Fucking AI messing up everything. Some devs might choose to use AI, but others who avoid using it are caught in an increasingly impossible situation. AI pervades everything these days. Want to use some tool or library? Good chance it’s been poisoned by AI. I have used automated translation services in the past, as a first pass with a human doing the next iteration. Those used to be just simple dictionary lookups and old school translation matrices, but now all use AI. Buy an asset collection? Better hope nobody snuck AI generated ones in there without disclosure.
It’s bizarre how quickly our whole world has went to shit with AI. And how many people just go with it. I have people in my life complaining about how expensive computer hardware has become and how they hate Instagram and tiktok being filled with slop, only for these same people rave about how quickly they can make presentations at work with copilot. And how much time they saved with Claude. Like they are part of the problem and don’t even see it.
Maybe steam needs a verge of death system like new grounds. If the Game is downvoted to oblivion, delete it forever. And take their 100 $ submission fee and give it to charity or something so at least something good comes out of this sloppy mess.
There no need to delete.
LLM slop is the next evolution to asset flips. Fundamentally the same thing.
Steam handles this not by deleting these slops but by hiding them effectively they don’t come up in results unless you search for very specific terms.
Now here comes my controversial opinion which I hope I get downloaded significantly for: currently it costs $200 to submit a game to steam. This problem would go away if they increase that to $2,000.
I get your idea but I don’t think this is the right approach. 2000 $ is a lot of money in some regions where it would hurt solo Indie devs most. At this point I don’t know if there is regional pricing in those areas for submitting. And for every one else: I am not saying that 2000 $ is nothing, but every one who ever worked in a studio knows how much money is burned in games and this amount would be a minor position on the bill but thats another story.
Maybe a stricter policy about disclaiming where your assets come from would help against slop and asset flips.
And please lets make ai opt-in everywhere. Like I get that websites like itch now have a no ai tag, but this should be active by default. I don’t want to opt out actively every time I browse.
Review bombers would love that. The amount of times that feature would get used the way you’d hope would be dwarfed by the field day right wing trolls would have with it.
Yeah maybe a little short sighted, you are right. But watching this also feels like a car accident.
The solution is to immediately demand a refund on any game where you even catch a whiff of genAI. Even if it’s past the usual refund terms, request one. Make it painful for Steam, and they will be much more inspired to solve the problem.
Yeah, down with technology! The witch hunt is on! Can we do electricity next?
Not wanting to buy stuff made unethically, such a witch hunt, very regressive. Go do one.
Right, because all the electronics from factories, and electricity from non-renewable sources (the majority) is totally ethical.
/s
You can probably say goodbye to things like LGBT-representation in videogames if that sort of system was implemented.
Yeah true, maybe. But I think we can still agree that we are drowning in slop nobody wants and if we don‘t filter it out now, this mess will be harder to clean up afterwards.
Definitely, the situation sucks all around. Maybe stronger curation by Valve would be an option to mitigate it somewhat.
Game platforms had shovelware issues before AI took off. Now it’s worse and they’re still not doing anything about it.
Look forward to millions of Gilson B. Pontes’ with AI slop.
Steam is working on it but how effective it will be remains to be seen
They’ll only work on a solution as long as customers care. If they notice that AI content will make them money, they will drop it.
Seems to me that Steam is embracing it rather than working on it. None of their discovery tools will ever be effective as long as they are built on the hopelessly flawed tag system.
I picked up a bunch of games on sale recently. Every one was a game I had already wishlisted and did research on. I’m not even paying paltry steam sale prices for AI games. All the AI flood has done is make me less likely to impulse buy an indie game because generally I’ll have to look into the company first. I used to just impulse buy a lot of <$10 indie and friend slop games without even reading the reviews. Unfortunately I can’t do that anymore because the whole niche is flooded with AI.
Is the refund policy not good enough to just buy and refund later If it s shit?
My concern is not that the game will be bad, it’s that it’s AI at all. Plenty of AI games just don’t disclose they used AI, or the disclosure is inaccurate. I’m not interested in engaging with AI media at all so I don’t want to buy it in the first place, even if I can return it.
I feel the same way about Apple. They should have a tag for whether the developer used a Mac. We need to pick apart all the tools that developers use and boycott the ones that upset us!
That would require you to play the games you buy, which is an inefficient way to hoard games. Nobody has time for that!
Last year, Tech Raptor found that around 500 of the nearly 3k games of October Next Fest games had AI disclosures, I can’t imagine it’ll be less this year and there’s no way way to filter them out.
If they add a toggle, then game devs will stop putting AI disclosures. The only way is to tag them, and block those tags.
A lot of devs are already lying about AI usage, because the AI disclosure kills engagement even without a filter.
A random example is Soul’s Remnant, cute little indie MMO - right before launch they added several major features, and 20+ languages. When questioned about it, they admitted on their discord to using AI translations… And said they would take down the translations rather than use AI disclosures.
Within 3 weeks they had 10 updates with mile-long patch notes as a team of 2, and they never took put the AI translations or added a disclosure.
Lying about the AI disclosure is a huge red flag and sadly common. I’m a fan of the emerging Organization genre that’s blowing up in popularity, and it’s just as rife with undisclosed AI usage as it is with… disclosed AI usage.
From a business perspective it makes sense: people don’t want AI in their games, so if they disclose AI then people won’t buy that game. From the perspective of a gamer, it sucks donkey balls and if you lie about that then I’m never buying any of your products again.
The thing that’s really kind of frustrating about it though is that those are the perfect kind of games for low quality asset-flip shovelware before the advent of AI. It’s basically the one place where that kind of approach to development wouldn’t really bother me. It’s truly a crazy timeline when I’m looking back fondly on asset flips
And said they would take down the translations rather than use AI disclosures.
That’s fair. The disclosure might kill the business, but the cost of translation might do, too.
Did you read the next sentence, where they did neither, and are now just lying about their AI use, and seem to have doubled down on it?
It’s the right move. There’s zero benefit to being honest when there’s irrational, angry mobs doing a witch hunt and purity tests.
I would disagree. IMO there is even less benefit in building a community of trust, talking about not using AI with that community,then the moment the launch crunch happens go all in on AI and lie about it.
I can understand being upset about the dishonesty. They should have just ignored the conversation entirely, and declined to comment.
It sounded like something they’d do after it blew up.
If AI kills indie gaming, I’m gonna be livid
It has already killed a video game decomp community. I’d have to go back to reddit to find the article though. I’d rather pretend I still have control over going there…
edit: missed “video game”
I saw the same, don’t worry about it. Really hate that shit.
Ok, but I already seen some news recently where a few indie devs are quitting because their demo got cloned by AI sloperators. I think in my case I heard about the needle in a haystack game dev lamenting about it. And then one of the AI sloperators lamenting their shit-ass clone got cloned. It could be the sloperator doing it to himself to make some ragebait advertising though.
