Valve Has 'Significantly' Rewritten Steam's Rules For How Developers Must Disclose AI Use

Valve has substantially overhauled its guidelines for how game developers must disclose the use of generative AI on Steam, making explicit that tools like code assistants and other development aids do not fall under the disclosure requirement. The updated rules clarify that Valve's focus is not on "efficiency gains through the use of AI-powered dev tools."

Developers must still disclose two specific categories: AI used to generate in-game content, store page assets, or marketing materials, and AI that creates content like images, audio, or text during gameplay itself. Steam has required AI disclosures since 2024, and an analysis from July 2025 found nearly 8,000 titles released in the first half of that year had disclosed generative AI use, compared to roughly 1,000 for all of 2024. The disclosures remain voluntary, so actual usage is likely higher.

Sounds sensible

[gweihir]

Yes, AI code may also be bad, but insecure or unreliable game code has always been an issue and is one reason why gaming on a separate machine can be a good idea.

Re:Sounds sensible

[alvinrod]

The problem is that it won't be long before every game has the label on it and everyone ignores them. Even if you're a small developer that truly built everything yourself, you'll still be buried beneath the avalanche of AI games churned out by people who lie about it. The floodgates are opening and there doesn't seem like a good way of stopping what's coming.

Re:Sounds sensible

[gweihir]

Yes, so? Food has labels on it as well. Most people ignore them. I do not, because I find too mich sodium and too much sugar or sugar substitutes quite repulsive.

The bottom line is that labels are not for the ones that ignore them. They are for the minority that looks at them and for giving the rest the freedom to look at them if they so chose. Freedoms do not come with a requirement for them to be used or they stop being freedoms.

Re:

[thewolfkin]

The problem is that it won't be long before every game has the label on it and everyone ignores them.

The point of food labels isn't that people look at them. It's that people CAN look at them. It enables some of us to look for all of us. It doesn't matter if a majority looks at labels regularly. A minority can look at it and inform the rest of us. And then we can verify what they say by looking ourselves if they say there's something important to be seen.

I also don't think that AI will be so easily ignored. Especially for the areas the label is trying to highlight.

Who cares about the marketing material?

[sabbede]

I sure don't. I suppose marketeers do, but I'm not convinced that industry has net positive impact on humanity. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I care if any assets were generated.

I've mentioned before, because it's relevant, that I play Bellwright. It's fun. They use AI generated voices as placeholders during EA, but I wouldn't care if that's all they ever did. If a small studio wants to save some cash, let 'em. The results might not be as good, but I say leave those concerns to the studios that can afford a team of voice actors and hundreds of artists.

Re:Who cares about the marketing material?

[alvinrod]

I suspect that AI generated voices will soon replace human voice actors. In part because it's easier for developers to tweak things without having to go and re-record voice lines, but also because audio actually eats up a lot of disk space when there's a lot of it. Fully voice acted games could take up hundreds of gigabytes for dialogue or narrative heavy stories. Games like The Elder Scrolls Oblivion were designed around what could fit on a DVD because it had to ship on consoles. These days those restrictions don't exist to the same extent, but that's also a part of why game sizes have ballooned so much.

Having some kind of AI that runs locally and can reproduce voice from text is going to be the future. Initially it will be mostly used for random NPCs or more mundane things like asking for directions while the important story characters still use voice actors or famous actors, but as the technology improves it will be used everywhere in any games that are really just novels disguised as games. It's an even better fit when you consider than another AI could be generating some of the text that the other program voices. I think we're still maybe a decade away from something like that, but that's where the puck is headed.

Re:

[gweihir]

And then you compare even the better "AI sloop" videos on YouTube vs the worse real speakers and realize the extreme loss of engagement that happens.

Re:

[sabbede]

We're used to bad voice acting in games. It isn't the engaging part of a game, so we live with it being bad because it still ads flavor. Given a choice between no voices and AI voices, I'll go with AI.

At least so long as the studio isn't pouring millions into development. If they can afford people, hire people.

Re:

[gweihir]

Well, I have been a gamer for 40 years and I will not accept bad voice acting in games. If a game has it, either it does still work with voice switched off or I will not buy or refund. And I cannot remember a single pretty good game with voice acting where that voice acting was bad. Maybe I have higher standards than most people, but I am not convinced of that.

Re:

[sabbede]

Resident Evil.

Excellent game, incredibly popular, genre-defining... Horrible voice acting. Just appallingly bad.

Oh, and I never think of it since I didn't actually play it, but Shenmue. "Looking for sailors".

Patrick Stewart aside, Oblivion had plenty of bad voice acting.

It seems there is a lot of discussion about this out there. Here's one thing - https://www.thesavvygamer.com/... [thesavvygamer.com]

You know those warnings about cancer?

[rsilvergun]

The ones because of California. Those were really useful at first because you could easily spot dangerous carcinogens in food however lawyers figured out that they could sue people who made products of any kind under the law and force a settlement because of the high cost of litigating those lawsuits. As a result everybody put disclaimers on everything and the law became worthless because absolutely everything tells you that it causes cancer now in order to prevent the lawyers from screwing with you.

I s

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a MasterCard once that came with that warning. They've become a joke and nobody pays attention to them.

Still very blurry

[EmperorOfCanada]

Some of what I do involves industrial design. I often describe what I want to various AI tools, and it draws me pictures of those things.

But, what I then do, is rebuild those things using CAD software. I take inspiration from the AI, but, what the AI generates is unusable as it is. I need parametric designs. Often, it will somewhat go off the rails, but is well close enough, that I can say, "Cool" and run with it.

The same with my AI generated software. Other than the autocomplete of lines, maybe 10%

Saw an interesting post somewhere yesterday

[ZiggyZiggyZig]

It was about people considering where AI use was acceptable. Two teams were discussing about making a movie, the team with the storyboard people was saying it's acceptable to use AI to write the first draft of the script because it is not "very creative", and the team with the scriptwriters was saying it's acceptable to use AI to draw the first draft of the storyboard because it is not "very creative".

I feel it's kind of the same here, we're banning AI for graphics, but somehow it's acceptable for code. I'm

Work harder, not smarter

[moogaloonie]

It's funny that we all just assume the corporations with deep pockets will be using AI, but expect all of the indies to dutifully snub it in the spirit of solidarity.

Rule 34 meets AI, and Steam is rightfully worried

[rocket rancher]

Steam’s updated AI disclosure policy is exactly the kind of policy you write when you’ve had to operate a platform at scale: focus on what the player actually consumes, and treat “live generation” as a different beast than “we used AI in the build pipeline.”

If a developer used an AI code helper, who cares? That’s a hammer, not a house. Steam seems to agree: gamers, in general, don't seem to care whether AI was used by devs to build the game.

But “AI content gen