Valve is acknowledging what many indie developers have been saying for months: Steam Next Fest is being crowded by clones and low-effort AI-made games. Speaking at Steam Indie Connect in South Korea on Oct. 27, Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson of Valve’s Steam business team told developers the company knows about the problem and is looking for fixes, as Inven Global reports.
The event was co-hosted with the Busan Indie Connect Festival organizing committee and the Korea Creative Content Agency, and the question-and-answer session quickly turned to generative AI. Developers raised concerns about copycat games, low-quality releases and even extortion-style emails from people threatening to clone their projects.
Giardino said Valve does not want to police which tools developers use. “We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use,” he said. He noted that clones have always existed and that AI has sped the process up, and he encouraged developers to make games that do not depend on a single easily copied mechanic.
Wilkinson explained that the first two days of Next Fest deliberately show players a more random spread of demos before personalized recommendations take over. That is meant to stop visibility abuse, but it has a cost. “We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed,” he said. “We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.”
He also pointed to scale. Next Fest has grown from around 50 to 100 games in its early days to thousands of demos today, which makes it far harder to curate. The most recent edition ran from Oct. 19 to 26. According to TheGamer, Valve’s stated focus is on improving the store and its systems rather than limiting developer access based on tools.
The comments add to a wider debate about AI in games, where players have pushed back on everything from storefront clutter to AI voices in released games. Valve did not give a timeline for any changes to Next Fest, but the message to developers in Korea was that the issue is on its radar.
