The worrying trend of games on Steam getting quick clones for the same storefront has been acknowledged by store owner Valve — and the onus placed on developers to prevent it themselves.
Valve has weighed in on the rising trend of developers using AI to quickly replicate successful new releases and upcoming games, a cloning practice that has caused a lot of developers pause. Its advice? Game devs should make less copyable games, and condition communities to reject clones.
Valve, Steam's owner and ultimate gatekeeper, has been traditionally hesitant to acknowledge this or take any actions, but a recent statement at the Busan Indie Connect Festival Organizing Committee developer conference in South Korea indicates that Valve is aware of the problem, and believes the solution is in the hands of the individual developers and not Valve itself.
Members from Valve's business team, Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson, were asked whether Steam had any measures in place or planned to prevent games from being cloned by AI, as reported by InvenGlobal. The developer that asked the question cited an email threat that they received wherein someone threatened to clone their game with AI and release it first.
Giardano suggested this was an issue for law enforcement rather than Valve, but seemed hesitant to commit more than Valve's resources in helping with that. According to InvenGlobal's reporting (which was machine translated, but verified with an independent native speaker), Giardano backed off the idea that Valve would perform any kind of hands-on actions to prevent cloning games.
Source link
