which time the slop submitter has already gotten what they want.
There is an easy way to filter crap out: crank up the fee charged to developers to submit a game to Steam in order to deter slop and also use the proceeds to cover the cost of more human curation of submissions, also to deter slop. Sometimes the gate does need to be kept.
There theoretically could be - and I don't have an issue with an otherwise competent dev/artist making use of AI tools - but I know no examples of good games that also deserve a "made with AI"/"uses AI" badge.
I'm sure this is a logical facility, so I apologize, I don't have an exact example but I imagine most developers are not eager to stick their hands up to say "Hey, I use AI!" given how consumers have treated games that they think use AI.
> They could always take the bold step of listening to what their customers want
Customers don't know what they want. Sorry but it's just true. They are anti-AI because of a multitude of reasons, only some of those reasons are based in reality. Most of them will give up their anti-AI stance once the dust settles and they will not reward the creators who "stuck to their guns".
It's the same way customers beg restaurants for healthy options then when the restaurant puts those items on the menu they don't sell. Right now mob mentality might sink a game that people think AI was involved in but give it a year and they won't care.
Thinking that not using AI will be a winning play (today) is just fighting the last war.
Many users no longer want to do this after facing a deluge of low-quality, low-effort games and having to rate them all. They'd rather let the dreck remain unrated.
Anyone who attempts to reframe this as "AI is not a contributing factor" needs to remember that in the past, the number of sloppy games were negligible due to a natural filter/barrier of entry where the indie author had to know how to code, or motivated enough pay someone who does.
AI lowers the barrier to entry - including for scammers.
This assumes players have infinite time. It does not address the loss of revenue a proper indie game got as a result of being less discoverable in a sea of slop.
I think it works fairly well. Sure, a few players waste a few minutes to hours on the game, but once it has 10 negative reviews that all say it's AI slop, no one will bother to buy it anymore and Steam can rank it accordingly.
I don’t have solutions but tagging AI is definitely not easy. A lot of art is expressed via code: particle effects, menu layouts, iconography, animation keyframes. AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning. More recently, Opus 5.5 is clearly a model that started to develop visual taste and can draw images with code, as opposed to outputting images as tokens or via diffusion. And these capability gains are still accelerating.
There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.
> AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning.
It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
If I use Opus 5.5 to spin up a debug session and step through part of the code to recreate a segmentation fault, does the entire project now need a "MADE WITH AI" label on it?
What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
>If I use Opus 5.5 to spin up a debug session and step through part of the code to recreate a segmentation fault, does the entire project now need a "MADE WITH AI" label on it?
Yes. Of course you can explain all the nuance in your AI disclosure statement and consumers can decide if it matters to them.
>What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
> If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
I don't care if 90% of new games get tagged as AI, I am simply not interested in them. The developers don't care if they get tagged? Good, at least they'll be honest about it then. And on top I can filter out the 90% of suggestions I am least likely to care about? I don't see the downside.
> it carries no meaning about the quality of the games
Why does that matter? Slop versus non-slop should be marked as such. Like the other commentators said, if it ends up impacting their finances maybe they should just you know... not ship slop.
Slop vs non slop isn't what is getting marked though, AI is. Almost all developers are using AI code tooling now, so its a pretty meaningless marker. We need actual way to mark slop, which requires something a little more complicated than "did they use AI"
I would argue that this could even be detrimental. Using coding agents nowadays has become a matter of survival for indie/solo devs. The moment their product is revealed, nothing is stopping a vibe-coder with a pro license to just copy the game concepts and release it.
Here's an 11 year old video trying to educate people who think they "hate CGI" just how much CGI they've been watching, just without realizing it, because it was actually quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
I have not come across a single piece of software that has improved in quality after the developers start using AI. Sure it does have the possibility, but that's not what AI is used for. It's used for moving fast and breaking things. And we are finding out exactly how bad that philosophy sucks.
Steam requires any use of AI art or code to be disclosed in the steam description. No vs yes is a simple toggle that can be added, similar to sexual content.
Perhaps, but the examples in that article all clearly look like they're using AI-generated art assets. You might as well call that style "slop" in the sense that it is very easy to spot. I don't know if it's possible to create a general AI filter for the actual code, but certainly labelling ones that had AI-made visual and audio assets, with minimal human craftsmanship involved, would be a good first step.
Just give me the switch to filter it out. I don't care how much AI have you used in your slop. I care if you have used it at all. If I miss on some hidden "gems" that's on me.
You don't miss out on hidden gems, you miss out on ~95% of games. Most programmers are using AI now, and when you get into any game with a significant amount of devs, at least a few of them are using it.
Steam has had problems with asset flippers long before “AI” hit the mainstream, but due the fact that even those “human slop” took time to make, you didn’t see them as often.
Sure, we at HN are holier than the rest and we know how to “bend the powers of AI for good”, but what Steam players see is a sea of mass produced AI slop games which barely work at all.
And yes, there is that one guy with good storytelling skills using AI to fill the knowledge gap in other areas make a game with some interesting ideas, but even him is getting overshadowed by the sea of slop. (Still a point could be made here of why. Why do everything alone? Why not take a chance with an aspiring VA recording lines from their phone? Pretty sure some people would work for free to get their first chance to get featured in anything)
We know it makes absolutely no sense to slap a binary “AI” sticker in a game just because one dev asked Claude to help them fix some scripting bug or whatever but maybe, just maybe, the best solution in that case would be outright lying. We know who that tag is for, something something read the spirit of the law, not what was literally written.
Right now I am glad I am not a Valve employee because they will have to figure out some scaleable solution for the (lack of) QA problem they have been ignoring for a long time now.
Agree with this in general. Issue with this is who's doing the AI tagging?
The uploader? Easy to lie about.
The playerbase? Will be false positives.
Steam moderators? Maybe, seems like a ton of work though.
Besides, I'd say majority of software projects nowadays have at least some AI tooling involved in the development process, we tagging 99% percent of games?
