Add a “AI Slop” feature in the reviews to track that. Let publishers flag games built on their IP. Give the store front some feature options for both.
The flag one should probably have a verification system and trust system to prevent IP trolling though. Reviews should probably also have rep system to weight reviews to tbh
People have been complaining about too many games years before AI, but most don’t remember when steam was such a gatekeeper that they didn’t even allow visual novels on the store. I think having a way to filter AI generated game assets is enough.
They should just surface the reviews more prominently, and let me buy a Steam Frame. The last part is key.
Dear Steam,
Please put a filter tool in so that we, the player, can choose to filter out AI slop.
Thank you.
Doesn’t matter. They know everyone is hooked on that shit and will accept whatever it is they chose to do. Come on!
People will never get their shit together enough to do anything about this, and this is because people by-and-large, won’t boycott things they’re not willing to let go of.
Valve, YouTube, Meta, Microsoft, Rockstar…
… all of these things will be around forever, because they know how to tap into human endorphins. And humans will not protest against the thing that provides them. Not in numbers that would make any fucking difference.
So let’s all just keep consuming our doom-flavored outrage while we casually cruise the slow, spiraling decline into the AI-induced enshittification we all were warned about, but did nothing to stop. Oh, and be sure to complain about it to everyone that will listen before you settle down to sign in and see what shit they’re shoveling you this evening.
is ai a tool or a crutch?
Can be both.
That’s fine and I like that. We, the gamers, we can decide and it should be like that. We just need Valve’s assistance by helping us with thorough AI disclosures. We can do the rest by controlling slop and clones with our wallets and filters.
They should make it easy to avoid it though by requiring AI use disclosures by developers and then including a filter for users to automatically filter AI like you can filter adult content out.
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Let the people play what they want, even if it is slop! And the stealing/inspiring part - i get it, it is frustrating and not fair, but not the AI is the problem here, it’s just a tool - the problem is with the copycat’s reasoning (that is to make a quick buck and don’t give a damn about broader consequences for the future). If the game is a shameless copy it already is prone to be copyright claimable (although i don’t believe in legal batles, especially for small developers or not wealthy individuals that clearly are disadvantaged from the start), if it is not - let the Poeple decide. Of course it poses a threat of oversaturating the market - i don’t care, it’s not new - Steam has been oversaturated with non-AI-porn-game-slop for years now and nothing bad happened.
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Hey Valve, could you use AI to port all of your own old Intel versions of Mac games to Apple Silicon?
Why not just have a slow release for new games; only have them show up in search results for n users. Then the original and gain traction and get word of mouth before immitators emerge. Not perfect, could use moderation as well, but sorta a temporal patent.
You know who also doesn’t "gatekeep"developers? Piracy websites, which I shall now use.
Steam is only worth iso far as it’s convenient and user friendly. AI slop flood is neither.
So you’re going to avoid ai slop on pirate sites just like you avoid them on steam? What point are you making?
What point are you making?
That if I have to suffer through bad curation and filtering any way, paying for the service becomes irrelevant and I might as well get the games for free? The whole “piracy is a service issue” is GabeN’s most famous quote.
I mean, suppose Steam adds a search filter for AI, does that move the needle? And I feel like it’s going to become impossible to avoid, not so much was there AI used in creating the game, but how was it employed. I know my obvious prohibitions would be AI voices, storyline, art. Probably more.
It’s simple, really. Steam allows 18+ games, but it treats them under a special regime, you can fully disable them from view. AI games should be the same.
“Oh but developers will just lie” yeah they can lie about having a +18 asset in the middle of the game too, but as soon as they are caught and it’s proven, they are banned. Same if they hide malware.
“Oh but no game developer will disable Claude from VSCode, now what?”
There’s a difference between the kind of AI slop that dominated the latest demo fest vs using Claude in an IDE.
I think we’re reaching a point where there is going to be so much stuff around be it games, tv, movies, music, etc all made by AI and all just garbage, that it will make curating a huge deal. Like we’ll need to have services whose sole purpose is to sift through the marketplaces and find quality stuff to then present to people. So you’ll have a two tiered system where on one hand you can browse “everything” and it’s just a deluge of stuff and then on the other hand you can go to a curated marketplace that only lists stuff that is known to be high quality. But it’s going to take time for those curated places to pop up, and in the mean time we are gonna be swimming in slop.
Like in the pre-search-engine internet you would have indexes, or whatever they were called, listing useful websites.
