Steam requires AI game disclosures – Epic’s CEO says they’re meaningless
- 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 say removing AI tags would reduce transparency for gamers who care about how games are made.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is calling on video game stores like Steam to ditch their “Made with AI” tags, arguing that they are obsolete before they’ve even completed their rollout.
“AI will be involved in almost all future productions,” he wrote in an article on X, insisting that there is no point in labeling games that use it. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Steam, for now, disagrees.
Valve’s popular digital storefront introduced a policy earlier this year requiring developers to disclose whether generative AI was used in the creation of a game. It could be in the writing, artwork, code, or anything else. The goal is to let players know what they are downloading. This is the part that Sweeney takes issue with, suggesting that reporting AI in 2025 is like putting a warning sticker on games that use 3D graphics or autocomplete in code.
Agreed. The AI tag is relevant to art exhibitions for authorship disclosure and to digital content licensing markets where buyers need to understand the rights situation. This makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in almost all future productions.November 26, 2025
But it turns out people care. And not just in the abstract. For a growing number of gamers, developers, and digital storefronts, knowing how a game was made, especially in a world flooded 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 outsourced, flavorless AI.
It’s important to say that few people object to a developer using autocomplete when writing code. AI coding assistance is now almost standard. But generative art, AI-written dialogue, and AI-composed trailers are where the conversation gets tricky.
For the average gamer browsing Steam’s indie section, this isn’t hypothetical. You’ll see lots of generative AI assets, often poorly vetted, like character portraits with too many fingers or dialogue trees written like Wikipedia entries.
This year, Steam’s Next Fest featured several games built almost entirely from AI-generated content, and players took notice. Some studios have been called out for recycling the same image prompts or grouping elements together without real design cohesion.
AI games
It must be recognized that Sweeney thinks of small developers. “I hate to see Valve taking away more and more opportunities from small developers,” he wrote in a follow-up post, arguing that AI tags stigmatize indie games that use the tools ethically.
This is a legitimate concern. No one wants a world where individual studios are penalized for using Midjourney to draw background art or ChatGPT to brainstorm quest descriptions. But the opposite is also true: gamers don’t want to feel cheated into buying games that have outsourced all their creative soul to a neural network.
The broader concern here is not about AI, but about trust. Steam’s disclosure policy gives players the option to care. Maybe not. Maybe you’re just looking for a relaxing deck builder or another farming sim to relax with. But if someone cares, because they’re an artist, their work has been removed, or they just want to support entirely human-made work, then the AI label is valid. It’s not a scarlet letter. It’s a filter.
Sweeney’s proposal to eliminate AI tags altogether would keep players guessing. It would also remove a key accountability mechanism. If a developer releases a game with AI-generated assets, the current policy says: just say so. This is not censorship. It’s 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 asks a text-to-text engine to “create a vampire encounter sim” and publishes everything that comes out. And while the “Made with AI” tag doesn’t explain this nuance, it does open the door to questions.
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