The video game market was already flooded before LLMs. Now, it's much much worse. I'm not sure that "AI" vs. "no AI" is really the right filter, but I do understand the need to filter out the chaff. There's too much content, and too little time. Even for something that you love, there's more out there than can possibly be managed or enjoyed. This problem will get worse.
I'd say gen-AI art assets are definitely the deep end, and DLSS-Yassify is right behind it. I'd put code behind them because there's a second gradient within it from Copilot-on-a-short-lease to vibe coding.
I used to assume that low effort indies would be the major force for the game equivalent of gen-AI tiktok fruit slop, but when I saw DLSS 5 I realised it might come for AAA first.
Because value in this case is particular to the engagement of a player.
Most playing a video game know nothing of programming let alone the specific architecture or development process, so I am not sure how you would expect them to express feelings about the code.
Narrarive or script is still in the same artistic consideration though, so say if the game was a sort of meta exploration of the code, this might expose the same sort of "value" over code.
It may not, by some philosophical definition, but most consumers (and I'd say most programmers too) place little importance on code as a human artistic expression. In the case of games the art assets are also a much more clear and direct signal that there was AI involved in the creation of the game. A game with handmade art but vibe coded game logic might not be as obvious.
I disagree. The core of gameplay is handled in the code. Art by itself doesn't make a game fun. Think about card games like Poker, Black Jack, Spades, you name it. Nobody plays those games because the cards are a particular art style, they play them because the rules and strategy are fun.
You can have AI create the rules for you, or you can have the AI create the code that implements the rules. It's not different for art. You can have the AI create concepts for your, or you can direct the AI towards a specific vision.
I argue that while it is possible to direct AI to implement your artistic gameplay idea faithfully, it is not possible to direct AI towards an artistic vision without losing a lot in the handling of the details.
There’s no right vs wrong, for art the details Are the fun part.
I’m enough of a sucker to think that there’s art in code as well (not just the game design but implementation too) but clearly less and it’s not nearly as visible.
There's nothing inherently offensive about AI generated art. You simply choose to dislike it. Are you offended by screws made by industrial machines instead of hand-carved?
And machine screws are a lot less art that art is, obviously, so I don’t think that comparison helps your case. Screws are the code equivalent in the analogy.
My point is that some object created by an automated process that serves its purpose should not be offensive. You can absolutely have a preference, but offended? On what grounds is something created by AI inherently offensive? And how can that be uniquely applied to art but not software?
AI or no AI is the wrong metric, of course. I imagine the way to solve this usefully probably goes through something that looks like Reddit. More "meta-moderation."
The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."
Nobody is going to mark their game as "Made with AI" unless customer sentiment shifts or there is a very strong incentive not to lie. Right now releasing a game with a ai label is just net negative. Meaning the filter would be utterly useless even if it was introduced.
They really want a "no dogshit" filter, I imagine. So a filter for actual effort and care.
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
--
As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
Ten years ago, you could already code one tower defense or "farming simulator" or bejeweled-alike game, and then reskin it 6 different ways for cheap and release the "new versions". The only new thing is the quantity of slop, but slop games certainly existed before AI.
So long as user reviews are adequately filtered to be real players, some slight tweaks to the Steam search algorithm should do a good job at handling it.
No one will notice or care if Claude wrote boilerplate code for your game. Everyone will notice if you vibecoded the mechanics whole cloth. The people who don't want to play sloppy games, already are avoiding sloppy games just fine.
It might be time to bring back steam greenlight. Some games are made significantly better with AI as the developers are very bad at programming, but they're damn good artists and have a vision. Not everyone has the money to hire capable people to bring their ideas to life.
Introducing a better review system where you could rate how fun, asthetically pleasing and whatnot a game is would likely help with sorting out the sloppy mass produced media. I think steam could take one step further and build a classification system based on required-to-submit 1 hour long of in-game footage. The effort needed for sloppy games is far lower than recording 1 hour of gameplay in 90% of the slop and I believe that would at least somewhat make people reconsider knowing that they can't hide behind a fancy trailer or cool visuals.
Maybe it has to do with people losing their minds at the mention of it? Spend however long on a game, for some random to come out the woodwork and attempt to invalidate everything because you decided to disclose.
An AI filter is in the interest of both sides here because the people who would "lose their minds" over it can just avoid it with the press of a button. And if you want to sell to everyone, then make a product everyone wants.
Ironically what I think people really want here is a better recommendation system, one that almost certainly would need ML algorithms (or 'AI' as we call it nowadays) to implement.
So Valve will need to train on descriptions of games and perhaps demand more out of developers who want to sell games on their platform.
All notable app stores face this already or will face it soon. Maybe the apt GUI for your favourite debian derivative won't get too flooded...
Every major gaming outlet and studio has at one time or another decided to try to play chicken with their customers. This never goes well. Historically Steam has been pretty skilled at not finding a hill to die on so one would assume they'll avoid the obvious blunder of ignoring users preferences here.
This doesn't feel like something I want Steam to do. Valve should not both host the games, profit from sales, and decide winners in the market themselves.
This is really a call for games journalism to step up and try to innovate. Human curators with taste, and a number of them with different mindsets who people can find one that meshes their own, is more important than ever.
Steam can increase the barrier to entry to prevent flooding the market, of course. But AI will facilitate making more games of increasing quality. Today it's all slop, but that may not be the case tomorrow. So what we actually need is a trusted curation system so we can float the garbage out and find the gems.
And as much as I appreciate Gabe, there are enormous financial incentives that make me uncomfortable giving yet more power and dominance to Valve. Especially as he gets older.
So this is a space where games journalism has a space to get back in and try to innovate solutions to a real and growing market problem.
I feel for me to even have this conversation we need some gradient we can point to and say this is clearly all AI and this is clearly minimally assisted and everyone is along this gradient and past some arbitrary point its no longer aggregable to me.
