Valve on AI clones and Steam: what developers were told this week

Developers are searching for Valve's answer to a problem many of them now describe as routine: AI tools make it cheap to copy a game that someone else has spent years building. On 27 October 2026, two members of Valve's Steam Business Team, Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson, spoke at the Steam Indie Connect developer event, co-hosted with the Busan Indie Connect Festival in South Korea, and the clone problem came up in the Q&A [1].

What happened at the developer event

A developer told the room that they had received extortion emails. The sender threatened to clone the game with AI and release the copy first. Giardino said he had not heard of such cases before and called them a matter for law enforcement rather than the platform [1].

He also made clear that Valve does not plan to decide which tools developers may use. "We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use," he said [1]. Giardino argued that clones existed long before generative AI and that the technology has only sped them up [1].

The advice on offer

Valve's answer has two parts. The first is community: a studio with players who follow it is harder to replace. The second is continuous improvement. Giardino told developers to add features and personality rather than rely on "a single mechanic that someone can easily copy" [1].

Valve has historically avoided aggressive DRM and anti-piracy measures, and Giardino said the same approach applies to AI cloning [1]. Developers who find a copy should report it to Valve, which said it wants to look into such cases and help where it can [1].

The concern is not new in the Steam catalogue. In July 2026, the analyst Mat Piscatella wrote that "Good games will get cloned and buried," and he warned that discovery is already hard without a rising flood of releases [2]. games.gg reported that Valve had published figures showing more than 14,000 games released on Steam in a single year, and that Valve had introduced AI disclosure requirements [2].

Why visibility is the other half of the problem

The same event covered how games get seen. Wilkinson said wishlists do not affect visibility: "What drives visibility is the number of people buying and playing the game" [1]. For the first two days of Steam Next Fest, games are shown almost at random, and only then do personalised recommendations take over. Wilkinson acknowledged the trade-off: "some low-quality games get exposed" [1].

Valve's position on AI in 2023 was similar in spirit. It said it did not want to discourage the use of AI on Steam, that its review process reflects current copyright law, and that developers must make sure the AI material they use does not infringe [3].

What to watch next

Watch whether Valve publishes a formal process for reporting clones, or changes how Next Fest and the new Personal Calendar surface small games. Giardino said, "We don't think we're perfect and there's plenty of room for improvement" [1]. Developers will also be watching whether disclosure rules and reporting tools reduce the number of near-identical copies that reach the storefront.