Valve has a message for indie developers worried about AI clone games: build a community and keep updating your game, because the copycats can steal your mechanic but not your relationship with players. Speaking at the Steam Indie Connect event on October 27 — co-hosted by Valve, the Busan Indie Connect Festival Organizing Committee, and Korea's Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) — members of Valve's Steam business team addressed developer fears about AI-generated clones directly, including reports of outright extortion.
The session drew attention because it dealt with a concrete, escalating threat. As covered by Inven Global, one developer described emails currently circulating in the indie community in which extortionists threaten to copy a game with AI and release it first unless the original developer pays. The exchange offered a rare official window into how the platform that dominates PC distribution thinks about the flood of AI-generated titles, a concern that has been building across the industry as AI news coverage of cloning and slop complaints has intensified.
"Pay or We Clone It First"
According to the report, Tom Giardino of Valve's Steam business team responded that he was hearing about such extortion cases for the first time. His answer separated two questions that developers often conflate: whether Valve will police which tools developers use, and how developers should protect their work.
On the first, Giardino was categorical. "We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use," he said, framing the choice to use AI in development as the developer's own. On the second, he offered a blunt reassurance with a caveat: clone games are a problem that long predates AI.
Clones Predate AI — AI Just Accelerated Them
Valve's argument to developers is that the pattern of spotting an interesting concept at a showcase like Next Fest and rushing out a similar game existed long before generative tools, and that AI has simply accelerated the pace rather than inventing the behavior. That framing puts the burden of defense on things clones cannot replicate, rather than on platform enforcement.
The company outlined two such defenses. The first is community: a studio homepage, sustained relationships with players, and the personality and trust that come from showing up over time. Giardino acknowledged that this takes time and does not happen automatically — which is precisely what makes it hard to copy. The second is continuous improvement: making the real version the best version, so that features and polish added through steady updates keep outpacing whatever a cloner can produce from a single snapshot of the game.
For indie studios, the advice amounts to a strategy of differentiation through velocity and relationship. A clone can match a mechanic; it cannot match a patch cadence, a devlog audience, or the goodwill earned by responding to player feedback.
Steam's Scale — and New Tools for Visibility
The broader presentation gave context for why visibility on Steam matters so much to the developers asking these questions. Valve's figures at the event put the platform at a recent peak of 43.5 million concurrent users worldwide, more than two decades after its September 2003 launch. For the Korean development community in attendance, the company cited Korean market revenue growth of 126% over the past five years, with premium game and DLC revenue up 70% and in-game purchase revenue up 388%.
Valve's Marc Wilkinson also walked through new discoverability tools. A Wishlist Data API now delivers wishlist data by period, country, and language for specified App IDs and date ranges — data studios can use to time announcements and discounts. A Personalized Calendar, which graduated from Steam Labs testing into an official feature, recommends upcoming titles wishlisted by players with similar tastes, though games must have an official release date set to appear.
Both tools fit the same theme as the clone advice: Valve is pushing developers toward durable, data-informed audience building rather than launch-week spikes. Giardino's presentation also walked through the full launch pipeline — coming soon pages, demos, Next Fest, playtests, and build reviews — with the reminder that "launch feels like the finish line, but it is actually the starting line," and that studios should not rely on Steam alone but combine consoles, other PC stores, Discord, and social media.
What It Means for the AI Slop Debate
Valve's stance lands in the middle of an ongoing fight over AI-generated content on storefronts. Player backlash against low-effort AI releases has grown loud enough that stores face pressure to filter or label AI-made games, while developers have petitioned for stricter disclosure. Valve's answer steers between the poles: no tool bans, no platform-level policing of cloning, and instead an ecosystem position that quality, cadence, and community are the real filters.
Whether that position holds as generation tools get cheaper is the open question. For now, the message to the developers receiving extortion emails is consistent with how Valve has always run its store: the platform will not pick your tools for you, and the market — not the gatekeeper — decides what survives.
