Valve has ‘a significant number’ working on Steam’s visibility dilemma but says

A “significant number” of Valve staff are trying to figure out how to solve Steam’s issues with new game visibility, but it doesn’t plan to start “gatekeeping” games made with AI.

During a Steam Indie Connect event held in South Korea on Tuesday, Steam Business Team member Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson held a Q&A session with Korean developers.

As reported by Inven, some developers raised concerns about how increasingly hard it is to get their games noticed on Steam, given that there even more games being added to the storefront these days, especially as AI use has grown.

Giardino stated that the use of AI in game development was a decision to be made by each developer, adding (as transcribed by Inven): “We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”

Responding to claims that some developers have been getting extortion emails from people threatening to use AI to release clones of their game first if they don’t pay a ransom, Giardino said it would look into such cases if reported, but stressed extortion was more of an issue for law enforcement agencies.

Regardless, he added that Steam generally focuses less on getting rid of copies and clones, and more on placing weight and discoverability on the original version.

“Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective,” he advised.

Valve says its aim is not to filter out bad games but elevate good ones

Another developer then reportedly raised the issue of ‘AI slop’ games, stating that they had participated in the most recent Next Fest but saw poor engagement results, while also noting people on social media complaining about the number of low-quality games dominating the event.

Wilkinson replied by detailing explaining the Steam Next Fest visibility structure, explaining that games are shown to players on a random basis for the first two days of the event, after which point personalised recommendations are activated, making games the user is more interested in more likely to come to the surface.

He suggested that many of the negative comments about low-quality games therefore likely came during the first two days, but stressed that one of the reasons games are randomly shown during this period was to ensure a fair share of exposure to every developer, and to prevent system abuse by developers entering early to gain immediate visibility.

“We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed,” he added. “We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.”

Giardino added that such complaints weren’t a new thing in Steam’s history, and that there have been instances in the past of users asking to be able to filter out certain games. He explained that when Steam Greenlight launched 14 years ago, developers asked if Greenlight titles could be filtered out, and the same thing happened with self-publishing system Steam Direct was added.

Each time, however, Giardino said Valve’s aim was not to filter out bad games, but improve the store to make better ones come to the fore.

“We don’t think we’re perfect and there’s plenty of room for improvement,” he said. “Rather than limiting developer access, making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy.”