- Steam currently requires developers to disclose any use of generative AI in their games.
- Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney wants Steam to stop tagging games that use AI
- Critics say removing AI labels would reduce transparency for players who care about game development.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is urging video game stores like Steam to ditch their “Made with AI” labels, saying they will be obsolete before they even hit the market.
“AI will be involved in almost all future productions,” he wrote in an article on X, stressing that labeling games that use AI is unnecessary. “It makes no sense.” Steam does not currently agree.
Valve’s popular digital store introduced a policy earlier this year that required developers to disclose if generative AI was used in a game’s development. It can be text, images, code or something else. The goal is for players to know what they are downloading. This is the part Sweeney disagrees with, suggesting that labeling AI 2025 would be like putting a warning label on games that use 3D graphics or auto-complete in their code.
Agree on. The AI label is relevant to art exhibitions for authorship disclosure and to digital content licensing markets, where buyers need to understand the rights situation. This does not make sense for game stores, since artificial intelligence will be involved in almost all future productions.November 26, 2025
But it turns out people do care. And not just in the abstract. For more and more gamers, developers and digital retailers, knowing how a game was made is part of the purchase decision, especially in a world full of generative AI tools. And what Sweeney sees as inevitable, others see as the beginning of a much bigger problem: games full of bland, outsourced AI llamas.
It is important to say that few people object to a developer using autocompletion when writing code. Support for AI encryption is now almost standard. But with generative art, AI-written dialogue, and AI-curated trailers, conversation becomes difficult.
For the average gamer browsing Steam’s Indie section, this isn’t hypothetical. You’ll see a lot of generative AI resources, often poorly controlled, like character portraits with too many fingers or dialogue trees written like Wikipedia articles.
During this year’s Steam Next Fest, there were several games made almost entirely of AI-generated content, and players took notice. Some studios have been asked to reuse the same images or combine elements without any real cohesion in the design.
game with artificial intelligence
It’s true that Sweeney has small developers in mind. “I hate to see Valve take more and more opportunities away from small developers,” he wrote in a later post, arguing that AI labels 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 design backgrounds or ChatGPT to brainstorm mission statements. But the opposite is also true: gamers don’t want to be tempted to buy games where their entire creative soul is entrusted to a neural network.
It’s not a question of artificial intelligence, it’s a question of trust. Steam’s Disclosure Policy empowers players to take care of themselves. Maybe not. Maybe you’re just looking for a fun deck builder or other farming simulator to relax with. But if someone cares because they’re an artist, their work has been removed, or simply wants to support work made entirely by humans, then the AI label is valid. It is not a scarlet letter. It’s a filter.
Sweeney’s suggestion to remove AI tags entirely will keep players guessing. It would also eliminate an important accountability mechanism. If a developer releases a game with AI-generated assets, the current policy says: 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 come up with mechanisms and then manually refine them over six months is in a different category than someone who asks a text-to-text engine to “create a vampire encounter simulator” and publishes the result. And while the tagline “Made with AI” doesn’t explain this nuance, it does open the door to questions.
