This isn't much of a response, what they said amounts to that you should work harder to cultivate a community that you can then funnel into their platform. "Launching isn't the finish line" is obviously true but what has been happening is that people are sniped before launch based on their demo and marketing material, so it's not all that relevant.
Valve 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.
Legal depends on details. There are copyright, patent, and trademark laws that apply depending on how the cloning was done. Ask a lawyer for details.
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).
I think your 'just a few more details' is doing some heavy lifting there. Like you said copyright doesn't protect ideas, so you'd need to use the same assets or something along those lines. It's really quite difficult to infringe with clones, which is why LLMs have basically destroyed intellectual property.
It's a good question and the answer is mixed. Some of the problem has been directly bootlegging games in other markets like China, so stealing the code and assets outright. That's definitely a copyright violation most places, I would assume it is in China too, but the point is moot without Valve's backing because no indie is going to conduct a lawsuit in a foreign country.
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.
In the same vein that having the same name of functions is a copyright violation. People don't understand that good things are meant to be copied so that consumers have the best product
> Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there.
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.
Valve takes a 30% cut of all sales through their platform which is responsible for the majority of their revenue. This is dependent on it being a mutually beneficial relationship for developers and a near monopoly on PC customers eyeballs.
Fantastical examples aside Valve is still dependent on developer good will. The balance of that to the near monopoly is a much more valid point about how far Steam can strain that relationship.
It does not work that way. This is not the same when Thiel was financing the anti-Gawker lawsuit.
This has no direct precedents and the case and the lawyers involved need to be chosen carefully, because once the precedent is set it is used by the courts for ruling subsequent cases. You don't want a sloppy lawyer, and the case has to be bullet proof, the judges known in advance (hence why certain districts are chosen for certain types of cases) and so on.
A case of this sort would bring into question so many non-game related things, more related to recent AI copyright and IP theft, that it would far exceed what Valve would be able to bring forward in terms of an argument anyway. Computer game mechanics and game designs are already on thin ice in terms of copyright.
Valve isn't going to fund this, and it is not how legal works.
One case does not a precedent set. Sure one case is a precedent and whichever lawyer it helps will be sure the judge knows about it. However any opposing lawyer will find plenty of details that are "different" and thus the judge should ignore it.
In the US you need to go all the way to the supreme court to get a binding precedent. However the supreme court wants to see a lot of other judge's with lots of different things considered before they set a binding precedent. They are well aware that they don't want to get this wrong and so want to review the thinking of a lot of different judges in lots of different circumstances so they can get the precedent right.
the other way to get a binding precedent is if lots of different cases refer to it and all get the same result and so there is no controversy.
Of course there are variances and the legal teams will find everything they can. But we're not talking about hundreds. I wanted to keep it simple for the crowd here, and furthermore a judge can look through the legal bullshit which they often do. Think about for example the way that Alsup handles his cases compared to the way a "stereotypical judge" is portrayed.
As an aside, other posters keep saying how Valve can regardless finance or file or whatever a lawsuit. Yes. Anyone can. It doesn't mean they will win. Lawsuits happen all the time brought upon by people who are wasting their time and money.
Share links to these violations, cases, case outcomes, etc.
I don't know why people are downvoting me. Folks, Valve aren't going to fund these lawsuits. It's a fantasy.
Edit: I keep trying to reply to you but you keep removing them before I can! It isn't personal in any way. I am simply looking to see what the arguments were and whether it was an already-released game having its assets stolen, vs. a game that is not yet released being knocked off with AI, vs. something else. I wanted to see what the cases actually played out like.
One of the threats that is highlighted in the article posted is that they want to extort games which are not yet released. Which is certainly juicy in its own right.
It seemed to me like they're hedging until they know which side is more profitable to support. We don't know yet if slop will be widely embraced by consumers. Valve will be happy to profit from AI if it takes over from real developers.
As far as I can tell, "slop" doesn't have a clear definition. It seems to just mean "AI used poorly or obviously". Nobody cares if a developer of a game uses AI as long as it's done well. They might not even know.
The idea that there is a future where game devs don't use AI, while the rest of the industry does, is absurd. We do know that AI will be widely embraced in gaming, because the alternative is, what? The honor system?
