- Steam currently requires developers to disclose any use of generative AI in their games
- Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney wants Steam to stop tagging games that use AI
- Critics argue that removing AI tags would reduce transparency for players who care about how games are made
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is calling on video game storefronts like Steam to drop their “Made with AI” tags, claiming they’re obsolete before they even finish rolling out.
“AI will be involved in almost all future production,” he wrote in a post on X, insisting that labeling games that use it is pointless. “It makes no sense.” Steam currently disagrees.
Valve’s popular digital storefront introduced a policy earlier this year requiring developers to disclose whether generative AI was used to make a game. It can be in the writing, the artwork, the code, or something else. The goal is to let players know what they are downloading. That’s the part Sweeney takes issue with, suggesting that flagging AI in 2025 is like putting a warning label on games that use 3D graphics or autocomplete in code.
Agreed. The AI tag is relevant for art exhibitions to publish authorship and for digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation. It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in almost all future production.26 November 2025
But it turns out people don’t care. And not just in an abstract way. For a growing number of players, developers and digital storefronts, knowing how a game was made is part of the purchase decision, especially in a world filled with generative AI tools. And what Sweeney sees as inevitable, others see as the start of a much bigger problem: games filled with outsourced, tasteless AI slop.
It is important to say that few people object to a developer using autocomplete while writing code. AI coding assistance is practically standard now. But generative art, AI-written dialogue, and AI-composite trailers are where the conversation gets tricky.
For the average gamer scrolling through Steam’s indie section, this isn’t hypothetical. You’ll see lots of generative AI assets, often poorly controlled like character portraits with too many fingers or dialogue trees written like Wikipedia entries.
Steam’s Next Fest this year had several games built almost entirely out of AI-generated content, and players noticed. Some studios were called out for reusing the same visual messages or merging assets with no real design connection.
AI game
To Sweeney’s credit, he is thinking of small developers. “I just hate to see Valve confiscate more and more options from small developers,” he wrote in a follow-up post, arguing that AI tags stigmatize indie games that use the tools ethically.
It’s a reasonable concern. No one wants a world where one-man studios are penalized for using Midjourney to sketch background art or ChatGPT to brainstorm quest descriptions. But the reverse is also true: gamers don’t want to feel tricked into buying games that have outsourced their entire creative soul to a neural net.
The broader concern here isn’t about AI, it’s about trust. Steam’s disclosure policy allows players to worry. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re just looking for a chill deck builder or another farming sim to relax with. But if someone doesn’t care because they’re an artist, they’ve had their work scraped, or they just want to support fully human-made work, then the AI tag is valid. It is not a scarlet letter. It’s a filter.
Sweeney’s suggestion to remove AI tags entirely would leave players guessing. It would also remove a key mechanism of accountability. If a developer releases a game with AI-generated assets, the current policy says: just say so. It’s not censorship. It is information.
After all, not all AI content is created equal. A developer who uses AI to brainstorm mechanics and then spends six months refining them by hand is in a different category than someone who tells a text-to-game engine to “make a vampire dating sim” and publishes what comes out. And while the “Made with AI” tag doesn’t explain that nuance, it does open the door to asking.
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