Valve has urged independent game developers worried about rapidly produced AI clones to build recognizable communities and keep improving their games, arguing that identity, trust and continued development are harder to copy than an isolated mechanic.
The guidance came from Valve's Steam Business Team at Steam Indie Connect, an event held in South Korea and co-hosted with the Busan Indie Connect Festival organizers and the Korea Creative Content Agency. During a question-and-answer session, a developer described emails that allegedly threatened to copy games with AI and release them first unless the creators paid. Valve representative Tom Giardino said he had not previously encountered that form of extortion and characterized the threats themselves as a matter for law enforcement, while inviting developers to report incidents to Valve so the company could examine them.
Giardino separated the problem of threatening messages from the broader issue of imitation. Clone games predate generative AI, he said, but newer tools can accelerate the process. Valve's proposed response is not to dictate which development tools studios may use. Instead, developers should establish a public identity, communicate with players and continue adding features and creative details that reflect their own perspective. Giardino compared the approach with Valve's long-standing view that a legitimate product should compete by offering the best version and service.
The event also addressed complaints about low-quality, AI-assisted submissions appearing during Steam Next Fest. Valve's Marc Wilkinson explained that titles receive broadly random exposure during the festival's first two days. Personalized recommendations take over later, based on what individual players are more likely to enjoy. Randomized early exposure is intended to give every participating game a chance and make it harder to manipulate visibility by entering early, though Valve acknowledged that the design can surface weak games. Wilkinson said staff were considering how to improve that trade-off.
Valve said the scale of Next Fest has changed sharply, growing from dozens or hundreds of participating games to thousands. That expansion makes discovery more difficult and also complicates judgments about whether a campaign succeeded: wishlist gains that transform one small studio's prospects may disappoint another with higher expectations.
Alongside the AI discussion, Valve presented tools intended to help studios understand and reach their audiences. These included a wishlist data interface organized by time, country and language, and a Personal Calendar store feature that highlights dated upcoming releases for players with similar tastes. The broader message was that releasing on Steam is the beginning of sustained marketing and development, not the end of the process.