It's a very Valve answer, and it's likely the correct one. It feels very similar to their stance on piracy - it's a service problem. If you make the experience good enough people wont do it.
I actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.
The quality of games became so bad that I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis, scrolling through the catalog without finding anything I want to play...
I find myself going back to titles that are over 10 years old over and over again. Every new game I've bought in the recent years I have regretted buying shortly after.
Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore. I mostly play Indie games now, but even those are rarely anything special now. Back to Terraria I guess...
>Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore.
Denshattack!, ballxpit, blue prince, balatro, outer wilds, pipistrello... There's plenty of quality there too!
It's true that the average quality we're exposed to is lower, because there's so many random pet projects and big players take fewer risks. Relying on word of mouth or gaming reviewers you trust is important nowadays. But I'm convinced it's a matter of discovery rather than existence.
This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)
Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?
Maybe you would like Hardspace Shipbreaker? That's a good game with unusual mechanics. Or maybe Factorio if you enjoy Terraria. Maybe Ark Raiders or Valheim if you like action multiplayer games?
I think its easier to discover a game with a good story then a game with novel mechanics, but they exist.
I do enjoy Valheim and Cracktorio. Ark Raiders looks cool, but I hate PvP experiences as I suck at shooters and prefer to avoid online dick measuring contests. Also wouldn't get my friends to play it with me. Gotta check out the Shipbreaker thingy
Apparently arc silos players based on aggression so if you don’t engage in pvp it puts you with other players who don’t and if you do with those who do
I still can't determine if it was the long COVID or staying up until 5am playing this fucking thing that made my coworker act so erratically for months on end.
I woved not to touch that as I prefer to remain employed.
I've never used the Steam for browsing for games to buy. I've only bought stuff there after finding the games some place else (reviews, word-of-mouth). Using it for that has been a terrible experience since the day they opened the floodgates, since there's just too many damn games out there, even ignoring the slop (even without AI, there's still the Unity asset flip to flood the store).
Steam can't not have a store front, but it wouldn't matter to me if they removed 95% of it and just reduced it to a search bar with and a list with some basic results to know I'm actually buying the right game (think $Name, $Dev, $Date-of-release, $Probably-some-other-values-to-prevent-obvious-copycats). I'd use it in functionally the same way as I do know, and I wouldn't by any less because of it.
I don't want to say you're holding it wrong, but I question your tactics if your goal is to find new games you want to play.
I think it is mostly temporal filtering (due to rosy retrospection and survivorship bias combined with Sturgeon’s Law) that we all naturally fall into.
Most games 5+ years ago were also bad, but you remember the small set that were good and completely forget all the bad, and this builds an impression that games in the past were so much better. The same applies to movies, music, books, etc.
Of course, in the age of AI, a lot more (in absolute terms) shovelware content is likely to be made than ever before, so it'll probably hyper-accelerate the impact of this phenomenon.
Arguably some mass market AAA games already were slop.
In a future with millions of games released every day discoverability or curation of the great games will be really important (even more than it is now).
The contrary, marketing was already important on Steam since the indie boom of some years ago. Now it's something you cannot escape if you want to earn money from indie games.
This isn't much of a response, what they said amounts to that you should work harder to cultivate a community that you can then funnel into their platform. "Launching isn't the finish line" is obviously true but what has been happening is that people are sniped before launch based on their demo and marketing material, so it's not all that relevant.
Valve 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.
> Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers.
Is cloning the games in this way illegal? Has there been a precedent set?
Legal depends on details. There are copyright, patent, and trademark laws that apply depending on how the cloning was done. Ask a lawyer for details.
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).
I think your 'just a few more details' is doing some heavy lifting there. Like you said copyright doesn't protect ideas, so you'd need to use the same assets or something along those lines. It's really quite difficult to infringe with clones, which is why LLMs have basically destroyed intellectual property.
It's a good question and the answer is mixed. Some of the problem has been directly bootlegging games in other markets like China, so stealing the code and assets outright. That's definitely a copyright violation most places, I would assume it is in China too, but the point is moot without Valve's backing because no indie is going to conduct a lawsuit in a foreign country.
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.
