Yeah, it's another post about AI and no, it wasn't what I originally had planned but it continues to infest what feels like all discussions like a bad rash so here we are again. Keep reading to the end though because I think there's hope for this problem.

Steam Slop Fest

Since relaunching this blog in 2025, I've done a round up of my top demos from each Steam Next Fest. Three so far. Those posts take longer to put together than most and get by far the least interest so I was debating skipping this one but after seeing what was on offer at the start of the most recent event, I had no motivation to even bother. The number of games that were either obvious AI slop or worse, AI rip-offs of existing games made my heart sink. Worse, many games I thought looked potentially interesting had AI disclosures that showed the majority of their content wasn't human made. Two developers have even pulled their planned public playtests from Steam because they fear they'll be immediately copied by AI Pigs and others have reported being literally extorted by crooks demanding payment to not put up an AI clone, stealing the original dev's thunder. What fucking timeline is this?!

To surface games people might not know about, the landing page for the event shows generalized recommendations for the first two days, switching to personalized recommendations based on your wishlist, previously played titles and other unknowns on the Wednesday. To their credit, at least in my case the recommendations generally got much better and the slop reduced somewhat once this happened. I would hope so given my top 1% size Steam library and them having 20+ years of buying history to draw from.

Also to Steam's mild credit, they do require developers to disclose AI use on their store page though like most things in their Libertarian philosophized storefront, they barely police this. To see it if it's even there, you have to go to the game's store description, click Read More and scroll all the way to the bottom. Needless to say, most people don't. Despite repeated calls for it, the otherwise sublime Augmented Steam browser extension hasn't implemented anything to flag games with AI disclosures and the only extension that does it right now is very basic and the developer seems to be in no rush to improve it. In their usual Valve way, they've vaguely said that people are looking into the problem while promising zero action.

To be clear, rip-off clones and things like asset flips have been an issue for years. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to shaming these. Steam's hands off approach of letting anyone with a couple hundred bucks publish on the store led to a torrent of this garbage. They were usually easy enough to ignore and most did. The problem now is that generative AI has made it so easy, fast and cheap (for now, more on that later) to crap out near 1:1 copies that the established originals are getting their oxygen sucked out. Games yet to be released are being confused with the rip-offs and in some cases are even accused of being the rip-offs themselves. This is a whole other level from asset flips.

Think about it for a minute. You're a solo dev or small team that's put years of your life, heart, soul and money into hand-crafting a piece of interactive art that you believe in. Then when you're finally ready to show it, some amoral loser with a crusty photo of Marc Andreesen on their desk tells a chatbot "Make me something like this" and even if it's inferior in most ways, it still looks enough like your game to confuse your potential customers or worse, turning them off your game entirely because of how bad the copy was. Explain to me in what world that's remotely fair or just. It's not just that the "creator" put in less than 1% of the effort you did but it wasn't even their ideas and vision, it was yours! It's like when an employee is forced to train their half-assed outsourced replacement, only you didn't even know you were doing it and at least at a real job, you get paid for that.

Even if a demo isn't a direct clone of another title, many that I thought looked good had disclosures saying that most of the art, music, voice acting, writing or other elements were AI generated. While I still have a pretty hardline stance on it, I did have a couple of compelling use cases for it presented by others developers that I think are worth discussing and I will later on.

Sweeney's Latest Stupidity

On the other side, we have game industry supervillain and top contender for the Learn to Shut the Fuck Up Awards (tm) Tim Sweeney, who not only has made using AI a core part of Epic's game, store and even engine development going forward but has insulted Valve for every requiring AI disclosures at all. The man's skill at putting his foot in his mouth is truly at an artisanal level, to the point where I wonder sometimes if he does it on purpose to generate headlines and social media buzz.

It's been 8 years since the Epic Games Store launched and it's still garbage. Years of buying exclusives and giving away weekly free games still haven't made it appealing to nearly anyone. Before the AI bubble, it was full of crypto and NFT scam games that he was also all-in on and chastised Valve for mildly regulating. They proudly declared that is was now a vibe-coded platform and the big benefit of this new version? It started a couple seconds faster than Steam, a crown Valve took back within 24 hours.

Hearing a game uses Unreal Engine 5 almost guarantees it will be an unoptimized mess and not a word has been said on how Unreal Engine 6 might improve this. Surely adding in tons of AI generated spaghetti code will be the key to making it run better. ...Right?