I use claude in my games(Currently a hobby) I draw a character on paper, claude models the proportions symmetrically and then I go back in and slowly build up the model. I wouldn't have a problem with artists doing this at all, in fact I don't know of a good reason not to. However if they generated a picture, sent that to claude, took whatever claude generated and threw it into the game then its going to look like garbage and cause they didn't start by throwing new information into the system it must start from training data so it will look the same as all the other slop.
That first step of starting with a piece of paper or some human seed is huge, the more detailed that step the less I care about the rest of the process.
Steam had a problem with trash even before "AI". It allowed rampant asset flips that required little to no technical expertise and certainly no effort. "AI" tags make no sense because you cannot separate supposedly "vibe-coded" slop from any other game made by anyone from normal indie developers to big studios (and they are using the same tools supposed vibe-coders use). Disclosures are also useless, because the entire development process cannot be meaningfully audited and it becomes a gamble people will make to try and not get filtered and such. Valve needs better curation, but it did not do anything about it before and it certainly will not do so now, evidently it's profitable this way.
I'm participating with my game in this Next Fest and I don't really think this is much of a problem. The amount of games presented doesn't seem significantly higher than last Next Fest. Games that are good get boosted after 2 days (first 2 days everyone gets featured randomly) so low quality AI slop won't get much of attention. And the way they check if a game is popular is wishlist count and player/install count as far as I understand. I don't think low quality slop will get much of boost, and if it does it probably is deserved unless the wishlist count/player count gets botted somehow, but I haven't really seen this happen but who knows. For most people I think it's best to wait until after the second day to see which demo's are worth checking out, there won't be much AI slop there.
IMO, We really should be centering these discussions around the lines that separate Remix versus Ripoff. I want to live in an age of less effortful remixes that push the culture forward, but we are mostly getting ripoffs that slopify the culture at the moment. Shun the ripoffs, praise and boost the remixes, same as it ever was.
This is just something I’m starting to ruminate on, so I recommend that you go watch the video. As a lifelong gamer and sometimes game developer, I want to live in a world where everybody and their mother can implement a game idea that they have. we just need better mechanisms to critique those games at a similar scale.
Gamers and game journalists seem to be unaware that most software engineers are using AI now, likely including programmers who work at prestigious AAA games. But they only see the vibecoded slop, and assume that AI=slop, when in reality ~all games use AI coding now, both slop and non-slop.
I'd assume that all major AAA games within few years will have codebase that is heavily generated by Claude/Codex, probably way higher quality than pre-LLM codebases too.
The productivity gains are just that immense, ESPECIALLY for the kind of "brainless plumbing" that a majority of AAA gamedev is
Many of the (very successful and well-reviewed) indie devs I follow on social media viscerally hate AI and consider coding and assets to be two parts of the same whole for their (again, very successful) games. So no, far from ~all. That is what they call “wishful thinking.”
80-90% of devs, which will make for 99%+ of games with 5+ developers working on it.
Sure, some solo projects might not use AI, but those are the exact people who i think should be using AI for game dev. Games are often best when a single person can execute their vision, and the productivity gains from AI enable a solo dev to actually execute on a larger vision.
That has almost nothing to do with what I said, unless you think these indie devs are out on social media lying.
My point is that, yes, artistic integrity actually exists and there are many game developers who reject this technology outright for obvious reasons. This should not come as a surprise.
What about tools used to make the game? Can they be AI products? What about tools that lint human made code? What if your paint program contains some AI-generated plugins, does that disqualify your game?
What if your music mixer uses an open source library that depends on a math library produced by an author who has an AI image as an avatar on social media?
Anyone who demands purity in all things should have their values questioned. Just look at history for examples of the outcomes of people obsessed with purity.
Yeah, what people want is games that aren’t slop. Defining that is probably impossible. We’ve always had shovelware, but the volume now is unsustainable and only going to get worse.
The problem is that in the context of AI, "slop" has lost its definition.
It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.
But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.
I think the number of submissions is fine. It's easy to filter by the type of game you're looking for. If you just want to doom scroll, yeah you're going to have a bad time.
One of the things that captivates many people who play games is imagining building their own.
It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.
At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.
As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.
You're forgetting one (I think people do this deliberately because they dislike AI, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt): those who are passionate about games and skillful, and can ship higher _quality_ at the same pace as before.
That’s why I caveated it with fully using AI. If they’re using AI as a tool within their workflow, it doesn’t fall into the same bin as the vibecoded games that are being referenced in the article.
I remember reading a lament by a journalist in a video game magazine like 25 years ago "why don't they invent tools that would make game making easier for people like us who don't know programming?"
Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.
You know it's an interesting question. If an amateur makes a terrible game and puts it on Steam, is that slop? If they use AI to make a better game, is that somehow worse?
Slop isn't only a description of the quality, it's also alluding to a level of cynicism. Someone pouring their soul out into a flaming turd didn't make slop, whereas a professional team using ai to pump out hundreds of fairly well polished, gripping, pleasant games with no new ideas or soul in them are making slop.
Not that I agree with your assessment, but why do we need a thoughtful and intelligent solution here? Seems to me people want a simple, easy solution and bans or required disclosure seems to fit quiet well here
Get rid of the thing that's causing problems is both thoughtful and intelligent when the alternative is either ignore the problem or some as of yet undefined activity that is entirely outside the current scope of business. Steam isn't obligated to accommodate AI-generated games or participate in whatever currently undefined process would be required to make them palatable. That's the studios' responsibility.
There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.
This is what people are mad about, taken from the front page of nextfest: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5106420/Leverage_Real_Est... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5155900/Ages_TD_Demo/?cur... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5200920/BATTLE_PARTS__POW... https://store.steampowered.com/app/4609270/Naval_Supremacy/?...
These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)
And there are a lot this year
> There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.
I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.
“Here” being HN - curse of an early comment, the “both sides” and “you can’t really tell” got downvotes fast
absolutely wild that HN juuust clips the visibility of the referral code appended to all of your links
well played honestly
So what people are really complaining about is the lack of an approval or curation process on Steam’s end. AI is exposing the problem by making it worse.
