Valve will not protect games from AI clones on Steam

Valve has publicly responded to the wave of AI clones on Steam and shifted protection onto the developers themselves. At a conference held by the organizing committee of the Busan Indie Connect festival in South Korea, representatives of the company's business team, Tom Giardino and Mark Wilkinson, made it clear that the platform does not plan to introduce measures against games quickly copied with the help of neural networks.

The question was asked by a developer who had received a threatening letter: the author of the letter promised to clone his game using AI and release it before the original. According to Giardino, this is a matter for law enforcement, not for the store.

Advice from Valve: make games that are hard to copy

«We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools to use and which not to», Giardino said; the quote is given from InvenGlobal's material in machine translation, checked against a native speaker. Valve has abandoned the idea of manual measures against the cloning of games.

Instead, the company suggests that authors work proactively:

• build an active community around the project;
• earn players' trust so that, when copies appear, the audience chooses the original version;
• make the game itself more complex — according to Giardino, complex projects are harder to copy.

For small studios this probably means rising costs. Marketing and community work stop being something that can be postponed until release: they become part of the project's defense. The advice to make games more complex, meanwhile, applies less well to compact projects built on a single mechanic, which a significant part of the indie market rests on.

What this changes for public demos

The concerns are not limited to one region or genre. Digital Sun Games, the authors of Moonlighter and Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, have postponed the public playtest of their new game ReVamp: the studio was alarmed by reports that games are being taken apart, cloned and released before the original. A large public build was called too great a risk by the studio, with a release that is still months away, and it was replaced with a more closed test on their own Discord server — it starts on October 29.

An early showing of a demo version remained a cheap way for indies to get players' attention and feedback — showcases like Steam Next Fest were built on this. Now a public build simultaneously becomes a template for copying: mechanics, level structure and economy can be taken apart and reassembled before the original reaches release. Going into closed tests will probably cost part of the visibility in the store, while taking part in public showcases leaves the risk of meeting a competitor assembled in a matter of days. Digital Sun Games itself expects platforms to strengthen the protection of original works.

The open storefront works against the authors

Valve's position continues the course taken in 2018, when the company announced that it lets practically everything into the store, apart from certain unspecified exceptions. «We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto Steam, except for things that we decide are illegal or straight up trolling», Erik Johnson of Valve put it at the time.

For almost ten years this principle was perceived as a plus for independent authors: there is no selection process to pass. Generative tools have shifted the balance — the same openness that lowered the barrier to entry for indies lowers it for those who copy other people's projects too. Valve has so far given no public comments beyond the appearance at the conference.

Why the platform does not want to take on the role of arbiter

The refusal to intervene is probably connected with the fact that the task has no technical solution. To cut off clones, the store would have to assess the similarity of game mechanics, and those, unlike code and assets, are weakly protected by copyright — developers themselves also point to the limited nature of such protection for game mechanics. Any such check would turn Valve into an arbiter in disputes over borrowings, with claims from both sides. The referral to law enforcement shifts this burden onto the legal system.

If the trend persists, the pressure will probably shift to other levels. Developers will postpone public demos and move to closed invite-only tests, and sooner or later the platforms will have to answer the question of content origin — at least through mandatory labels about the use of generative tools. For now, the winners are apparently those who managed to build an audience in advance: a recognizable name and a living community remain the protection that Valve considers effective.

What lies behind this position of Valve: an unwillingness to take on moderation, the impossibility of distinguishing a clone from the original, or a bet on self-regulation of the market?