It’s not, but the commenter you are replying to wants it to be
In the same vein that having the same name of functions is a copyright violation. People don't understand that good things are meant to be copied so that consumers have the best product
You will not find a business willing to take such risks, so the net effect will be no products at all.
> Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there.
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.
> Why though?
Valve takes a 30% cut of all sales through their platform which is responsible for the majority of their revenue. This is dependent on it being a mutually beneficial relationship for developers and a near monopoly on PC customers eyeballs.
Fantastical examples aside Valve is still dependent on developer good will. The balance of that to the near monopoly is a much more valid point about how far Steam can strain that relationship.
Assuming that AI-driven game development ever becomes a real thing, they could literally lose every single developer they have now and still be fine.
Are the bootlegs illegal?
Valve could just not publish them, they don’t have to risk suing.
Valve doesn't have a case here to bring. It is not their legal fight to begin with.
The developer or publisher would bring the case. Valve would fund it.
in what world?
It does not work that way. This is not the same when Thiel was financing the anti-Gawker lawsuit.
This has no direct precedents and the case and the lawyers involved need to be chosen carefully, because once the precedent is set it is used by the courts for ruling subsequent cases. You don't want a sloppy lawyer, and the case has to be bullet proof, the judges known in advance (hence why certain districts are chosen for certain types of cases) and so on.
A case of this sort would bring into question so many non-game related things, more related to recent AI copyright and IP theft, that it would far exceed what Valve would be able to bring forward in terms of an argument anyway. Computer game mechanics and game designs are already on thin ice in terms of copyright.
Valve isn't going to fund this, and it is not how legal works.
> once the precedent is set
One case does not a precedent set. Sure one case is a precedent and whichever lawyer it helps will be sure the judge knows about it. However any opposing lawyer will find plenty of details that are "different" and thus the judge should ignore it.
In the US you need to go all the way to the supreme court to get a binding precedent. However the supreme court wants to see a lot of other judge's with lots of different things considered before they set a binding precedent. They are well aware that they don't want to get this wrong and so want to review the thinking of a lot of different judges in lots of different circumstances so they can get the precedent right.
the other way to get a binding precedent is if lots of different cases refer to it and all get the same result and so there is no controversy.
Of course there are variances and the legal teams will find everything they can. But we're not talking about hundreds. I wanted to keep it simple for the crowd here, and furthermore a judge can look through the legal bullshit which they often do. Think about for example the way that Alsup handles his cases compared to the way a "stereotypical judge" is portrayed.
As an aside, other posters keep saying how Valve can regardless finance or file or whatever a lawsuit. Yes. Anyone can. It doesn't mean they will win. Lawsuits happen all the time brought upon by people who are wasting their time and money.
We're simply imagining different cases. I'm thinking about straightforward copyright violations I've read about recently in the games industry.
Regardless, I don't see why Valve couldn't fund a lawsuit based on a novel legal theory.
Share links to these violations, cases, case outcomes, etc.
I don't know why people are downvoting me. Folks, Valve aren't going to fund these lawsuits. It's a fantasy.
Edit: I keep trying to reply to you but you keep removing them before I can! It isn't personal in any way. I am simply looking to see what the arguments were and whether it was an already-released game having its assets stolen, vs. a game that is not yet released being knocked off with AI, vs. something else. I wanted to see what the cases actually played out like.
One of the threats that is highlighted in the article posted is that they want to extort games which are not yet released. Which is certainly juicy in its own right.
Absolutely nothing that you wrote precludes Valve from funding a lawsuit. You wrote a cost-benefit analysis.
It seemed to me like they're hedging until they know which side is more profitable to support. We don't know yet if slop will be widely embraced by consumers. Valve will be happy to profit from AI if it takes over from real developers.
As far as I can tell, "slop" doesn't have a clear definition. It seems to just mean "AI used poorly or obviously". Nobody cares if a developer of a game uses AI as long as it's done well. They might not even know.
The idea that there is a future where game devs don't use AI, while the rest of the industry does, is absurd. We do know that AI will be widely embraced in gaming, because the alternative is, what? The honor system?
It's a very Valve answer, and it's likely the correct one. It feels very similar to their stance on piracy - it's a service problem. If you make the experience good enough people wont do it.
I actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.
