Valve has ‘a significant number’ working on Steam’s visibility dilemma but says it won’t gatekeep games made with AI
Valve is addressing concerns about Steam’s visibility challenges, particularly regarding the influx of AI-generated content that recently dominated Steam Next Fest. According to reports, a “significant number” of Valve staff are working on improving how games are discovered and surfaced on the platform.
The issue came to a head during Steam Next Fest, where developers and the community complained about the prevalence of low-quality, AI-generated games—commonly referred to as “AI slop”—clogging the festival’s offerings and making it difficult to find genuinely interesting indie projects. This visibility problem highlights growing challenges with game discovery on Steam as the platform contends with increasingly large numbers of releases.
Despite the concerns, Valve has made clear that it will not take the approach of gatekeeping or outright rejecting games created using AI tools. Instead, the company appears focused on improving curation and visibility mechanisms to help legitimate games stand out, rather than banning AI-generated content entirely. This reflects a broader tension in the gaming industry around AI-generated content—balancing concerns about quality and authenticity with openness to new creative tools.
Valve’s approach suggests the company is betting on better discovery systems and filtering rather than content restrictions as the solution to Steam’s crowding problem. With the platform hosting tens of thousands of games, improving how players find what they’re looking for has become increasingly critical to the service’s functionality and user experience.