Valve will not police AI games, and it never policed the tools

Busan is a port on the south coast of South Korea, and the number that opened the slides was 43.5 million. That is how many people Valve says were on Steam at once, a peak read off the deck at a developer event called Steam Indie Connect on October 27. The same presentation put five-year growth in total Steam revenue in South Korea at 126%, with in-game purchases up 388%, according to Inven Global's account of the room. Valve crossed the planet to explain the machine, and the machine is doing fine.

Two men from Valve's Steam Business Team, Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson, took the questions, and PC Gamer, VGC and Inven all wrote down the answers. When a developer asked whether the store would police the tools used to build games, Giardino said it flat: "We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

No hedge, no preamble. It is the most honest sentence out of this business in a year, offered to a room with every reason to want a door slammed shut.

One developer told the panel that indie studios have been getting extortion emails, and read the threat out loud: "If you don't pay, we'll clone your game with AI and release it first." Giardino said it was the first he had heard of it, called extortion a matter for law enforcement rather than a storefront, and said, "If you report such cases to us, we want to look into them further and help in whatever way we can."

The case for a gatekeeper

The arguments for the wall are not stupid. A developer spends two years on a game and watches a stranger drop a near-identical one onto the same store in a fortnight, and the store shrugs. One developer asked Valve for more tools to vet who gets access to a pre-release build, and PC Gamer quotes Israel Mallén of Digital Suns, which cancelled a Moonlighter demo over clone fears, asking for "more tools to vet who gets access [to pre-release builds], like account age, playtime or review history."

The flood is a number, not a mood. Nearly 23,000 games will have landed on Steam in 2026 before November, per PC Gamer's reading of the SteamDB release chart, and Next Fest has carried more than 8,000 demos at once. Wilkinson addressed it. Games show to players almost at random for the first two days of Next Fest, he said, before the recommendation engine takes over, and the randomness is deliberate, to stop people gaming the early window. "We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed," he said. "We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem."

So the case is simple. You have a gate. You have a flood. Close the gate.

Why Valve will not, and why that is right

Except Valve has stood at this gate before and did not close it. Giardino walked the room through the history: when Greenlight arrived about fourteen years ago, developers asked for a way to filter Greenlight games out of the store; when Valve replaced it with Steam Direct, they asked for a checkbox to hide Steam Direct games. "We don't think we're perfect and there's plenty of room for improvement," he said, then landed the line that belongs on the office wall: "Rather than limiting developer access, making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy."

That is not laziness. It is the doctrine Valve has used on piracy for twenty years: it never won with copy protection. It won by making the legitimate copy the one people wanted. Applied to a cloned game, that yields the one piece of advice which survives contact with reality. "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."

The rival camp is no help. Epic's Tim Sweeney went after Steam's AI disclosure rule this month, calling the requirement that developers reveal generative AI a forced "political statement" and "abhorrent" on X, in a post Kotaku dates to October 23: "Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they're helping organize is abhorrent." He is a strange ally, though, because Valve has been quietly softening that same rule, dropping the flag on AI used for code while keeping it for art, voice and translation. Even the label Valve keeps is not a gate.

The extortionist is not a phantom. He is a coward with a template email, and telling a studio to build a community and update the game is a slow answer to a fast threat. But look at what Valve is betting on. The game, shipped and kept moving until the copy is chasing something that will not hold still. Giardino put the whole trade in one line about launches: "Launch feels like the finish line, but it's actually the starting line."

The people who sell this week's promise get what the promise always pays. The extortionist keeps mailing studios that stop opening his mail, and the merchant who shoveled a thousand half-finished demos onto Next Fest on the theory that the algorithm does the marketing learns that the algorithm only counts players. That is the curse. It is small, and it is deserved.

The 43.5 million were never on Steam to see a gate. They were there to play something good, and they will still be there when the slop seller has moved on, which is the whole argument, and was Valve's from the beginning.

The full Steam Indie Connect Q&A, including the Wishlist Data API and the newly official Personal Calendar that Wilkinson introduced, is written up by Inven Global and PC Gamer.

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