Yikes. On the one hand, curated lists sound like a breath of fresh air right now. On the other, that’s AI setting us back 30 years.
My search engine even labels AI slop websites, that it pulls from open-source lists like https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist. So yeah every day I feel like the need for curated lists is getting stronger even for “useful websites”. Too much noise these days.
You’re going to see the media organic content labels, just like groceries have “regular” and “organic”. There’s demand for such a certification so it wouldn’t surprise me to see that in the near future.
Pretty much this. I am reminded of when reality TV first came up, it was thought that it would be a passing fad lasting maybe a year or two. People get exited by it at first, then get bored of it craving something with more substance. It never happened. Turns out the slop machine hit a level good enough that many would lap it up. Survivor is going into it 51st season right now.
But while this stuff can be produced (be it text, TV, software), you can curate it. Those curated lists will become the new social treasure like how some movie critics could become minor celebrities in themselves. Yeah there will be AI bots trying to do that as well, but if they fall flat, so to will their respect.
So basically the current steam curators system but you have to pay to see what they curate. And valve wins again
Well I think there could also be a place for like niche curators. Like a blog that goes and finds all the strategy games that are actually good and posts reviews of them. If your a fan of that type of game you follow them, they try all the shitty ones so you don’t have to, and point you to the good ones. Same with other niche things.
That is a built in feature in steam
Neal Stephenson explores these ideas in a few of his books. Basically that there is so much false information online that the biggest advantage you can have is good software for sifting through it.
Rotten Tomatoes -> Bots and Tomatoes. Is it AI slop or hot?
Hot or Bot
This is the exact same attitude they had to the deluge of unity store asset flips (well they actually tried to blame unity for that, but I digress)
Steam gets their money either way.
And that’s what Lord GabeN needs to buy another super yacht for himself, and more Aston Martins for his son to race.
I am starting to think that having hard technical or imposed market limits might be a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils.
It you had to build a game on before the era of cheap middleware engines, there was a natural barrier to entry. The Nintendo seal of approval used to mean something at least even if the game was still trash.
But now, you can flood the space with minimal barrier to entry and we are being flooded with junk. But those that control the access and making big money off this so they turn a blind eye.
A few months back, there was a reddit post for my local town, it was about self publishing their new game on Steam. Anyway, about a dozen others posted links to their projects all releasing within the next few months, all of them copies or low effort projects. This is a single town, in a single country, that is releasing potentially dozens, possible hundreds of games a year. The market is flooded because we have made it so easy to pump this junk out and there is little interest in putting even vague restrictions on it.
The crash is coming and we will all know why it happened.
It’s been coming for a long time. Steam always had a slop problem since the greenlight days.
The reason so much shit got onto the platform was by exploiting the trading card system, and Valve allowed it.
Eventually Valve realised they could get more money by just skipping the vote, and allowing people to just pay to get their games on the platform.
Pretty much. They already had this tendency, it is just accelerating and now the technology has kicked it into turbo.
I just want a sequel to The Guy Game so I pair it up with its brother I have on this very real shelf I have that holds this also very real physical copy of this game I have amongst other games like Donkey Kong Country 1+2+3, Rollercoaster Tycoon, 1+2, Goldeneye n Perfect Dark, and Myst n Riven. Shame they didn’t make more games in the Myst series. Could have been a great series of, I dunno, five or so games and a book series, but they stopped making them after the second installment as my definitely not self-neuralized brain is telling me. The books were good though. But what were we talking about? Nine-tenths of the law? Tf does that shit mean? Bueller?
there is myst 3, 4, and 5 with 5 being a definitive end to the series
If you liked myst and riven you’d probably like them as well. The series was pretty strong if you’re into the whole “narrative over gameplay” thing. At the time they were also widely regarded for the graphical quality but that obviously didn’t hold up
If you liked those point and click adventure games the journeyman project trilogy from presto studios in the same era is also great, though there was supposed to be a 4th installment that was cancelled. The Lucasarts and sierra games from a bit earlier in that genre (the dig, sam and max hit the road, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, day of the tentacle, police quest, kings quest, monkey island, etc) are also great
Getting all of these games to run on a modern pc is a bit of a headache though. Some are on gog and some have support in scummvm but not all. The renaissance of point and click adventure was like 1995-2000 and the genre really died around then. Great games, although they can be extremely frustrating and obtuse at times
Shame they didn’t make more games in the Myst series.
Lol, maybe they could make one with Brad Dourif, I heard he’s available.
This is like the Wii shovelware era on steroids.
