Steam Week in Review: AI disclosures enter the discourse again, as Epic CEO calls them 'just as partisan as mandatory political essays'

Valve's mandatory AI disclosures are once again at the centre of the discourse, mostly thanks to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who has long been vocally against them. The debate has been reheated in the same month Epic Games proudly announced it will pivot to "AI first" development on its forthcoming Star Wars and Marvel crossover. Then it announced an AI game jam, before walking back its requirement for AI to be used.

But the true battleground has been on Elon Musk's X, where Sweeney's refocused his reticule on Steam. One of his most repeated notions this time around is that forcing developers to disclose AI use is inherently political.

"Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they're [Valve is] helping organize is abhorrent," he wrote on October 24 in response to some AI loving guy who works at an AI company.

Later, to another user: "These AI statements are just as partisan as mandatory political essays or forcing developers to list their voting history to drive cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions."

And then: "There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns."

(Later, when a user wrote this is a "big opening for Epic if Valve doesn't figure this out", Sweeney replied "Yep!")

On October 25: "They [Valve] are burning down the businesses of good developers to enforce their politics. A year from now they’ll all be using AI, games will be better and made faster, and they’ll pretend their hate mob posting the death threats wasn’t wrong but merely misunderstood."

In Valve's defence—and I rise in Valve's defence trepidatiously—the AI disclosure was initially imposed due to a seeming uncertainty with how use of this "legally murky" technology was unfolding in the game dev space. "Today's changes are the result of us improving our understanding of the landscape and risks in this space, as well as talking to game developers using AI, and those building AI tools," Valve wrote at the time. "This will allow us to be much more open to releasing games using AI technology on Steam."

"We'll continue to learn from the games being submitted to Steam, and the legal progress around AI, and will revisit this decision when necessary."

Why didn't Epic Games Store do the same? I'm not taking a swipe at EGS here, easy as it may be, but Epic Games' shopfront publishes a tiny slither of what Valve's does. In 2024, 1,100 games were released on EGS. Steam's figure was 18,433. Given that volume and the "legally murky" environment, the AI disclosure starts to look a whole lot more sensible.

Leaving aside whether insisting on AI disclosures in 2026 is inherently political—and I'm not denying it is, if inadvertently—Sweeney's posts on X do labour to imply that Valve is an anti-AI company taking a steadfast anti-AI stance, which, manifestly, it is not. Gabe Newell himself was an enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI in its infancy, donating $20 million to the then nonprofit enterprise. His most recent public comments on AI are not unlike those made by very many other enthusiastic tech billionaires, albeit less hyperbolic. That Valve will refresh its AI disclosure requirement in the medium to long term future seems inevitable to me.

But I do wonder what Sweeney dislikes more: anti-AI sentiment, or Steam?

It's an unusual time for him to revive this debate with such vigor. We are living through peak slop. The majority of games that release on Steam every week are irredeemable. The latest Claude model is facilitating the rapid thieving of game concepts and even code. Graphical assets, in-game music, in-game voices, generated using AI, immediately signal their provenance and are ugly as hell.

I don't doubt AI use in game dev will increase, but it will probably need to tend sharply away from the sensorial. Optimistically, most serious developers will realise that the vast majority of us don't want to see or hear that shit. I suspect that for most people, anti-AI sentiment, at least where games are concerned, isn't principled: it's a visceral emotional response.

Top Steam games by revenue (October 13 - 20)

Modern Warfare 4's official release date was October 23: its placement here is thanks to a pre-order incentive granting early access to the campaign. It's not a bad result, obviously, but I'm surprised it didn't topple PUBG. COD games do seem more spiritually at home on console, I guess.

Enshrouded hit 1.0 after a stint in early access, hence its reappearance here. Of particular note is something not shown in the above list: Over the Hill, the chillaxed offroading sim by the creators of Art of Rally, hit number 11 on the revenue charts for this period. That's a damn good result, and well deserved.

To provide a little bit more (slightly random) context: the new Castlevania game, which released on the same day as Over the Hill, came in at number 15. It's surprising that an offroading game would outperform a new entry in one of the medium's most beloved series. But then: the Snowrunner and Mudrunner games are extremely popular.

Last week's Steam deep cuts