Valve addresses Steam's AI game cloning problem by telling developers to make games less copyable

Valve's Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson were asked at a Steam Indie Connect developer conference in Korea whether Steam has measures against AI-cloned games. Giardino said Valve does not want to be a gatekeeper and suggested developers build active communities, earn trust, make the legitimate version the best one, and add complexity that is harder to copy. The remarks come second-hand via InvenGlobal and machine translation, and Eurogamer has asked Valve for clarification. The unreleased indie game Needle in a Haystack Simulator was cited as having been cloned so many times its developer struggles to identify the original.