The only thing keeping any of this viable is their garbage battle royale for babies (I mean "metaverse", he really loves trend chasing doesn't he?) and even with all that money and multiple investments being made into the company in recent years, they still laid off 1,000 people in 2026 alone because they couldn't stay above water. You'd think instead of publicly insulting his betters, he could tell us what he's doing to fix those things but nope, trashing anyone who isn't as big an AI Pig as him is the way. CliffyB said in his memoire that despite being in the games industry since the 90s that Sweeney isn't actually much of a fan of games and only really cared about the business angle. That's more clear than ever now. Tim, do us all a favour and just shut up and go fix your engine.

Microsoft Madness

On top of that, if you didn't think it was possible for Satya Nadella to fuck up Microsoft any more, the company is offering 60,000 workers or 25% of their entire workforce voluntary buyouts, of which a big piece includes Xbox. This is on top of their prior layoffs to keep feeding their failing AI ambitions without taking on debt like the other hyperscalers. That 25% represents an almost incalculable loss of institutional knowledge at a company whose core products are more hated than even and need more investment than ever.

They also rushed out an announcement of Xbox Labs, a vaguely defined new skunkworks division they've created to study AI's impacts on game development, including the recent fad of using coding agents to create "pass-through mods" that allow two unrelated games to share assets and do mashups that look cool in short-form videos but are only fun or interesting for about 5 minutes.

Then they said their next console will likely launch at a price so delusional and hubristic that it all but guarantees it to be DOA.

I said that Asha Sharma was brought in to get Xbox ready to sell or spin off and I stand by that more than ever. Satya Nadella has made it clear he will burn the rest of Microsoft to the ground to make AI work, even as it looks like more of a pipe dream than ever. He needs to get thrown out of that company in disgrace now.

Boomer Psychosis

Even outside the bigger industry, I've seen many gaming and tech luminaries who should know better becoming full-on AI Pigs. Once respected retro gaming and computing YouTuber The 8-Bit Guy took a sci-fi screenplay he wrote for fun years ago and used generative AI to make a feature-length movie out of it. He released a preview on his channel that I refuse to link to because it's one of the worst things you'll ever watch and he doesn't deserve more views for it.

He talks about how he created it in three weeks using his phone and he's not only proud of that and thinks himself a filmmaker now but he plans to premiere it in an actual theater and sell DVDs of it. Like, for money. The like ratio and comments have thoroughly eviscerated it and he's talked about how even his wife and daughter told him it was a bad idea but he's still dug in on it.

This is a guy who has hand-coded a number of new games for numerous retro platforms over the years and even developed and released his own bespoke computer from scratch. He's not only incredibly talented but a showcase of what a person is capable of when they put in the time to learn and create. That he's suddenly gone all in on AI slop and thinks that to be on the same level I don't know how to call anything but straight up AI Psychosis.

It's not just him either.

Ken Williams, co-founder of Sierra On-Line, one of the most venerated OG game developers who recently returned to to the craft with the interesting if flawed remake of Colossal Cave said in a recent newsletter that he's become a full believer in AI-first game development. Oddly, he talks about how much money it would have saved in making Colossal Cave 3D, while simultaneously saying that it cost a lot more than it should have because of his own bad decisions. Their newsletter doesn't have a web version so here's a PDF with the relevant bit.

Gabe Newell is also a big believer in AI, calling it a "cheat code" for those who know how to use it. Given this past Next Fest, that seems very true but probably not how he meant it. Steam is ironically the only storefront that requires AI disclosures, but that probably wasn't his decision. Though fanboys still treat every word he says as gospel from on high, he's been pretty checked out of Valve for a while now, spending most of his time on his multiple mega yachts. Valve's development processes are a black box so who knows how much AI they're using but I suspect it's not much.

The Oliver Twins are making multiple new Dizzy games and are unapologetic in their use of generative AI. They claim with a straight face that the projects are human-led and they have accountability over the final quality, even as the images they use to promote their own Kickstarter are full of inconsistencies and errors.

Numerous older retro creators like Modern Vintage Gamer, Dave Plummer, Trixster and more have also been extolling the virtues of AI tools to speed up retro game and hardware development, do recompiles of old games to run on new systems or enhance emulators, even as fan run communities for these things close down because the slop tsunami has ruined them.

