Image: Valve
Valve is staying neutral on games with AI generated content.
A week after it surfaced that Valve was banning games with AI generated content on Steam, the company decided to make its stance on these games clear. In a statement shared with VGC, Valve clarifies that it doesn’t want to ‘discourage the use of’ games with AI generated content on Steam.
Last week, a game developer took to Reddit to report that their game had been rejected by Steam due to the use of AI generated assets. The developer had tried to resubmit the game after altering the problematic assets by hand to better disguise them, only for Steam to ban the game entirely. At the time, the developer was told that their game had been rejected due to the use of copyrighted material in their AI generated assets.
With AI creation tools becoming more readily available to game developers everywhere, Steam is seeing a rise of new AI games surging into the platform spanning any and all available genres. A few of these games are popular on Steam today and seem to have escaped scot-free from Valve’s watchful eye - but that may just be due to their absence of copyrighted material.
Speaking to VGC, Valve says that its, “goal is not to discourage the use of [games built with AI] on Steam,” and last week’s incident was merely “a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion.”
The company went on to say:
We are continuing to learn about AI, the ways it can be used in game development, and how to factor it into our process for reviewing games submitted for distribution on Steam. Our priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can. The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music.
AI creation tools can be used to generate basic character models and in-game assets based on material from other existing franchises. This saves precious time that could be used for other aspects of game development, but it also results in assets that obviously fall into murky legal territory, seeing as they were created from other IP.
Valve says that game developers on Steam, “can use these AI technologies in their work with appropriate commercial licenses,” but they absolutely cannot, “infringe on existing copyrights.” This means that if you’re using AI tools for game development, don’t rip off other games and you’ll be fine.
