Epic's Alexander Rehm says Valve's AI slop response falls short

Epic Games online services product director Alexander Rehm has publicly argued that Valve's response to Steam's flood of generative-AI clone games "isn't enough," posting his critique on LinkedIn last week — days before Valve announced changes to Steam's review process.

The timing matters. Valve's new requirements arrive in response to a deluge of games evidently fueled, in part, by generative AI. But the changes may not slow the slop. Valve says it doesn't want to dictate what "tools" developers use, even though Steam now requires AI disclosures on game store pages. The stated goal: speed up the review process while enacting new requirements.

What does this change for small developers?

Rehm's core objection is resource asymmetry. Valve's approach, he says, "is a reasonable strategy if you've got the runway and team to do it, and not much use if you're one or two people who shipped a single clever mechanic."

That camp is large. Most developers on Steam fall into it.

His summary is blunt: "If you're building anything indie sized right now, 'keep improving forever' isn't a moat, it's a tax only the well funded can pay."

Rehm also addressed reports of developers being extorted by AI users threatening to clone a game unless paid off. Valve told staff it hasn't seen such reports, and that extortion is a job for law enforcement, not the storefront.

"Which to me reads like a platform that still sees this as someone else's problem," Rehm says.

He echoes counterarguments that Valve's position prompted across the industry: How long can Valve defer? When do material solutions arrive? How do teams behind hotly anticipated games handle copycats beating them to launch with near-identical titles? Valve's own review slowdown, evidenced by its recent backlog, suggests it hasn't found the answer.

The glass house problem

Here's where the story turns. Several replies to Rehm's post point out Epic Games' own record on generative AI. Former Valve developer Chet Faliszek was the sharpest, noting Epic's AI-first pivot, its AI-mandatory game jam, and its "vibe coded" game launcher.

"What an absolutely dishonest read of mixing an off the cuff response in a Q&A with a written statement so you can say they see it as someone else's problem and that they aren't addressing it," Faliszek responds. "I love how you make sure to not to link to either... All the while Tim [Sweeney] screams it is a political act the same as revealing someone's voting record to have an AI disclosure... so explain - how does that work?"

Sweeney has repeatedly criticized Valve over Steam's AI disclosures. Those disclosures aren't mirrored on the Epic Games Store — even though Epic's Fab marketplace does mandate AI disclosures.

Sweeney defends the difference. "This is a business to business marketplace," he wrote of Fab in an October tweet. "Many Fab customers are operating under contracts that require them to understand the providence of all content in their game (including Steam's own contract that I've complained about) and they cannot buy assets without this info."

Unreal Engine 6 and the slop question

Sweeney has also promoted the generative AI features of Unreal Engine 6. One video game lawyer told GamesRadar+ that the engine risks legal blowback by ignoring copycat potential.

On the underlying copyright questions, Sweeney points to the Anthropic court ruling. "The Anthropic court ruling found they were liable for copyright infringement when torrenting pirated content (as the article quotes me on), but they found that the training itself was fair use," he writes. "Other courts have found that whether particular content produced by AI was infringing dependent on its similarity to the copyrighted work."

Then there's Fortnite. Epic's push to turn Fortnite into a Roblox-style platform via Unreal Engine integration raises the same question Rehm put to Valve: how would Epic control a slop flood of its own?

Chalmers Robotics Society chairman Maximilian Ygdell put it directly to Rehm: "Epic was fine with using AI trained on others' work, now the same technology is used to empower the people and suddenly it's an issue? Am I missing something here?"

No answer yet. What's clear is that both storefront operators now face the same unresolved question — who pays the cost of AI clones, the platform or the developer — and neither has a working answer. Watch whether Epic adds AI disclosure rules to the Epic Games Store, or whether Steam's new review requirements measurably cut the clone deluge.