These are only a few examples. There's obviously a vocal group of young people who are full-on AI Pigs and will defend the technology and the lying billionaire sociopaths who peddle it it to the death, regardless of who or what it harms along the way. Many of them were just as rabid about crypto and NFTs before they melted down too. Overall though, this demographic has represented the most vocal opposition to generative AI in my observation.

It could just be me but it feels like some of the biggest advocates for it are older boomers and I've been thinking about that a lot because I find it morbidly fascinating.

Many of these people came from the dawn of video games and some helped shape the industry in its infancy. Figures like Ken Williams I revered and looked up to when I was younger and had my own dreams of making games. They made them in an era before off the shelf engines where you had to write every line of code and place every pixel by hand and had to squeeze every last drop out of hardware almost unthinkably primitive to modern developers in order to get an edge over your competitors. Where you had to release on many platforms at once, some so different from each other that you had to basically rewrite your game from scratch for each.

You would think these people would appreciate the value of putting in the time and hard work to learn a craft, master it and then use it to make something special and valuable. Instead, they are some of the biggest advocates for this cheap and lazy way out of that. They don't simply talk about it as an inevitability that we have to learn to accept, they are fully on board with it taking over.

What I'm trying to understand is the mindset that drives this in older people specifically. Is it just because they came from an era where everything was incredibly complicated and difficult and they like the idea of it not being as hard now? Is it because they're older and as they became more aware of their decreasing time left on Earth, they see a different kind of value in taking shortcuts? Is it just some "How do you do fellow kids?" type thing where they don't want to look like the old, out of touch relic of a bygone era for not embracing this? Or is it as simple as them seeing their Facebook feed full of AI slop and thinking that means it's just the default way of creating now? I don't know but something drives this borderline (and in some cases acute) AI Psychosis these people are experiencing. If you have your own ideas, leave them in the comments as I'd love to figure this out.

There Is No Such Thing As AI Art

As I've often in the past, AI has its uses and I'm not naive enough to think it will go away, even when the bubble pops. In the heated debates I've seen in the last week, some developers gave use cases where I think it actually has value in game development. Localizing games into other languages for instance, which many small developers can't afford to have done professionally but which greatly increases their potential audience. This is one place LLMs actually excel and one developer said their non-English audiences thought they were well done. AI coding agents I even think can be valuable to a point, either for analyzing existing code for problems, bridging libraries and codebases more easily or even providing a functional baseline to iterate on. I don't refuse to touch a game if it used AI in non-creative aspects and I think that position isn't reasonable.

But if you are using AI as a substitution for actual creative work, then you are not an artist or a developer, period. If you're cloning other people's work, you're just a straight up thief and if you're using it to take a vague idea and generate it into something you then publish, then you're a lazy hack. If you have the gall to charge money for it, you deserve to be shamed and ridiculed.

Using generative AI for creative elements, be it visual, writing, music, level design, core mechanics or whatever is you saying you want the glory and satisfaction of creation without having to put in the time and effort to learn a craft. It's not only lazy but the height of hubris to think that puts you on the same level as people who did. As the header image jokes, it's like ordering a meal at a fast food joint and thinking that makes you a chef. It's ludicrous and delusional.

Even creators of bad games still made something. You didn't make anything, you delegated it to a chatbot that has been trained on real human work scraped from the Internet without permission, compensation or even attribution. In a world where the AI industry hadn't bribed their way out of accountability, we call that theft. That you're using tools one layer removed doesn't mean you still aren't basing your output on stolen work.

It's these two points that infuriate me most about this issue. Like Gabe Newell said, generative AI is a "cheat code" but if you win every match in a game by cheating, that doesn't mean you're good at it, you're just a cheater. My girlfriend's mostly a console player and when she first heard about how rampant cheating is on PC she asked me "Why would you even want to do that? You're not actually good at the game, you're just faking it." I told her my theory that cheaters don't care if they're actually good, only that it appears that way and that they feel like they are. I think it's that same motivation that powers people who make games with chatbots and think themselves developers. But I'm here to tell you, it's bullshit and you're not just wrong for doing it but I think it's a sign of much bigger problems in your life and mindset.