This is like seeing someone get mugged and saying clothes lack stab resistance. The mugger simply exposes the problem.
What? The onus is not on me to wear stab proof clothing, the onus is on society to create a world where the floor is high enough that mugging isn't worth it.
I still stand behind what I said back when they moved to direct publishing. Fee to get on Steam is too cheap. I think it is 100 dollars. Should have been five or ten times of that. And even then I suppose that would have slowed things only a bit.
When Valve had a strict curation process, many years ago, there were widespread complaints about indie games being kept out.
Yes, abuse of a system with some reliance on trust does expose the reliance on trust.
Valve is just as much of a victim.
Valve takes a 30% cut and makes eye watering profits. I don't feel it's fair to characterize them as a victim for having to put in some effort to mention a basic standard of quality on their platform.
They've got a solid return policy, if you've played less then 2 hours they'll refund. They can probably derive a ratio to mint a hiristic and bobs your uncle.
How?
Valve is getting bombarded by slop too.
How are they a victim? People aren't going to leave Steam over this. Valve will continue making money regardless from these sales, just as they don't care that they got children addicted to gambling because it also made them money.
As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop. Slop has always existed in video games, it’s just faster to create now. So, so much faster.
I think you might be in a bubble if you think that most people don't hate AI. A lot of people hate it with a passion.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...
39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.
Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
Same as when I got annoyed that library I wanted to use turns out does not check any of the boxes it claims to check, because its pure untested slop. I would have no issues with it being AI if it worked because I used it to make my own versio of that library that in fact works as advertised.
> While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
> Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
Most people only see the slop. They don't have informed opinions. 1 in 5 American adults is functionally illiterate, and they are supposed to have a valid opinion about the usefulness of AI in contexts they can't see?
Most people hate what they (incorrectly) think AI is.
Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell. They see a ton of AI slop everywhere and they think that AI is harmful because it turned every site and every platform and every type of human expression they’ve experienced into endless piles of AI slop. Can you blame them? Are they even wrong?
>Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell.
Yes, I agree. It took science to prove that life doesn't arise from rotting meat. But the fact that populations (even in developed countries) are rapidly getting less and less educated indicates that people are less and less likely to have the critical thinking skills to understand when their eyes are not adequate instruments of observation.
Also AI slop exists, certainly; people aren't wrong to hate AI slop, but you have to agree that slop isn't the entirety of AI.
You might be missing the point here. Drug discovery and math proof generation are not being sold on steam nextfest.
thats funny, because you are moving the goalposts in the argument i made, which is that people who say they hate AI don't know what AI is and think it is only slop, yet you readily agree that AI is more than slop.
I hate so called "AI" and so do most people I know. Slop is in category of its own tho.
> As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop.
That isn't true. AI is overwhelmingly used to create slop, not useful or interesting things. Therefore people hate AI in large part because it is synonymous with slop.
But why are they mad? Why do they ever encounter such games? I interact with Steam daily and before AI vibecoding there were plenty of garbage games out there.
I have no reason to seek them out. The only reason I would ever encounter "Leverage Real Estate Simulator" is because people are "outraged" about it.
Who cares about steam entries for bad games? Who is it hurting?
This is taken from the front page of nextfest.
Many shoppers browse nextfest to find cool new indie games. These are being crowded out by AI slop.
They're not mad? They ask for a filter to specifically make sure that they don't see the AI slop.
What Steam users want is a way to filter out crap but crap existed well before AI (trust me, I've spent a _lot_ of time scrolling through games on Steam both for "Fests" and just in general). And unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to filter "crap" out. There as good games that use AI, there are bad games that use AI, there are good games that don't use AI, there are bad games that don't use AI. I don't think "AI" is a good filter.
Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.
This is such a tedious argument, "<bad thing> existed before AI too". Yes it did, but there was like 0.1% of it compared to today. Sometimes, a substantial enough different of degree becomes a difference of kind.
Even if the ratio was better for AI, the volume means the filtering has to be better:
Before: 1e6 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 100, but the filter is only 90% accurate so 10 bad games get through.
Now: 1e7 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 1k, and even if the filter is now 95% accurate (or equally if the content is on average twice as likely to be in the "good" range) there's still 50 bad games.
Unfortunately the filtering is also AI, and the filter is at best(!) of a similar kind as will have been used to train the AI which made the slop, so this necessarily goes much worse, and is reasonably likely to pass all 9e6 new vibe-generated games.
The screenshots and description used to be a good filter - stock unity assets and poor copyediting meant low-effort game. This is no longer the case.
Why doesn't Steam's rating system work to filter out the crap? Does this problem only exist for new games, are the ratings being gamed, or is something else going on?
I really like small indie games, sometimes there just aren't enough reviews or the reviews are inconclusive. Sometimes when I read reviews that are negative they're actually something that I _do_ want in a game, and so it's actually a sign that I do want to play that. So you can't just trust the review #/rating alone. And they're probably being gamed as well.
Someone has to buy the game before they can rate it and there is a threshold before a consensus rating is shown, by which time the slop submitter has already gotten what they want.
Now there is an an infinite amount more crap to filter through...
There is an easy way to filter crap out: crank up the fee charged to developers to submit a game to Steam in order to deter slop and also use the proceeds to cover the cost of more human curation of submissions, also to deter slop. Sometimes the gate does need to be kept.
> There as good games that use AI
[citation needed]
There theoretically could be - and I don't have an issue with an otherwise competent dev/artist making use of AI tools - but I know no examples of good games that also deserve a "made with AI"/"uses AI" badge.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3312030/AI_Learns_To_Driv...
It’s not exactly what you meant, but I enjoyed this for several hours.
I'm sure this is a logical facility, so I apologize, I don't have an exact example but I imagine most developers are not eager to stick their hands up to say "Hey, I use AI!" given how consumers have treated games that they think use AI.
> most developers are not eager to stick their hands up to say "Hey, I use AI!" given how consumers have treated games that they think use AI.
