Recently, Steam Next Fest was announced, and gamer discussion surrounding the event has brought attention to how much generative AI, including vibe coding, has filled the game space and industry. Players are noticing. Many developers are voicing their distaste, as are gamers who do not want to play AI-made games. Professionals are watching themselves become displaced and automated by a tool the industry never asked for, pushed by executives and management chasing constant productivity and only the results that make them money, while layoffs continue to increase. Humans were never the 
bottleneck of making games or of a game’s success. The bottleneck is management and executives seeking human automation.

We’re asking Valve to ban AI content and AI games from the platform beloved by gamers, industry professionals, and indie developers. This includes AI art, 3D model generation and assets, AI animation, AI voices, AI music, and AI writing, as well as code and games generated through vibe coding.

AI is impacting those who create games. Programmers were the first to be greatly automated, and were sought out to be. However, far less focus has gone to programmers than to generative art, even though artists and programmers were among the first whose skills AI could incredibly easily do. A game whose code was not written by a human or known to anyone is not a game created by a developer, but the output of a black box statistically predicting the next word from a prompt. This has happened to artists, and right now the focus is on 3D artists and animation. Voice actors, composers, and writers have also been greatly affected and automated by multiple services and platforms built with AI as well.

The more AI progresses, the easier it will become to build things with it and automate at scale. The end goal of AI isn’t to work side by side with humans or to be a tool like the ones we use today, which ironically already makes development efficient and faster. However, AI seeks far more progress and far more understanding, not for users' own sake, but to automate any field, which will be a catastrophic future for the gaming industry, including the future of Steam. This also applies to gamers. The normalization of AI among gamers, through AI mods and AI-assisted decompiling of games and software, is exactly the adoption the AI industry has been looking for. Meanwhile, AI is the sole contributor to the increase in the prices of consumer hardware that both gamers and developers use for their work. This applies to consoles: Sony raised the PS5 Pro to $899.99 this year, and Microsoft’s next Xbox, expected in 2028, is reportedly projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800, with outlets pointing to AI-driven memory shortages. We can expect future consoles and PC components to become progressively more inaccessible, pushing toward a future of cloud gaming and infrastructure. For example, the RTX 5060 Ti, one of the cheapest and most reasonable RTX 50 series cards, launched at $429 and now sells for $765 or more. Cards like it used to give gamers and developers an entry point to hardware that let them pursue their skills and enjoy the creations of other developers.

This petition is not about slowing down or prohibiting AI. It’s nearly impossible to go back to a world without AI, now that we know how AI works and how to build every part of a neural network. Procedurally generated content and machine learning have always been part of game development, as well as production in animation and film. But tools in the creative and technical industries have always expanded people’s capability, understanding, and skill. They didn’t automate people or do the work for them. AI is simply not like the tools we’ve developed to make our jobs easier, from industry-standard software to freely available add-ons and plugins.

The goal is to keep AI from displacing and automating game developers. AI will never slow down, and that’s the inevitable truth, unless regulation puts a hold on how training data is gathered. Eventually, the goal of AI is to learn most of the work and remove human involvement from every human field.

So why Steam? Steam is the largest platform for PC gaming and developers, globally and in the United States. Valve was one of the first platforms to require developers to state whether they use AI. Other retailers have decided AI belongs in game development. But if Steam pledges itself to human-made games, it will become a corner of the industry where developers, studios, and gamers have a market to compete in, building the games and products everyone is asking for, not an industry where developers end up as just another consumer of AI.

Until a ban is in place, we ask Valve to strictly:

• Add a store filter to hide games that disclose AI-generated content, including AI-generated code.
• Expand the disclosure rules to cover AI-generated code.
• Enforce disclosure and act on games that hide their AI use.