A Valve artist has defended AI disclosures on storefronts like Steam, saying they only scare those with “low effort” products.
good response from Valve
Nobody who wants to hide information from you has your best interests at heart. Sweeney is a creep.
Stop it, Valve! I can only get so erect!
Good shit, I hope we keep seeing headlines like this nonstop, because you know for sure those AI assholes have bots spamming inboxes with the opposite message.
But I thought ai users love ai why wouldn’t they want people to know? (:
I look at it the same way I look at game engines. It’s a tool, which if used in the production of the game should be disclosed and let people decide if they want to buy that product or not.
I’d much rather buy a game made with Godot than Unity. So yeah, list the ingredients
Or UE5, since it’s an unoptimized mess
Yes, we should celebrate transparency. Even if every game includes Ai in development in some shape or form, its good to know what exactly was done. In some cases its even a little less harmless or even acceptable (like generating meaningless terrain) than in other cases.
Check out demos, read reviews. If it’s good it’s good, if it’s bad it’s bad. What does it matter how it was made?
Because AI-gened voices and graphics are terrible in their own right. They’re super unnatural and casually wander into Uncanny Valley.
Also I’m not paying for a product that wasn’t human-made. I don’t want to support those who waste their time talking to a chatbot like a moron.
They are terrible now, but they will get better and better. The code will be at least AI-assist generated regardless.
I don’t think LLMs will survive for so long
Which demos? Those are long dead on Steam. Demos are now basically paid early access releases…
It’s one of the quality indicators. Just like the game engine. E.g. I know Bethesda games will have shit performance and be bug ridden because they use Creation Engine.
Actually I’ve found the opposite, it feels like industry moved away from demos for quite awhile. But steam has been recently showcasing games with demos and encouraging them? (Probably not true of AAA)
I guess the situation is a bit better since their 2024 overhaul, but it’s mostly limited to indie devs not like before demos were used by every single studio and publisher as a marketing tool to allow people actually playtest the game not only to see if the game is interesting but also it’s performance on your machine.
itch.io still beats Steam into ground in this area.
Ok. I admit I’m not really into the scene and so I’m talking generically. But I see my daughter watch hours of YouTube of other people playing new games and commenting (rather moronically) on them. Seems like a pretty it should be pretty easy to see if the game is worth your money before you buy.
Many of those Youtubers get paid to play those games, and the ones catering to younger audiences are particularly bad at providing those disclaimers
And the disclosure wouldn’t change anything for those that do research for their purchaces outside the store page, but it would have an impact on people that don’t.
But why should it matter at all? They don’t list whether the game was written in c++ or c# because it makes no difference. What matters is the game play. If it’s good, it’s good.
They don’t list whether the game was written in c++ or c# because it makes no difference.
Sure they do. That’s what game engine disclosure does.
Do they really? And do you care? I mean I understand if they tell you it’s based on Unity or what other framework systems, because that would dictate a certain look and feel area, but the programming language?
Is there an asset flip disclosure?
So pretty much every shop/job simulator?
Nearly all games use assets, would be pointless.
Asset flips refers to low quality project that use all store-bought assets without providing any uniqueness whatsoever on gameplay.
yes, but how do we define an asset flip? whatever definition is used will be something avoided by scummy developers or will apply to all games on steam.
Problem is there are legitimately good games that do this, usually ones that focus exclusively on writing but still. At that point it’s better to let the reviews handle it.
Like what?
Early access version of ATOM RPG was pretty damned close. I’m talking way back when it was the first world map or so when going to death tunnel would crash my game if I entered and exited it enough because of an infinitely respawning rat.
Mind you that was pretty early in it’s development but it very well could’ve stayed in polished form of that and still been good.
I said “low quality project”, that means games with “focus exclusively on writing” are not belongs to this category.
Huge chunk of RPG Maker games are using generic reusable assets provided by RPG Maker yet still cool af, as they focus on writings.
Sure but the problem is that distinguishing between a shitty asset flip and a proper game that is just using generic assets is moreso a matter of effort. There is basically no way to distinguish the two short of actually playing it, which is different from tracking say AI which is pretty objective in it’s separation. The only tag that could work is a “strong usage of generic asset” but that doesn’t really distinguish between say a shitty asset flip and a game that is a generic asset flip in everything but it’s writing.