They could always take the bold step of listening to what their customers want, and eliminating use of AI. Then they wouldn't need to hide it.
> They could always take the bold step of listening to what their customers want
Customers don't know what they want. Sorry but it's just true. They are anti-AI because of a multitude of reasons, only some of those reasons are based in reality. Most of them will give up their anti-AI stance once the dust settles and they will not reward the creators who "stuck to their guns".
It's the same way customers beg restaurants for healthy options then when the restaurant puts those items on the menu they don't sell. Right now mob mentality might sink a game that people think AI was involved in but give it a year and they won't care.
Thinking that not using AI will be a winning play (today) is just fighting the last war.
Here goes a case:
Paradox publicly admit use of AI in various places, yet their games are good.
How would no-AI filter be implemented by Steam at all?
Do people expect Steam to proctor the entire development process?
Issue here is not AI use, but very low amount of creative human effort that went into making some games.
There are three existing realistic solutions for this problem:
- raise SteamWorks deposit of $100 for launching a new game on Steam (to reflect lower cost of making games with coding agents)
- reviews by users and pro game critics
- users can request refunds under 2 hours of playtime
> users can request refunds under 2 hours of playtime
This already exists (or did)
The parent comment specifies they're existing solutions:
> There are three existing realistic solutions
> reviews by users
So does this!
Many users no longer want to do this after facing a deluge of low-quality, low-effort games and having to rate them all. They'd rather let the dreck remain unrated.
Anyone who attempts to reframe this as "AI is not a contributing factor" needs to remember that in the past, the number of sloppy games were negligible due to a natural filter/barrier of entry where the indie author had to know how to code, or motivated enough pay someone who does.
AI lowers the barrier to entry - including for scammers.
Just as one would expect from a list of existing items!
Show the refund request rate.
This assumes players have infinite time. It does not address the loss of revenue a proper indie game got as a result of being less discoverable in a sea of slop.
I think it works fairly well. Sure, a few players waste a few minutes to hours on the game, but once it has 10 negative reviews that all say it's AI slop, no one will bother to buy it anymore and Steam can rank it accordingly.
This variety of slop is really easy to automatically detect (for now).
I don’t have solutions but tagging AI is definitely not easy. A lot of art is expressed via code: particle effects, menu layouts, iconography, animation keyframes. AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning. More recently, Opus 5.5 is clearly a model that started to develop visual taste and can draw images with code, as opposed to outputting images as tokens or via diffusion. And these capability gains are still accelerating.
There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.
> AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning.
It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
If I use Opus 5.5 to spin up a debug session and step through part of the code to recreate a segmentation fault, does the entire project now need a "MADE WITH AI" label on it?
What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
>If I use Opus 5.5 to spin up a debug session and step through part of the code to recreate a segmentation fault, does the entire project now need a "MADE WITH AI" label on it?
Yes. Of course you can explain all the nuance in your AI disclosure statement and consumers can decide if it matters to them.
>What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
Yes.
> If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
I don't care if 90% of new games get tagged as AI, I am simply not interested in them. The developers don't care if they get tagged? Good, at least they'll be honest about it then. And on top I can filter out the 90% of suggestions I am least likely to care about? I don't see the downside.
> it carries no meaning about the quality of the games
It doesn't have to, Steam already has reviews.
Ok. In this scenario, I would happily stick to the 10% of games not tagged as AI.
> If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are
You presume in favor of the existence of non-slop.
Why does that matter? Slop versus non-slop should be marked as such. Like the other commentators said, if it ends up impacting their finances maybe they should just you know... not ship slop.
Slop vs non slop isn't what is getting marked though, AI is. Almost all developers are using AI code tooling now, so its a pretty meaningless marker. We need actual way to mark slop, which requires something a little more complicated than "did they use AI"
> if it ends up impacting their finances maybe they should just you know... not ship slop
Again, I'm saying this would end up not impacting any developers' finances, because nearly no players would take the AI tag seriously.
I would argue that this could even be detrimental. Using coding agents nowadays has become a matter of survival for indie/solo devs. The moment their product is revealed, nothing is stopping a vibe-coder with a pro license to just copy the game concepts and release it.
Here's an 11 year old video trying to educate people who think they "hate CGI" just how much CGI they've been watching, just without realizing it, because it was actually quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
I have not come across a single piece of software that has improved in quality after the developers start using AI. Sure it does have the possibility, but that's not what AI is used for. It's used for moving fast and breaking things. And we are finding out exactly how bad that philosophy sucks.
Developers who slop code inevitably slop assets. It’s a “make hard things easy” dopamine button — how could they not?
You know you can make your UI not look like AI wrote it, with AI, right?
Yes. The obviously-AI ones are of course the most offensive, but in general I would always prefer to use the UI without any AI involvement.
Steam requires any use of AI art or code to be disclosed in the steam description. No vs yes is a simple toggle that can be added, similar to sexual content.
Does Steam, itself, disclose its use of AI in a prominent manner? It's built on top of Linux, which allows AI assisted contributions.
Perhaps, but the examples in that article all clearly look like they're using AI-generated art assets. You might as well call that style "slop" in the sense that it is very easy to spot. I don't know if it's possible to create a general AI filter for the actual code, but certainly labelling ones that had AI-made visual and audio assets, with minimal human craftsmanship involved, would be a good first step.
Just give me the switch to filter it out. I don't care how much AI have you used in your slop. I care if you have used it at all. If I miss on some hidden "gems" that's on me.
You don't miss out on hidden gems, you miss out on ~95% of games. Most programmers are using AI now, and when you get into any game with a significant amount of devs, at least a few of them are using it.
Steam has had problems with asset flippers long before “AI” hit the mainstream, but due the fact that even those “human slop” took time to make, you didn’t see them as often.
Sure, we at HN are holier than the rest and we know how to “bend the powers of AI for good”, but what Steam players see is a sea of mass produced AI slop games which barely work at all.
