Two members of Steam’s business team have faced questions from Korean developers about some of the platform’s most glaring shortcomings: the flood of shovelware and AI slop, and the inability of users to filter it out.
Earlier this year, Sony’s PlayStation Store made major efforts to tidy its storefront – removing whole catalogues from certain developers, along with closing off their access to the platform. The games in question included titles seemingly created for trophy-farming, quickly made games heavily reliant on AI-generated assets, and misleading imitations.
Nintendo took a different approach, changing eShop sales rankings to sales revenue over a select period as opposed to the number of copies sold – pushing extremely cheap, heavily discounted games out of major visibility. They also tightened their publishing guidelines in certain regions.
Valve, beyond requiring games to label their use of AI, has seemingly done little to crack down on the resulting flood of cheap shovelware that either abuses or implements the tech poorly. Tweaks have been made to the interface and recommendation features, but it’s now estimated that over half (50.6%) of the games released so far in October this year have AI disclosure warnings on them – be they good or bad games – according to GamesChart.com.
A Steam Indie Connect event was held in South Korea on Tuesday, with Steam Business Team members Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson holding a Q&A session. During the session, some developers raised concerns about how increasingly hard it is to get their games noticed on Steam.
Giardino responded (translated from Korean), saying the use of AI in game development was a decision to be made by each developer:
“We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”
Giardino also reportedly said Valve would investigate developer complaints about being threatened with AI-generated, low-quality clones of their games unless they paid a ransom, but suggested extortion was primarily a matter for law enforcement.
Either way, and despite developers previously requesting the ability to filter out Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct titles, Giardino says “placing weight and discoverability” on the original game rather than actually removing the clones and shovelware is what they consider the best approach:
“Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective.
We don’t think we’re perfect and there’s plenty of room for improvement. Rather than limiting developer access, making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy.”
How effective Valve’s algorithms actually are at filtering out the ‘bad games’ remains questionable. This was seen with the recent Steam Next Fest, with social media commentary focusing on all the low-quality games dominating the event.
Wilkinson explained the event initially displays games in an almost random fashion for the first two days, before switching to personalised recommendations. Wilkinson said:
“We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed. We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.”
Despite their efforts to improve discoverability, the inability of users to natively filter out shovelware or games carrying generative-AI disclosures remains a glaring omission and has led to obvious frustrations for some with the growing volume of low-effort releases plaguing the interface.
