- 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 tags will reduce transparency for players who care about how games are made.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is calling on video game stores like Steam to ditch “Made with Artificial Intelligence” tags, arguing they are outdated before they've even finished releasing.
“AI will be involved in almost all future projects,” he wrote in a post on X, insisting that the label games that use it's pointless. “This doesn't make sense.” Steam doesn't agree with this yet.
Popular digital store Valve earlier this year introduced a policy requiring developers to disclose whether generative artificial intelligence was used in the creation of a game. This could be in text, illustration, code, or anything else. The goal is to let players know what they are downloading. Sweeney argues, suggesting that labeling AI in 2025 would be like putting a warning sticker on games that use 3D graphics or code completion.
Agreed. The AI tag is relevant for art exhibitions to reveal attribution, as well as for digital content licensing markets where buyers need to understand the rights situation. This 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 care. And not just abstractly. For a growing number of players, developers and digital stores, knowing how a game was created, especially in a world awash with generative AI tools, is part of the purchasing decision. And what Sweeney sees as inevitable, others see as the beginning of a much bigger problem: games full of bland, outsourced AI crap.
It's important to note that few people object to developers using autocomplete when writing code. AI-powered coding assistance is now almost standard. But generative art, AI-written dialogue, and AI-generated trailers are where the conversation gets tricky.
For the average player browsing the indie section of Steam, this is not hypothetical. You'll see a lot of generative AI assets, often poorly vetted, such as character portraits with too many fingers or dialogue trees written like Wikipedia entries.
This year's Steam Next Fest featured several games made almost entirely from AI-generated content, and players took notice. Some studios had to reuse the same images or combine assets without any real design integrity.
AI games
To Sweeney's credit, he's thinking about small developers. “I just hate to see Valve confiscate more and more features from small developers,” he wrote in a follow-up post, arguing that AI tags stigmatize indie games that use these tools ethically.
This is a fair concern. Nobody wants a world where one-person studios are penalized for using Midjourney to sketch out background graphics or ChatGPT to brainstorm quest descriptions. But the opposite is also true: players don't want to feel tricked into buying games that put their entire creative soul into a neural network.
In a broader sense, this is not about artificial intelligence, but about trust. Steam's Disclosure Policy gives players the opportunity to show they care. Maybe not. Maybe you're just looking for a laid back deck builder or other farming simulator to relax with. But if someone cares because they are an artist, their work has been taken down, or they just want to support an entirely human-made work, then the AI tag is valid. This is not the scarlet letter. This is a filter.
Sweeney's proposal to eliminate AI tags entirely will leave players guessing. It would also remove a key accountability mechanism. If a developer releases a game with AI-generated assets, the current policy is: just say so. This is not censorship. This is information.
After all, not all AI content is created equal. A developer who uses AI to brainstorm a mechanic and then spends six months refining it by hand is in a different category than someone who tells a text-to-game engine to “make a vampire dating sim” and publishes whatever comes out. While the “Made with AI” tag doesn’t explain this nuance, it does open the door to asking questions.
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