Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones
https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/27761/valve-responds-to-developers-fearing-ai-slop-and-clonesValve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers. Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there. It's as much a threat to them as anyone else, and indie studios can figure out for themselves they need to market harder but can't necessarily embark on a lawsuit.
Clones always existed, kids chose pokemon rather than a dollar store dragomons because pokemon became a household name by the time bootlegs appeared, legitimate shops only sold pokemon and the cartridge itself showed a quality difference.
Nowadays the clone can reach people before the original, the store shows everything equally, and the sprites, videos and description can be good enough to fool people. Steam works as a platform for the purchase itself but not as a discovery mechanism, because there's no "seal of quality" you can consider (other than skipping indies entirely).
No one can review at the scale needed, and it's entirely possible for a great game to have devs that are awful at marketing and get buried. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think some kind of threshold is necessary for the shops, or at least for an optional filter.
same for many forms of media, and for a lot of physical objects such as luxury items fakes. and we're talking utility here, so I bet lots of people use counterfeit electric equipment because it just works.
of course then comes ingenuity and community, but copyright is so dead, that it cannot be resurrected meaningfully at all perhaps at this moment.
Is cloning the games in this way illegal? Has there been a precedent set?
What could be done is forwarding the complaint to Valve, and ensuring that the bootlegged game put out by those attempting to make good on their threats gets removed, and the developer banned.
> The question regarding AI cloning stemmed from a specific threat. One developer shared that indie developers have recently been receiving extortion emails threatening, "If you don't pay, we'll clone your game with AI and release it first." While understanding the advice to showcase games prior to release, the developer noted that such threats could make creators hesitate and asked if Steam had protective measures in place.
> Tom Giardino expressed regret, noting that this was the first time he had heard of such extortion cases.
> [...]
> While drawing a line on the extortion itself, he kept communication channels open. He noted that such extortion is closer to an issue for law enforcement agencies rather than a game platform to solve
For Valve to remove a game like that could be seen as anti-competitive. They would also have to actually prove this with evidence and so on for it to make sense. And there lies the competitive fog of war which can have consequences among competing games. One competitor saying "I'll make a game if you don't pay me to not make one" to another is not extortion or a threat at all. It's just business. And it can be very scary to be faced with an adversary like that.
What do you think Facebook et al do? They rip each other off through planted employees, poaching, and other shenanigans to find out who is working on what so they can be there before their competitors.
This is why we have other methods (patents, copyright, and so on) that are employed for legal protection. But ideas? Not good enough.
The word "extortion" here is doing so much heavy lifting it's comical.
The idea of a game is not protected. The specific graphics, dialog, script, and code are protected. Save the princess in an 8 level game is generic but just a few more details copied and suddenly you are an illegal clone of the NES Mario brothers script...
If you are worried talk to a lawyer about preemptively registering your copyrights (cheap) and trademarks (more expensive).
A clean room knockoff isn't but I don't think the cases would necessarily even be brought or won. There's a lot of quick buck artists who see gaming as a soft target. Success is in convincing them there's risk involved rather than actually winning in court or extracting settlements.
That will still leave a lot of AI game development people feel is slop. That's probably the reality going forward. But reducing that to the people who are interested in making games (even if we are unhappy with their results) and removing the people who are revolving through the latest AI get rich quick schemes is probably achievable.
As for the other cases, I don’t see a realistic path for Valve. Once they start kicking knockoffs they will have to draw a line, and it won’t end up being based on whether the action is actually illegal.
The only defense against copies has always be the same, be better than the copies in thing the consumer likes. You can't copy a Mario game, you can't copy a Kojima game, you can't copy a game that has been masterfully done and polished. If slop is gonna eat your lunch, it's only because your game is as good as slop.
Sure if you made a name for yourself, you can bank on that. People will buy Slay the Spire 2 instead is cheap copycats.
However I you are a new indie dev and made a decent game, how can people find you? They can't under the sea of slop. They could scroll and scroll and never find you.
I heart from many game reviewers that they have an harder and harder time finding good games to review. Not because people don't make good games anymore, in fact more good games than ever are made but finding them is harder than ever. Indie devs don't have a giant marketing department.
If steam keeps refusing to curate game the gaming market is going to crash hard.
I get how my comment comes off that way but I do agree and am broadly in favor of knockoffs. I think there's a distinction between a knockoff and a bootleg, where a knockoff steals ideas and a bootleg steals the execution. And a good game is a tasteful knockoff of a bunch of previous games, great artists steal and such.
The end result of what you're talking about isn't that the innovator will be copied and consumers will benefit.. it's that the innovator will no longer exist and no-one will benefit.
So far, so good. I talk to indie devs all of the time. I remember a husband and wife setting aside a small budget for their passion project. These are people with very limited time and money, so they do not have the resources or expertise for the business and marketing side, and they may also get overwhelmed if somebody just makes a copy and starts spreading it on reddit or elsewhere.
I think Valve is still right in essence but the answer is really "it depends". To me it comes down to relationships and trust: Getting a few early, vetted players, not necessarily going for high volume e.g. 500+ on Discord or whatever. Having people who really care, support and co-create with you. This will probably look a little bit different for every game: Some might run curated spaces, others will just embrace that copying is a thing that may happen. I saw the Xbox Labs announcement lately with even another route: Remixing being part of what they explore as the future.
Valve could just not publish them, they don’t have to risk suing.
Why though?
Imagine, there will be an AI agent, which will produce new game everyday and Steam users will like it and keep buying. Steam can only exist if customers keep buying and are not annoyed by games.