At an event for indie game developers in Korea, Valve representatives gave advice on how to cope with the deluge of AI slop pouring onto Steam, and especially a new spate of threatening communications sent to indie developers telling them their games will be cloned unless they pay a ransom. The responses, while useful for a few, were perhaps more than a little tone deaf to the realities of independent development.

As reported by Inven Global, Valve’s Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson attended Steam Indie Connect on October 27 to speak to developers about the current state of Steam. And their key message was that “Launch feels like the finish line, but it’s actually the starting line.” In other words, the way to beat those trying to rip you off is to continually work on your game, adding new content and features, such that the knock-offs can’t keep up.

Giardino said he’d not heard of the examples of extortion, where developers receive threatening messages demanding money to prevent AI clones of their games from being released alongside the original, actual game, and suggests this is a matter for law enforcement rather than a gaming store. He then, according to Inven Global , went to some lengths to try to suggest AI is not the core problem. Pointing out that clone games existed before genAI (which, sure, but not like this ), and saying that “we don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use,” Giardino’s two suggestions are to build community and to pursue “continuous improvement” of their games.

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