Okay, so, complex projects having a small part you didn’t make doesn’t matter?
it’s not that it doesn’t matter at all but what problem does it solve if nearly every game on steam has it? It wouldn’t even help identify actual asset flips.
Okay, so, every game on Steam having some generated asset wouldn’t matter?
No. It’s a lot easier to define that and restrict it.
Tim sure is an odd dog. I just don’t get where this unearned confidence to shit talk comes from.
Money. Money is where it comes from.
“I am rich, therefore my opinion is valid and you should listen to me”
EXTREMELY LOUD ‘INCORRECT’ BUZZER
Yes but
pays the buzzer guy to play the “correct” sound effect
old-timey bicycle horn
It’s not seen often that Valve reacts to public comments.
Valve hasn’t reacted.
It’s a Valve employee.
“Opinions are my own” - his Twitter bio. Which shouldn’t need to be said, but here we are.
So we should ignore that he works at Valve?
in the sense that valve has nothing to do with this… yes
I can’t imagine the other artists and eccentrics that work at Valve would disagree with this guy tho.
I do not agree. While it was not an official statement, he still works at Valve. So his opinion is connected to Valve. We should not ignore that. He is not ANY developer. The only thing is, I should have made that more clear in my initial reply, but I think its not really needed because we know the context he is a developer on his own private account. But I would not ignore that.
I would bet that the steam client has at least 1 line of ai generated code in it.
Where’s their disclosure?
Why would it? The client has been around for ages and hasn’t changed in all that time. So your getting mad about a hypothetical. Your weird.
The client is constantly getting updates. Maybe the visual store layout hasn’t changed to you, but hasn’t updated in years is comical. The client beta has one from Nov 25th.
Why would you disclose one line of AI code. It’s unidentifiable and meaningless. Like saying you don’t want code where auto complete was used and every character must be written by a human finger.
Kind of like using AI to place one single pixel in an image.
Because they’re forcing their clients to disclose any use of AI for any kind of content including, art, sound and code.
That would include 1 line.
Let’s not kid ourselves that that’s the limit that must not be crossed. Art, sound and code is more than one line for anyone that has written even a hello world program on any popular game engine. This is a bad faith argument with no purpose other than to muddy the waters.
The point is, I guarantee you valve has ai generate code in their platform. It’s widely used. And unless you’ve gone and like vibe coded the whole thing it’s pointless to require declaring it.
Where do you draw the line? A function? A class? An optimized algorithm? A feature? A test suite?
Steams policy on this (edit: on code) is bad.
You only need do disclose what could ever potentially be identified as AI. Otherwise it’s unenforceable. Even saying it’s used for code is debatable. You can’t tell once it’s compiled and can’t tell the difference between one developer breaking the companies policy or a policy that short snippets or auto complete are fine
Sounds like they should just remove it then. Having an unenforceble policy is a bad policy.
You want them to declare that the NPCs use an LLM to interact with you sure, that’s different, but this code part of the policy is bad.
Maybe you should write to Valve about it, rather than giving slippery-slope arguments to people who have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
You’ve said your piece. Arguing about it further is not helping anyone. It’s fermenting hostility for no benefit.
You’ve got slippery slope backwards lol.
Slippery slope is I can’t let you do ABC because if you do you’ll do XYZ.
This is you can’t do ABC, XYZ, 123, QWERTY, but if you do XYZ, 123, QWERTY you shouldn’t tell us because it’s actually okay and we didn’t really mean all those other things.
Valves policy if anything is the bad policy because it’s the strict policy you put in place because you’re implementing it due being worried about slippery slope.
Edit: And were literally in a thread where someone from VALVE is defending this bad policy, so this is the exact place to say my piece on it.
edit: Just to note, Valve will let you do it, they just stick you with a declaration that has a negative connotation to much of the community, such as the developer replying here, which is harmful to the game developer, while those who lie and did the exact same thing benefit from a shiny decal declaring their false purity
I did yes. But I figure either could work!
I expect devs to disclose when they use photoshop, IDEs with autocomplete, and store-bought assets as well. Starting to sound silly? That’s because it is
Silly? No I would love that, imagine if all games listed all the tools used in its creation, it would be so informative!
Because store bought assets are still quality assets and are human made. The only reason it sounds silly is because you went out of your way to make it silly.
Inb4 asset stores become >90% AI generated
Hence the need for the AI tag.
