Valve Forces Steam Devs To Play Their Own Games To Fight AI Slop

Amidst an industry-wide surge in AI-generated games, game clones, recomps, and mods, Valve has added a few new requirements to its release checklist, the most notable of which is that a game needs to be played through the Steam launcher for at least five minutes.

Officially, the reason for this is that even if a game runs perfectly fine without the Steam wrapper, some steps may have been missed that ensure it is actually installable and playable for other users. When one reads between the lines, though, Valve feeling the need to add such a bare-minimum rule after an entire decade since the direct-publish floodgates were opened clearly indicates a influx of more AI shovelware than it wants to deal with.

Outside of Steam, the topic of generative AI slop has been prominent across virtually every major media platform or artistic medium. Most recently, Anthropic banned the use of its Claude Opus 5.5 coding assistant in order to halt the wave of rampant recomps* and clones of existing games. 

We've also seen indie game platform Itch.io's daily game submissions double in the past two months, AI developers go after Microsoft and Adobe, and of course rampant AI-driven bug/exploit hunting. While Valve doesn't mention AI in its official blog post on the matter besides an FAQ concerning AI disclosures, I'd be hard-pressed to believe we're looking at anything but slop review fatigue here.

As enthusiastic as I am about recompilation, I'm reasonably certain the companies getting their games recompiled view the projects as little more than unlicensed ports exploiting a legal loophole. Historically, these projects used to take 5-10 years to reach a playable state, but AI-driven development has removed much of the painstaking manual work that used to be required.

While generative AI has proven itself to be capable of some truly transformative work, particularly in the software space, the fact is that making these tools so accessible invariably leads to platforms being flooded with more content than could feasibly be human-reviewed. Valve slapping in a few more checks is a very light-handed solution for the problem, honestly, but I imagine some self-proclaimed game developers won't be happy with the news.