And yes, there is that one guy with good storytelling skills using AI to fill the knowledge gap in other areas make a game with some interesting ideas, but even him is getting overshadowed by the sea of slop. (Still a point could be made here of why. Why do everything alone? Why not take a chance with an aspiring VA recording lines from their phone? Pretty sure some people would work for free to get their first chance to get featured in anything)
We know it makes absolutely no sense to slap a binary “AI” sticker in a game just because one dev asked Claude to help them fix some scripting bug or whatever but maybe, just maybe, the best solution in that case would be outright lying. We know who that tag is for, something something read the spirit of the law, not what was literally written.
Right now I am glad I am not a Valve employee because they will have to figure out some scaleable solution for the (lack of) QA problem they have been ignoring for a long time now.
Agree with this in general. Issue with this is who's doing the AI tagging?
The uploader? Easy to lie about. The playerbase? Will be false positives. Steam moderators? Maybe, seems like a ton of work though.
Besides, I'd say majority of software projects nowadays have at least some AI tooling involved in the development process, we tagging 99% percent of games?
The video game market was already flooded before LLMs. Now, it's much much worse. I'm not sure that "AI" vs. "no AI" is really the right filter, but I do understand the need to filter out the chaff. There's too much content, and too little time. Even for something that you love, there's more out there than can possibly be managed or enjoyed. This problem will get worse.
On the flip side, the purpose of Steam is to find new users for CSGO and DOTA2.
Isn't it a gradient? I'd probably rank it like this.
AI Used in back-office administration, internal documentation & presentations
AI Used in research
AI Used for generating placeholders
AI Used for Upscaling (DLSS)
AI Used for translations of UI.
AI Used in the final product (assets incl. textures, 3D, sound and voice)
AI Used in final product (code)
To say nothing of the other disciplines of AI like machine vision or voice recognition or dynamically building a story tree or character response.
I'd say gen-AI art assets are definitely the deep end, and DLSS-Yassify is right behind it. I'd put code behind them because there's a second gradient within it from Copilot-on-a-short-lease to vibe coding.
I used to assume that low effort indies would be the major force for the game equivalent of gen-AI tiktok fruit slop, but when I saw DLSS 5 I realised it might come for AAA first.
Why does art have some different value compared to code?
Because value in this case is particular to the engagement of a player.
Most playing a video game know nothing of programming let alone the specific architecture or development process, so I am not sure how you would expect them to express feelings about the code.
Narrarive or script is still in the same artistic consideration though, so say if the game was a sort of meta exploration of the code, this might expose the same sort of "value" over code.
It may not, by some philosophical definition, but most consumers (and I'd say most programmers too) place little importance on code as a human artistic expression. In the case of games the art assets are also a much more clear and direct signal that there was AI involved in the creation of the game. A game with handmade art but vibe coded game logic might not be as obvious.
I disagree. The core of gameplay is handled in the code. Art by itself doesn't make a game fun. Think about card games like Poker, Black Jack, Spades, you name it. Nobody plays those games because the cards are a particular art style, they play them because the rules and strategy are fun.
You can have AI create the rules for you, or you can have the AI create the code that implements the rules. It's not different for art. You can have the AI create concepts for your, or you can direct the AI towards a specific vision.
I argue that while it is possible to direct AI to implement your artistic gameplay idea faithfully, it is not possible to direct AI towards an artistic vision without losing a lot in the handling of the details.
There’s no right vs wrong, for art the details Are the fun part.
I’m enough of a sucker to think that there’s art in code as well (not just the game design but implementation too) but clearly less and it’s not nearly as visible.
Art is more artistic, it’s more of an expression of human ideas.
I don’t want AI either but I find AI art more offensive
There's nothing inherently offensive about AI generated art. You simply choose to dislike it. Are you offended by screws made by industrial machines instead of hand-carved?
> You simply choose to dislike it.
Too reductive.
I choose to dislike the taste of cilantro, but that choice is wired into many people and doesn’t present as a choice at all: it is instinctual.
Well, other than the fact that it’s art-shaped extrude, not art.
I didn’t say you had to.
And machine screws are a lot less art that art is, obviously, so I don’t think that comparison helps your case. Screws are the code equivalent in the analogy.
My point is that some object created by an automated process that serves its purpose should not be offensive. You can absolutely have a preference, but offended? On what grounds is something created by AI inherently offensive? And how can that be uniquely applied to art but not software?
If you think the only point of art is to serve a functional purpose, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree
AI or no AI is the wrong metric, of course. I imagine the way to solve this usefully probably goes through something that looks like Reddit. More "meta-moderation."
The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."
Nobody is going to mark their game as "Made with AI" unless customer sentiment shifts or there is a very strong incentive not to lie. Right now releasing a game with a ai label is just net negative. Meaning the filter would be utterly useless even if it was introduced.
They really want a "no dogshit" filter, I imagine. So a filter for actual effort and care.
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
--
As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
Exactly this.
Ten years ago, you could already code one tower defense or "farming simulator" or bejeweled-alike game, and then reskin it 6 different ways for cheap and release the "new versions". The only new thing is the quantity of slop, but slop games certainly existed before AI.
So long as user reviews are adequately filtered to be real players, some slight tweaks to the Steam search algorithm should do a good job at handling it.
No one will notice or care if Claude wrote boilerplate code for your game. Everyone will notice if you vibecoded the mechanics whole cloth. The people who don't want to play sloppy games, already are avoiding sloppy games just fine.
It might be time to bring back steam greenlight. Some games are made significantly better with AI as the developers are very bad at programming, but they're damn good artists and have a vision. Not everyone has the money to hire capable people to bring their ideas to life.
Introducing a better review system where you could rate how fun, asthetically pleasing and whatnot a game is would likely help with sorting out the sloppy mass produced media. I think steam could take one step further and build a classification system based on required-to-submit 1 hour long of in-game footage. The effort needed for sloppy games is far lower than recording 1 hour of gameplay in 90% of the slop and I believe that would at least somewhat make people reconsider knowing that they can't hide behind a fancy trailer or cool visuals.
