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The battle over “made with AI” tags could shape how players judge games
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(Image credit: Gamescom / Valve)
- 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 would reduce transparency for players who care how games are made
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is calling on video game storefronts like Steam to ditch their “Made with AI” tags, arguing they’re outdated before they’ve even finished rolling out.
“AI will be involved in nearly all future production,” he wrote in a post on X, insisting that labeling games that use it is pointless. “It makes no sense.” Steam, for now, disagrees.
Valve’s popular digital storefront introduced a policy earlier this year requiring developers to disclose if generative AI was used in the making of a game. That might be in the writing, artwork, code, or anything else. The goal is to let players know what they’re downloading. That’s the part Sweeney takes issue with, suggesting that flagging AI in 2025 is like putting a warning sticker on games that use 3D graphics or autocomplete in code.
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Agreed. The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation. It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.November 26, 2025
But it turns out people do care. And not just in an abstract way. For an increasing number of players, developers, and digital storefronts, knowing how a game was made, especially in a world awash with generative AI tools, is part of the purchase decision. And what Sweeney sees as inevitable, others see as the start of a much bigger problem: games full of outsourced, flavorless, AI-slop.
It's important to say that few object to a developer using autocomplete while writing code. AI coding assistance is practically standard now. But generative art, AI-written dialogue, and AI-composited trailers are where the conversation gets tricky.
To the average player scrolling through Steam’s indie section, this isn’t hypothetical. You'll see plenty of generative AI assets, often poorly vetted ones like character portraits with too many fingers or dialogue trees written like Wikipedia entries.
Steam’s Next Fest this year had multiple games built almost entirely out of AI-generated content, and players noticed. Some studios were called out for recycling the same image prompts or slapping together assets with no real design cohesion.
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To Sweeney’s credit, he’s thinking about small developers. “I just hate to see Valve confiscate ever more opportunity from small developers,” he wrote in a follow-up post, arguing that AI tags stigmatize indie games that use the tools ethically.
That’s a fair concern. Nobody wants a world where one-person studios are penalized for using Midjourney to sketch out background art or ChatGPT to brainstorm quest descriptions. But the reverse is also true: players don’t want to feel tricked into buying games that outsourced all their creative soul to a neural net.
The broader concern here isn’t about AI, it’s about trust. Steam’s disclosure policy gives players the option to care. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re just looking for a chill deck-builder or another farming sim to unwind with. But if someone does care, because they’re an artist, they’ve had their work scraped, or they just want to support fully human-made work, then the AI tag is valid. It’s not a scarlet letter. It’s a filter.
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Sweeney’s proposal to eliminate AI tags entirely would leave players guessing. It would also remove a key mechanism for accountability. If a developer releases a game with AI-generated assets, the current policy says: just say so. That’s not censorship. That’s information.
After all, not all AI content is created equal. A developer who uses AI to brainstorm mechanics and then spends six months refining them by hand is in a different category than one who tells a text-to-game engine to “make a vampire dating sim” and publishes whatever comes out. And while the “Made with AI” tag doesn’t explain that nuance, it opens the door to asking.
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Eric Hal SchwartzSocial Links NavigationContributorEric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.
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