I've wanted to make video games since the era of people like Ken Williams. I couldn't because for various reasons, I wasn't good at mathematical programming or art, at least one of which you had to excel at to have a chance back then and thanks to undiagnosed ADHD, I wasn't patient enough to learn. This was before Unity, Unreal or asset stores. It was in the era where you had to do everything from scratch. I eventually gave up on the dream and got into IT instead. With the tools and learning resources that are available now, I've considered trying my hand at making a small game some day. It will take a huge commitment and unthinkable amounts of trial and error because I'd be starting from nothing, knowing nothing. There's as good a chance as not that I'd either fail entirely or make something that sucked. But that's the whole point. You take the risk, put in the time and make the effort. If it works out, you have something you can be proud of and maybe even make some money from. If it doesn't, you have new knowledge you can apply elsewhere and can be proud of yourself that you at least tried.

What does having a chatbot make the game or even some of it for you accomplish creatively? Nothing. You learn nothing, create nothing new and even if you somehow manage to make a bit of money from it, you have nothing to be truly proud of. This is why generating my dream game with AI has never crossed my mind. I'd rather go through life having never realized this dream than put out something I know I didn't make while claiming credit for it. That so many people both young and especially old aren't disturbed by the thought of doing that is far more troubling to me than the technology they do it with.

This is a hill I have no problem dying on. If you make all or a notable part of your game with AI, you are not a developer, an artist or a creative. You're a lazy, entitled wannabe who should be ashamed of yourself and I will happily continue to hold you and those who enable if you in contempt for it and be unapologetic voicing it. If you don't want your stuff being called slop, then don't put it out in public.

The Economic Light At the End of the Tunnel

I debated whether to make this the last section but if you've managed to get this far, you likely share my view on this so I'd like to end on a potential positive for the like-minded. I don't believe that the economic realities of AI that are coming like a freight train for the industry and its enablers is compatible with this current trend of low-effort slop.

As I've said before, AI doesn't make money, the industry has no plan for how to and investors are finally wising up to that. It's estimated that right now, the major AI labs whose models power virtually every AI startup and tool these slop makers use spend more than $2.50 for every $1 in revenue they generate and because AI doesn't have economies of scale, this cost is growing. 80% of their revenues comes from 1% of their customers, most whom are startups that are also losing money. AI Pigs and investors are still trying to bury their heads in the sand over this but they can't forever.

The true price of using AI has been subsidized to an unheard of level for end users. The $20 a month Claude subscription you built your slop game with probably used hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of compute to do it. At some point, investors are going to insist that these companies start charging what their products actually cost and when they do, only the richest people and companies will be able to afford it. You think the people releasing slop copies of better games on Steam are wealthy? Hell no, most of them are broke kids or losers who get all their life advice from self-help grifters who see it as a get rich quick opportunity. If they suddenly have to spend thousands or more on their slop, they're going to find another grift. Same goes for all the AI slop YouTube channels, music and everything else that's flooding the zone right now. It won't go away but I think market forces alone will stem the tide of that substantially.

And before you go thinking that they'll just use an open source model to do it instead, remember that most of these people aren't technical. Setting up a local AI model requires high-end hardware that was hard to afford even before the bubble ruined memory prices. It's very complex to configure the model and even when you do, something that takes hours or days for a frontier model to generate is going to take weeks to months on your consumer-grade equipment. You think even if you could find a 5090 for under ten grand that it can spit out a slop game in remotely the same time as a data center full of Blackwells? Keep dreaming. Who is going to want to sacrifice their ability to use their gaming PC for months on end to generate slop that probably won't make enough money to cover half the cost of the power they had to use? Oh yeah, they have to cover that too.

I can't tell you when this reality is going to hit, just like I can't tell you when the bubble's going to pop. All I can tell you is that it will because it literally has to. There's only so much capital in the world and the AI industry has sucked up such an inconceivable amount that it's literally made it more expensive for governments to issue new debt. That's completely unprecedented and it cannot last. These AI labs have to start charging what their products really cost or they will fail and in either of these scenarios, the tools used to crank out slop become unavailable to most of the people using them.

I hate what this economically, environmentally and socially ruinous technology has done to gaming, among many other things. For all the problems the industry has always had, I love video games more than any other form of art and I hate how much effort I now have to put into making sure what I support is made by actual people with actual talent. Who would have ever thought this is where we'd be now? But I love this medium enough that I will keep putting in the effort to find the real things and more than ever, I'm convinced this trend will be a fleeting one.

Enjoy it while you can slop peddlers. Your time is coming and I can't wait to rub your fucking faces in it when it does.