Valve weighs in on Next Fest AI cloning phenomenon

Imran Khan,Contributing Editor

October 28, 2026

schedule2 Min Read

Valve has weighed in on the rising trend of developers using AI to quickly replicate successful new releases and upcoming games, a cloning practice that has caused a lot of developers pause. Its advice? Game devs should make less copyable games, and condition communities to reject clones.

Valve, Steam's owner and ultimate gatekeeper, has been traditionally hesitant to acknowledge this or take any actions, but a recent statement at the Busan Indie Connect Festival Organizing Committee developer conference in South Korea indicates that Valve is aware of the problem, and believes the solution is in the hands of the individual developers and not Valve itself.

Members from Valve's business team, Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson, were asked whether Steam had any measures in place or planned to prevent games from being cloned by AI, as reported by InvenGlobal. The developer that asked the question cited an email threat that they received wherein someone threatened to clone their game with AI and release it first.

Giardano suggested this was an issue for law enforcement rather than Valve, but seemed hesitant to commit more than Valve's resources in helping with that. According to InvenGlobal's reporting (which was machine translated, but verified with an independent native speaker), Giardano backed off the idea that Valve would perform any kind of hands-on actions to prevent cloning games.

"We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use," Giardano reportedly said.

Instead, he suggested that the onus is in the developers themselves to make their games less likely to be copied and to rise to the top of the crop. Giardano suggests doing this by building active communities and establishing trust so that, when copies do appear, people would prefer to just have the best, original version of the game. Complex games, Giardano reportedly argued, are also more difficult to copy.

This fear of AI cloning is not unique to any one region or type of game. The developer of the Moonlighter series, Digital Sun Games, is delaying a public playtest of their next game ReVamp out of fear that one or many AI clones will beat the studio to launch, for example.

Valve itself has taken a hands-off stance to curation on its store since 2018, when the company enacted a policy that any and all games — barring some undetailed exceptions — will be allowed on the Steam store.

"We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling," Valve's Erik Johnson stated nearly a decade ago.

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About the Author

Imran Khan

Contributing Editor

Imran Khan has been in the games industry in various forms for over two decades. He has been a former senior editor at Game Informer, a professional loudmouth at Kinda Funny, and news director at Fanbyte. He has also been doing PR for Vicarious PR and Head of U.S. PR for Japanese VR studio MyDearest, in addition to Producer work on their latest title Brazen Blaze.

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