People are proud to use AI but don’t want the AI label. Seems sus.
Maybe it has to do with people losing their minds at the mention of it? Spend however long on a game, for some random to come out the woodwork and attempt to invalidate everything because you decided to disclose.
An AI filter is in the interest of both sides here because the people who would "lose their minds" over it can just avoid it with the press of a button. And if you want to sell to everyone, then make a product everyone wants.
Yeah, it's a dishonest business practice to hide the use of AI.
Consumers should be able to make informed decisions about what they buy and people that like AI slop can consume AI slop.
Ironically what I think people really want here is a better recommendation system, one that almost certainly would need ML algorithms (or 'AI' as we call it nowadays) to implement.
So Valve will need to train on descriptions of games and perhaps demand more out of developers who want to sell games on their platform.
All notable app stores face this already or will face it soon. Maybe the apt GUI for your favourite debian derivative won't get too flooded...
don't need to train AI or ML on this, and there are plenty of curators out there.
simple tags and reviews from people with similar profiles as yours. netflix figured this out years ago with their by-mail recommendations.
The expectation of quality is slowly being chipped away. And it appears the HN community is prepared to “nuance” that expectation out of existence.
This is your "abundance".
"Trust (customers) but verify (games)" works but at the cost of Steam/Valve having to implement either human verifiers or AI verifiers.
This will cost with low ROI.
If Steam is indeed customer focused, they might but doubtful.
Every major gaming outlet and studio has at one time or another decided to try to play chicken with their customers. This never goes well. Historically Steam has been pretty skilled at not finding a hill to die on so one would assume they'll avoid the obvious blunder of ignoring users preferences here.
This doesn't feel like something I want Steam to do. Valve should not both host the games, profit from sales, and decide winners in the market themselves.
This is really a call for games journalism to step up and try to innovate. Human curators with taste, and a number of them with different mindsets who people can find one that meshes their own, is more important than ever.
I highly doubt without some moderation this will work.
People tend to do things unless explictely deterred or not allowed in the first place.
e.g. There is no u-turn sign (though in the area it is illegal) people will make u-turns regardless, unless cops are watching over them.
Same thing here. People will still post AI slops unless there are some watchers.
Steam can increase the barrier to entry to prevent flooding the market, of course. But AI will facilitate making more games of increasing quality. Today it's all slop, but that may not be the case tomorrow. So what we actually need is a trusted curation system so we can float the garbage out and find the gems.
And as much as I appreciate Gabe, there are enormous financial incentives that make me uncomfortable giving yet more power and dominance to Valve. Especially as he gets older.
So this is a space where games journalism has a space to get back in and try to innovate solutions to a real and growing market problem.
I feel for me to even have this conversation we need some gradient we can point to and say this is clearly all AI and this is clearly minimally assisted and everyone is along this gradient and past some arbitrary point its no longer aggregable to me.
I use claude in my games(Currently a hobby) I draw a character on paper, claude models the proportions symmetrically and then I go back in and slowly build up the model. I wouldn't have a problem with artists doing this at all, in fact I don't know of a good reason not to. However if they generated a picture, sent that to claude, took whatever claude generated and threw it into the game then its going to look like garbage and cause they didn't start by throwing new information into the system it must start from training data so it will look the same as all the other slop.
That first step of starting with a piece of paper or some human seed is huge, the more detailed that step the less I care about the rest of the process.
AI is a tool nowadays, cant ban it.
plenty of games made with AI that are fun.
They don't ask for a ban but for a filter. So that everyone can choose for themselves.
LLM are tools, AI doesn't even exist.
> plenty of games made with AI that are fun.
That's like saying there is plenty of water in the ocean, so you can drink it.
Steam had a problem with trash even before "AI". It allowed rampant asset flips that required little to no technical expertise and certainly no effort. "AI" tags make no sense because you cannot separate supposedly "vibe-coded" slop from any other game made by anyone from normal indie developers to big studios (and they are using the same tools supposed vibe-coders use). Disclosures are also useless, because the entire development process cannot be meaningfully audited and it becomes a gamble people will make to try and not get filtered and such. Valve needs better curation, but it did not do anything about it before and it certainly will not do so now, evidently it's profitable this way.
I'm participating with my game in this Next Fest and I don't really think this is much of a problem. The amount of games presented doesn't seem significantly higher than last Next Fest. Games that are good get boosted after 2 days (first 2 days everyone gets featured randomly) so low quality AI slop won't get much of attention. And the way they check if a game is popular is wishlist count and player/install count as far as I understand. I don't think low quality slop will get much of boost, and if it does it probably is deserved unless the wishlist count/player count gets botted somehow, but I haven't really seen this happen but who knows. For most people I think it's best to wait until after the second day to see which demo's are worth checking out, there won't be much AI slop there.
maybe judge games by if they are fun or not
Maybe they should just focus on "is it fun".
IMO, We really should be centering these discussions around the lines that separate Remix versus Ripoff. I want to live in an age of less effortful remixes that push the culture forward, but we are mostly getting ripoffs that slopify the culture at the moment. Shun the ripoffs, praise and boost the remixes, same as it ever was.
Are you talking about Minecraft in Dark Souls and that kind of thing?
I’m speaking about it in the same context as this indie dev: https://youtu.be/3Vm6WqoaNZ4?is=GJh6kjOLA2Rg2WbX
This is just something I’m starting to ruminate on, so I recommend that you go watch the video. As a lifelong gamer and sometimes game developer, I want to live in a world where everybody and their mother can implement a game idea that they have. we just need better mechanisms to critique those games at a similar scale.
>his game was cloned before he released it
Damn. Yeah that sucks.
I'd say his actual problem was lack of visibility. You wanna be in a position where people say, "oh, this is a clone of That Guy's game."
The actual "product" becomes the game dev, and his brand, rather than the actual game.
Or more broadly... marketing is more important than game development. (Or at least as important.)