The quality of games became so bad that I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis, scrolling through the catalog without finding anything I want to play...
I find myself going back to titles that are over 10 years old over and over again. Every new game I've bought in the recent years I have regretted buying shortly after.
Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore. I mostly play Indie games now, but even those are rarely anything special now. Back to Terraria I guess...
>Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore.
Denshattack!, ballxpit, blue prince, balatro, outer wilds, pipistrello... There's plenty of quality there too!
It's true that the average quality we're exposed to is lower, because there's so many random pet projects and big players take fewer risks. Relying on word of mouth or gaming reviewers you trust is important nowadays. But I'm convinced it's a matter of discovery rather than existence.
This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)
Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?
> The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming
I think that's the problem, there are too many to choose from, where you end up overwhelmed and ends up choosing none.
Maybe you would like Hardspace Shipbreaker? That's a good game with unusual mechanics. Or maybe Factorio if you enjoy Terraria. Maybe Ark Raiders or Valheim if you like action multiplayer games?
I think its easier to discover a game with a good story then a game with novel mechanics, but they exist.
I do enjoy Valheim and Cracktorio. Ark Raiders looks cool, but I hate PvP experiences as I suck at shooters and prefer to avoid online dick measuring contests. Also wouldn't get my friends to play it with me. Gotta check out the Shipbreaker thingy
Apparently arc silos players based on aggression so if you don’t engage in pvp it puts you with other players who don’t and if you do with those who do
https://arcraiders.com/news/notes-on-the-matchmaking-system
Some people really like it, some do not (I don’t play just have some friends who enjoy it)
> Cracktorio
I still can't determine if it was the long COVID or staying up until 5am playing this fucking thing that made my coworker act so erratically for months on end.
I woved not to touch that as I prefer to remain employed.
The average quality of games has always been bad. You probably aren't old enough to remember all the bad games on the Atari 2600.
90% of everything is crap; also Sturgeon might have been an hopeless optimist.
I've never used the Steam for browsing for games to buy. I've only bought stuff there after finding the games some place else (reviews, word-of-mouth). Using it for that has been a terrible experience since the day they opened the floodgates, since there's just too many damn games out there, even ignoring the slop (even without AI, there's still the Unity asset flip to flood the store).
Steam can't not have a store front, but it wouldn't matter to me if they removed 95% of it and just reduced it to a search bar with and a list with some basic results to know I'm actually buying the right game (think $Name, $Dev, $Date-of-release, $Probably-some-other-values-to-prevent-obvious-copycats). I'd use it in functionally the same way as I do know, and I wouldn't by any less because of it.
I don't want to say you're holding it wrong, but I question your tactics if your goal is to find new games you want to play.
yeah i have same experience but not sure if its just me getting older. the youngest game i play regularly is still 5 years old
> not sure if its just me getting older
I think it is mostly temporal filtering (due to rosy retrospection and survivorship bias combined with Sturgeon’s Law) that we all naturally fall into.
Most games 5+ years ago were also bad, but you remember the small set that were good and completely forget all the bad, and this builds an impression that games in the past were so much better. The same applies to movies, music, books, etc.
Of course, in the age of AI, a lot more (in absolute terms) shovelware content is likely to be made than ever before, so it'll probably hyper-accelerate the impact of this phenomenon.
Might be age and depression for me to be fair. Don't want to talk down on game devs either, a lot of games look good, but ain't for me.
I'm afraid a lot of the cloners will have much more time to devote to their community.
Arguably some mass market AAA games already were slop.
In a future with millions of games released every day discoverability or curation of the great games will be really important (even more than it is now).
So marketing wins again, I guess.
I can't figure out the sentiment of your comment. Are you trying to say marketing should not be necessary for some reason?
The contrary, marketing was already important on Steam since the indie boom of some years ago. Now it's something you cannot escape if you want to earn money from indie games.
I fear it'll be a slop market just like the Google Play Store. Yes there are millions of games, none of which are good.
True, even some orders of magnitude larger.
I'm hopeful that the jewels will rise to the top on their own merits, but with millions of games released every day it's gonna be difficult.
Maybe I'm a romantic but I hope there are some genius game designers in the world that now can release their dream games with the help of AI.