Adding to discussion of Valve's handling of Steam's growing gen AI problem, Epic Games online services product director Alexander Rehm suggests the company's solutions to clone and slop games aren't enough for most people.
Rehm waded into the news on LinkedIn last week, just days before Valve announced a change to Steam's review process in response to a deluge of games evidently fueled, in part, by generative AI. However, this won't necessarily change the outpouring of slop on Steam, as Valve says it doesn't want to dictate what "tools" developers use even if Steam does call for AI disclosures in game store pages. In fact, the idea was to speed up the review process while also enacting new requirements.
At a recent event, Valve business team members affirmed that the company is still working to solve this problem and suggested developers focus on maintaining original, high-quality games that are difficult to clone.
Rehm says this "is a reasonable strategy if you've got the runway and team to do it, and not much use if you're one or two people who shipped a single clever mechanic." This camp, of course, is where a lot of the developers on Steam fall.
The same Valve staff also fielded reports of developers being extorted by AI users who'd threaten to clone a game unless paid off. "Valve also said it hasn't seen reports of developers being extorted over AI clones and that this is a job for law enforcement, not the storefront, which to me reads like a platform that still sees this as someone else's problem," Rehm says.
"If you're building anything indie sized right now, 'keep improving forever' isn't a moat, it's a tax only the well funded can pay," he concludes.
Rehm makes some of the counterarguments that Valve's response initially prompted. How long can Valve kick the can down the road? When will material solutions arrive? How can the creators of hotly anticipated games deal with copycats beating them to launch with identical or near-identical titles? Valve has, as evidenced by its review slowdown, not found the perfect answer, and this process deserves scrutiny.
The sticking point here is Epic Games' glass house, as some responses to Rehm's post argue. In the replies, you'll find former Valve dev Chet Faliszek, who reckons Epic Games, with its AI-first pivot, once AI-mandatory game jam, and "vibe coded" game launcher, doesn't really have a leg to stand on.
"What an absolutely dishonest read of mixing an off the cuff response in a Q&A with a written statement so you can say they see it as someone else's problem and that they aren't addressing it," Faliszek responds. "I love how you make sure to not to link to either... All the while Tim [Sweeney] screams it is a political act the same as revealing someone's voting record to have an AI disclosure... so explain - how does that work?"
Sweeney has repeatedly criticized Valve for Steam's AI disclosures, which aren't mirrored on the Epic Games Store even though Epic's Fab marketplace does mandate AI disclosures.
"This is a business to business marketplace," Sweeney says of Fab in an October tweet. "Many Fab customers are operating under contracts that require them to understand the providence of all content in their game (including Steam’s own contract that I’ve complained about) and they cannot buy assets without this info."
The CEO has also emphasized the gen AI features of Epic's Unreal Engine 6 – a game-making suite that, one video game lawyer told GamesRadar+, risks legal blowback by ignoring copycat potential.
Separately, Sweeney writes, "What does the law say on the copyright issues associated with training on content? The Anthropic court ruling found they were liable for copyright infringement when torrenting pirated content (as the article quotes me on), but they found that the training itself was fair use. Other courts have found that whether particular content produced by AI was infringing dependent on its similarity to the copyrighted work."
The rush to turn Fortnite into Roblox by way of Unreal Engine integration also calls into question how Epic Games would control a slop flood. Chalmers Robotics Society chairman Maximilian Ygdell tells Rehm, "Epic was fine with using AI trained on others' work, now the same technology is used to empower the people and suddenly it’s an issue? Am I missing something here?"