Gamers and game journalists seem to be unaware that most software engineers are using AI now, likely including programmers who work at prestigious AAA games. But they only see the vibecoded slop, and assume that AI=slop, when in reality ~all games use AI coding now, both slop and non-slop.
Someone called this a Dark Forest problem recently, where "everyone" is using AI, but nobody wants to admit they're using AI.
Most programmers admit to it if you ask them, its everyone else making assumptions.
I'd assume that all major AAA games within few years will have codebase that is heavily generated by Claude/Codex, probably way higher quality than pre-LLM codebases too.
The productivity gains are just that immense, ESPECIALLY for the kind of "brainless plumbing" that a majority of AAA gamedev is
Engine tech is not usually the productivity blocker for AAA dev.
Many of the (very successful and well-reviewed) indie devs I follow on social media viscerally hate AI and consider coding and assets to be two parts of the same whole for their (again, very successful) games. So no, far from ~all. That is what they call “wishful thinking.”
80-90% of devs, which will make for 99%+ of games with 5+ developers working on it.
Sure, some solo projects might not use AI, but those are the exact people who i think should be using AI for game dev. Games are often best when a single person can execute their vision, and the productivity gains from AI enable a solo dev to actually execute on a larger vision.
Approximately everyone who uses a coding LLM will keep mum to avoid bad publicity in the current atmosphere.
That has almost nothing to do with what I said, unless you think these indie devs are out on social media lying.
My point is that, yes, artistic integrity actually exists and there are many game developers who reject this technology outright for obvious reasons. This should not come as a surprise.
“No AI” is too simplistic.
Does that mean no AI assistance at all? How is that possible to detect for if someone uses it for code generation and compiles it to a binary?
Do they mean no AI artwork? Maybe easier to detect, but mostly based on vibes still.
Do they mean no AI features? But why, wouldn’t an adventure game where you can talk naturally to NPCs be kind of cool?
Madness.
How about a filter for “No souless shitty copycat games that are pure cash grabs”. I’m sure Jev can help detect these at scale.
Steam requires self reporting. You can see their rules described here.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/38624...
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsur...
What about tools used to make the game? Can they be AI products? What about tools that lint human made code? What if your paint program contains some AI-generated plugins, does that disqualify your game?
What if your music mixer uses an open source library that depends on a math library produced by an author who has an AI image as an avatar on social media?
Anyone who demands purity in all things should have their values questioned. Just look at history for examples of the outcomes of people obsessed with purity.
Yeah, what people want is games that aren’t slop. Defining that is probably impossible. We’ve always had shovelware, but the volume now is unsustainable and only going to get worse.
The problem is that in the context of AI, "slop" has lost its definition.
It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.
But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.
I think the number of submissions is fine. It's easy to filter by the type of game you're looking for. If you just want to doom scroll, yeah you're going to have a bad time.
One of the things that captivates many people who play games is imagining building their own.
It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.
At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.
There’s two kinds of people making games (fully) with AI:
- I have a passion for making games but not the skill, and this lets me achieve my dream
- I can crank out games in an hour, and as long as I get 100 purchases over its lifetime I’m making money
As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.
This is a good point, if you could describe it sufficiently to that standard, do you think it might be able to get close?
There are three kinds of people:
- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries
- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people
- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points
- those that tremble as if mad
I'm on the verge of strategy 2, because I've been doing strategy 1 and financial pressure keeps derailing me.
My heart's not really in it though. Would be a lot more convenient if it was though.
You're forgetting one (I think people do this deliberately because they dislike AI, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt): those who are passionate about games and skillful, and can ship higher _quality_ at the same pace as before.
That’s why I caveated it with fully using AI. If they’re using AI as a tool within their workflow, it doesn’t fall into the same bin as the vibecoded games that are being referenced in the article.
The latter is definitely the challenge.
Someone who's played a lot of games and can keep iterating seems like not always a bad thing.
A lot of those games are attempts at cheap cash grabs more than "I can finally make my dream game".
I remember reading a lament by a journalist in a video game magazine like 25 years ago "why don't they invent tools that would make game making easier for people like us who don't know programming?"
Well it seems we are here now.
Monkey paw curls.
Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.
You know it's an interesting question. If an amateur makes a terrible game and puts it on Steam, is that slop? If they use AI to make a better game, is that somehow worse?
Good point, slop isn't new, it's the volume and speed that has changed.
Slop isn't only a description of the quality, it's also alluding to a level of cynicism. Someone pouring their soul out into a flaming turd didn't make slop, whereas a professional team using ai to pump out hundreds of fairly well polished, gripping, pleasant games with no new ideas or soul in them are making slop.
Speaking of low effort, "ban Z" does not constitute a thoughtful and intelligent solution to "Z created a problem."
Z=AI in this case, but lazy solutions are as old as time.
Not that I agree with your assessment, but why do we need a thoughtful and intelligent solution here? Seems to me people want a simple, easy solution and bans or required disclosure seems to fit quiet well here
Isn't a user-selectable filter very different from a ban?
Not to the most aggressive of LLM-based-tooling boosters, no.
It was lazy to ban DDT or X-rays for determining shoe sizes or watches with radium paint.
Get rid of the thing that's causing problems is both thoughtful and intelligent when the alternative is either ignore the problem or some as of yet undefined activity that is entirely outside the current scope of business. Steam isn't obligated to accommodate AI-generated games or participate in whatever currently undefined process would be required to make them palatable. That's the studios' responsibility.
Nobody browses the Steam store at random we all use filters and recommendations.
Not initially but after I gained experience with the store, yes. SEems like AI coders are going for the lowest common denominators (new users)
AI's largest share of any market is users who don't have domain expertise, though.
That is true thus the lowest common denominator.
I assumed the target market was Steam hoarders that buy games when they're cheap but never actually play them.
Those hoarders I rarely ever see IRL. I am thinking it's the vocal minority and influencers, twitchers saying they hoarded games but never played.
I am in multiple gaming community where they are heavy gamers. Rarely do I see them doing that.