AI clones and slop strain Steam and the communities around it

Luke Plunkett writes that this week's wave of AI-generated clones, in which someone scrapes a real game's codebase and sells a copy on a storefront, has pushed developers into defensive tactics. Those include announcing games later, favouring in-person events over online showcases and delaying public playtests. He argues the burden belongs with Valve, which takes a 30% cut of most Steam sales and already has content rules it enforces unevenly.

Plunkett points to a Steam Next Fest with more than 8,000 games as a sign that moderation is overdue. He says a store full of near-identical copies will drive users away. He cites Nintendo acting against Unpacking copycats on the eShop and PlayStation removing publishers for clogging its store as precedent. His conclusion is that the problem is Valve's to fix.

CounterpointDefenders of Valve's hands-off approach would say that screening thousands of submissions for derivative code is hard to do at scale. They would add that aggressive proactive removals risk catching legitimate developers, and that Valve already has an AI-disclosure policy that it can enforce after the fact.

Chris Person argues that vibe-coded ports are breaking the trust that open-source retro and decompilation projects rely on. Luke Street of the Dusklight project shut down decomp.dev, a tracker of decompilation projects, saying bad actors were forking and "finishing" other people's work and stretching the word "decomp" to cover any port. Person cites a Bloodborne port, built partly on the ShadPS4 emulator's renderer, that spawned many forks. A piracy site's packaging of one fork flooded the community-run Hunter's Dream server and led it to ban that fork. He also describes a growing number of slapdash MiSTer cores.

He treats the P.T. port, shared by Hideo Kojima and endorsed by hacker Lance McDonald, as a harder case: it looks competent, but AI involvement complicates how it should be reported. Person's conclusion is exhaustion at being unable to tell who cares about accuracy from who ships unchecked code.

CounterpointStreet himself concedes that AI can speed up decompilation significantly with human guidance and code review. Supporters of AI-assisted porting would say it widens access and helps preservation, and that the P.T. port shows careful use can produce competent results.

Previously: Sakurai predicted AI would multiply Steam releases while only human creators produce something new. — Thursday October 22 edition.

Game Developer's Bryant Francis argues in an opinion piece that the way the industry describes game development, and 'core teams' in particular, will shape how studios organise and value their work. This adds a trade-press voice to the debate over headline team sizes versus the people who actually build a game.

CounterpointStudios that cite core-team figures would say the term describes the small group making key decisions, not a claim about total headcount.

Previously: Aftermath argued the 75-person core-team figure for Galactic Racer hides roughly 1,109 credited contributors. — Monday October 19 edition.

EFF's Joe Mullin says Bill C-22, which has passed the House of Commons and is now before the Senate, would expand state surveillance. It would force telecoms and messaging apps to assist government surveillance and let the Public Safety Minister order backdoors, provided they do not create a "systemic insecurity". It would also require metadata retention for up to a year.

EFF cites an analysis by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Citizen Lab that calls for withdrawing Part 2, the surveillance and retention regime. It also warns the bill could widen data sharing with foreign police, including a prospective US agreement without Canadian court oversight. The piece is a call to sign the CCLA's petition, and it notes that some senators have raised constitutional concerns.

CounterpointThe Canadian government and law enforcement would argue that investigators need modern tools to deal with crime committed over encrypted and digital services. They would say the "systemic insecurity" limit and the bill's safeguards address the encryption concerns, which EFF, an advocacy group, presents in its strongest form.