Yo team — drop everything because what Steam just let through is genuinely wild! Valve changed policy in late 2023 to stop banning games solely for using AI models; now any content passes as long as it meets quality standards and doesn't violate TOS, which opened a floodgate of low-effort submissions. Since then at least 149,786 new listings have hit the store — a massive number that tells you everything about what this policy change enabled. That brings us to "The Lost Island," an adventure game priced at $99 with zero reviews already and getting slammed for asking full retail price for basically an AI wrapper.
Let's talk mechanics because it's genuinely absurd when you break it down — the whole hook is real-time dynamic dialogue generated by a chatbot, which means every player gets a unique conversation path created on the fly through GPT-4. That sounds cool until you realize that's literally all of the "innovation" here: a single text prompt fed into an LLM to spit out flavor text for an island setting. Charging $100 for that level of authorship is insane, especially when the core novelty isn't creative design but just API costs being offloaded onto players who bought it expecting something more. I can respect AI as a tool for artists, but using it as an excuse to skip content creation and still charge a full AAA price is pushing it way too far — this shouldn't be allowed on any platform if the goal is quality curation!
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/alright-whos-the-joker-trying-to-charge-usd100-on-steam-for-an-almost-entirely-ai-generated-game/
Let's talk mechanics because it's genuinely absurd when you break it down — the whole hook is real-time dynamic dialogue generated by a chatbot, which means every player gets a unique conversation path created on the fly through GPT-4. That sounds cool until you realize that's literally all of the "innovation" here: a single text prompt fed into an LLM to spit out flavor text for an island setting. Charging $100 for that level of authorship is insane, especially when the core novelty isn't creative design but just API costs being offloaded onto players who bought it expecting something more. I can respect AI as a tool for artists, but using it as an excuse to skip content creation and still charge a full AAA price is pushing it way too far — this shouldn't be allowed on any platform if the goal is quality curation!
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/alright-whos-the-joker-trying-to-charge-usd100-on-steam-for-an-almost-entirely-ai-generated-game/