- Steam currently requires developers to disclose any use of generative AI in their games.
- Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney wants Steam to stop labeling games that use AI
- Critics argue that removing AI labels would reduce transparency for players who care about how games are created.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is calling on video game stores like Steam to abandon their “Made with AI” labels, arguing that they are outdated even before they have finished rolling out.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 doesn’t make sense.” Steam, for now, disagrees.
Valve’s popular digital store introduced a policy earlier this year requiring developers to disclose whether generative AI was used in the creation of a game. This could be in writing, art, code, or anything else. The goal is for players to know what they are downloading. That’s the part Sweeney takes issue with, suggesting that flagging AI in 2025 is like putting a warning sticker on games that use 3D graphics or code autocomplete.
Agreed. The AI label is relevant for art exhibitions for authorship disclosure and for digital content licensing markets where buyers need to understand the rights situation. It doesn’t make sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in almost all future production.November 26, 2025
But it turns out that people do care. And not only in an abstract way. For a growing number of gamers, developers, and digital stores, knowing how a game was created, especially in a world inundated with generative AI tools, is part of the purchasing decision. And what Sweeney sees as inevitable, others see as the start of a much bigger problem: games full of flavorless, outsourced AI.
It is important to say that few are opposed to a developer using autocomplete while writing code. AI coding assistance is practically standard now. But generative art, AI-written dialogue, and AI-composed trailers are where the conversation gets complicated.
For the average gamer scrolling through Steam’s indie section, this isn’t hypothetical. You’ll see a lot of generative AI resources, often poorly vetted, like character portraits with too many fingers or dialogue trees written like Wikipedia entries.
This year’s Steam Next Fest had several games created almost entirely from AI-generated content, and players took notice. Some studios were called out for recycling the same images or for stitching resources together without real design cohesion.
AI games
To his credit, Sweeney is thinking about small developers. “I just hate to see Valve confiscate more and more opportunities from small developers,” he wrote in a follow-up post, arguing that AI labels stigmatize indie games that use the tools ethically.
That’s a fair 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 opposite is also true: gamers don’t want to feel cheated by buying games that outsource their entire creative soul to a neural network.
The broader concern here is not AI, but trust. Steam’s disclosure policy gives players the option to worry. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re just looking for a laid-back deck builder or another farming sim to relax with. But if someone does care, because they are an artist, have had their work removed, or simply want to support work made entirely by humans, then the AI label is valid. It’s not a scarlet letter. It’s a filter.
Sweeney’s proposal to remove AI tags entirely would leave players wondering. It would also eliminate a key accountability mechanism. If a developer releases a game with AI-generated assets, the current policy says: just say so. That’s not censorship. That’s information.
After all, not all AI content is created equal. A developer who uses AI to come up with mechanics and then spends six months refining them by hand is in a different category than one who tells a text-matching engine to “make a vampire dating sim” and publishes everything that comes out. And while the “Made with AI” label doesn’t explain that nuance, it opens the door to asking.
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