开发者不应被迫保护自己的游戏，Valve 应保护其 Steam 商店

Devs Shouldn't Have To Protect Their Games, Valve Should Be Protecting Their Shopfront

One of the most depressing (if not unexpected) topics of games industry discourse this week has been the explosion in AI-generated clone games, where unscrupulous assholes download an actual video game, scrape its codebase with AI then release a copy of it on a popular shopfront.

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As a general trend, this is something that's only going to become increasingly common as the individual grifters (assholes with a Steam page) making use of the larger grift (AI) see a chance at making some quick money built on stealing the work of others.

So far, once you get past the despair, a lot of the practical discussion I've seen in response to the week's news has been devs sharing tips on how they should be dealing with this trend. From announcing their games later to prioritising in-person events over online showcases to delaying public playtests, possible solutions to this existential problem are already being mulled over in Discords the world over.

But why does this burden fall solely on the shoulders of developers? In the case of Steam, this is a closed marketplace that charges a fee to list and, supposedly, has rules about content and conduct that are (when it comes to certain titles, at least) enforced. Valve makes billions of dollars a year from Steam, built on the fact that for decades now it's been a safe and reliable way to find and download video games (and that the company takes a whopping 30% cut from most transactions made on the platform).

Surely it's Valve's responsibility to moderate its own shopfront and enforce some basic level of standards? I know what you're about to say, that given the amount of shit shovelled onto the store daily, and the careless disregard so many developers have for the company's unenforced AI policies, that Valve gave up on most of its moderation responsibility years ago, but like...it doesn't have to be that way.

There's a point where--with over 8000 games featuring in the latest Steam Next Fest alone--Valve is going to need to spend a tiny fraction of those billions and take a more active role in policing its own shopfront, because if this trend of outright theft continues tracking upwards (atop the broader trend of more and more 'limited' games hitting the marketplace) and adds to the already-crushing weight of releases then it's going to make using Steam a frustrating and pointless experience for the user.

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If I want to play City Builder 2000, for example, and log on to find 19 games all claiming to be some variation of City Builder 2000, I am not going to sit there doing detective work trying to find out which game is the one I actually want to play. I am going to close Steam down and do something else with my time, because that is not how you run a shopfront.

It’s not like an active role in moderating clones (or even just low-effort games) is unheard of in the video game industry, either; in 2004 Nintendo took action against a run of Unpacking copycats on the eShop, while PlayStation has booted entire publishers off its shopfront simply for clogging the place up with bad video games.

So if you're an indie developer currently in crisis mode over the prospect of having your work stolen wholesale, I totally understand the need for planning, but also: I'm sorry this all falls on you, because so much of this is Valve's problem to fix, not yours.