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Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest

63 points 4gateftw 1 hour ago 37 comments

rivetfasten 1 hour ago | parent

Speaking of low effort, "ban Z" does not constitute a thoughtful and intelligent solution to "Z created a problem."

Z=AI in this case, but lazy solutions are as old as time.

expedition32 58 minutes ago | parent

Nobody browses the Steam store at random we all use filters and recommendations.

yipinwong 43 minutes ago | parent

Not initially but after I gained experience with the store, yes. SEems like AI coders are going for the lowest common denominators (new users)

dofm 31 minutes ago | parent

AI's largest share of any market is users who don't have domain expertise, though.

ncallaway 34 minutes ago | parent

Isn't a user-selectable filter very different from a ban?

23agt 31 minutes ago | parent

It was lazy to ban DDT or X-rays for determining shoe sizes or watches with radium paint.

forgetfreeman 30 minutes ago | parent

Get rid of the thing that's causing problems is both thoughtful and intelligent when the alternative is either ignore the problem or some as of yet undefined activity that is entirely outside the current scope of business. Steam isn't obligated to accommodate AI-generated games or participate in whatever currently undefined process would be required to make them palatable. That's the studios' responsibility.

malfist 28 minutes ago | parent

Not that I agree with your assessment, but why do we need a thoughtful and intelligent solution here? Seems to me people want a simple, easy solution and bans or required disclosure seems to fit quiet well here

yipinwong 42 minutes ago | parent

"Trust (customers) but verify (games)" works but at the cost of Steam/Valve having to implement either human verifiers or AI verifiers.

This will cost with low ROI.

If Steam is indeed customer focused, they might but doubtful.

forgetfreeman 35 minutes ago | parent

Every major gaming outlet and studio has at one time or another decided to try to play chicken with their customers. This never goes well. Historically Steam has been pretty skilled at not finding a hill to die on so one would assume they'll avoid the obvious blunder of ignoring users preferences here.

j45 30 minutes ago | parent

One of the things that captivates many people who play games is imagining building their own.

It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.

At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.

tikhonj 25 minutes ago | parent

Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.

mzhaase 24 minutes ago | parent

A lot of those games are attempts at cheap cash grabs more than "I can finally make my dream game".

mysterydip 22 minutes ago | parent

There’s two kinds of people making games (fully) with AI:

- I have a passion for making games but not the skill, and this lets me achieve my dream

- I can crank out games in an hour, and as long as I get 100 purchases over its lifetime I’m making money

cnity 17 minutes ago | parent

You're forgetting one (I think people do this deliberately because they dislike AI, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt): those who are passionate about games and skillful, and can ship higher _quality_ at the same pace as before.

quicklywilliam 16 minutes ago | parent

There are three kinds of people:

- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries

- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people

- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points

mcphage 6 minutes ago | parent

- those that tremble as if mad

wincy 10 minutes ago | parent

As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.

bananaflag 21 minutes ago | parent

I remember reading a lament by a journalist in a video game magazine like 25 years ago "why don't they invent tools that would make game making easier for people like us who don't know programming?"

Well it seems we are here now.

underyx 23 minutes ago | parent

I don’t have solutions but tagging AI is definitely not easy. A lot of art is expressed via code: particle effects, menu layouts, iconography, animation keyframes. AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning. More recently, Opus 5.5 is clearly a model that started to develop visual taste and can draw images with code, as opposed to outputting images as tokens or via diffusion. And these capability gains are still accelerating.

There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.

Apocryphon 13 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps, but the examples in that article all clearly look like they're using AI-generated art assets. You might as well call that style "slop" in the sense that it is very easy to spot. I don't know if it's possible to create a general AI filter for the actual code, but certainly labelling ones that had AI-made visual and audio assets, with minimal human craftsmanship involved, would be a good first step.

no_multitudes 11 minutes ago | parent

> AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning.

It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.

Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.

underyx 3 minutes ago | parent

> If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games

I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.

deadbabe 21 minutes ago | parent

“No AI” is too simplistic.

Does that mean no AI assistance at all? How is that possible to detect for if someone uses it for code generation and compiles it to a binary?

Do they mean no AI artwork? Maybe easier to detect, but mostly based on vibes still.

Do they mean no AI features? But why, wouldn’t an adventure game where you can talk naturally to NPCs be kind of cool?

Madness.

How about a filter for “No souless shitty copycat games that are pure cash grabs”. I’m sure Jev can help detect these at scale.

mey 15 minutes ago | parent

Steam requires self reporting. You can see their rules described here.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/38624...

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsur...

sosodev 11 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, what people want is games that aren’t slop. Defining that is probably impossible. We’ve always had shovelware, but the volume now is unsustainable and only going to get worse.

dijit 16 minutes ago | parent

Isn't it a gradient? I'd probably rank it like this.

AI Used in back-office administration, internal documentation & presentations

AI Used in research

AI Used for generating placeholders

AI Used for Upscaling (DLSS)

AI Used for translations of UI.

AI Used in the final product (assets incl. textures, 3D, sound and voice)

AI Used in final product (code)

To say nothing of the other disciplines of AI like machine vision or voice recognition or dynamically building a story tree or character response.

debugnik 9 minutes ago | parent

I'd say gen-AI art assets are definitely the deep end, and DLSS-Yassify is right behind it. I'd put code behind them because there's a second gradient within it from Copilot-on-a-short-lease to vibe coding.

I used to assume that low effort indies would be the major force for the game equivalent of gen-AI tiktok fruit slop, but when I saw DLSS 5 I realised it might come for AAA first.

nullstyle 15 minutes ago | parent

IMO, We really should be centering these discussions around the lines that separate Remix versus Ripoff. I want to live in an age of less effortful remixes that push the culture forward, but we are mostly getting ripoffs that slopify the culture at the moment. Shun the ripoffs, praise and boost the remixes, same as it ever was.

XenophileJKO 12 minutes ago | parent

Maybe they should just focus on "is it fun".

legohead 12 minutes ago | parent

maybe judge games by if they are fun or not

cubefox 12 minutes ago | parent

Gamers and game journalists seem to be unaware that most software engineers are using AI now, likely including programmers who work at prestigious AAA games. But they only see the vibecoded slop, and assume that AI=slop, when in reality ~all games use AI coding now, both slop and non-slop.

everdrive 12 minutes ago | parent

The video game market was already flooded before LLMs. Now, it's much much worse. I'm not sure that "AI" vs. "no AI" is really the right filter, but I do understand the need to filter out the chaff. There's too much content, and too little time. Even for something that you love, there's more out there than can possibly be managed or enjoyed. This problem will get worse.

jrm4 11 minutes ago | parent

AI or no AI is the wrong metric, of course. I imagine the way to solve this usefully probably goes through something that looks like Reddit. More "meta-moderation."

The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."

freeone3000 9 minutes ago | parent

There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.

This is what people are mad about: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5106420/Leverage_Real_Est... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5155900/Ages_TD_Demo/?cur... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5200920/BATTLE_PARTS__POW... https://store.steampowered.com/app/4609270/Naval_Supremacy/?...

These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)

And there are a lot this year

linuxftw 3 minutes ago | parent

I think the number of submissions is fine. It's easy to filter by the type of game you're looking for. If you just want to doom scroll, yeah you're going to have a bad time.