Valve says they want to improve discovery rather than filter developers over AI. This is EXACTLY what I said would happen last week (see screenshot.) There is no way out of the AI-enabled flood because it's the genie is out of the bottle. The frontier models are incredible, the open source models are not going away, they are going to get better and run on local hardware. The ONLY thing Valve can do is improve its discovery algorithm to match what Roblox and YouTube do. The problem of infinite content was already solved. It doesn't differ from how Tiktok, YouTube or Instagram already work. Roblox proves that the model is viable for both developers and users. The source of Valve's comments appears to be a presentation yesterday in Busan:

I have been wondering for many months now about the pro-Steam bots that come out of the woodwork the moment you say anything negative about Valve's store. I am not generally a conspiracy theorist but having experienced them, there is something unique here that I do not see in other patterns of user swarms on things like anti-AI games or Playstation physical discs, which I think have a larger percentage of real people to bots. Pro-Steam swarms have: 1. Many accounts with little-to-no followers, most unverified, most not following you 2. Instant community note swatting by an AI noter (says so in the descriptions of the notes) which abuses the notes systems; the bots coordinate to upvote the note so that it quickly appears 3. Absolute focus on incredibly minor, dumb points that only an LLM would care about (gross revenue of steam versus not; ironic given Steam's AI data labeling. Whoever is running the farm should label themselves!) At first you would think this would be a Valve-originated initiative, but this makes no sense. Gabe was one of the Microsoft OGs and has been a wealthy man since the 1990s. Valve is a tiny company that does no marketing because it has a printing press of money, and twitter doesn't really matter to them. Finally, and most importantly, they would never want to do something that could be traced to them. So it's not Valve. But who has financial incentive to put the money behind an operation like this? I think a lot about the large percentage of Steam usage that is in China. The Steam userbase that has Simplified Chinese as a default peaked at 54.6% of all Steam users in February 2026, though it ebbs and flows and can dip down to 30% depending on the month. The normal global client for Steam is not allowed in China; they have a China-specific version of Steam that is far more limited, and so many Chinese users access global Steam through VPNs, paying through local payment processors. I estimate that at least $30BN dollars has been spent by Chinese Steam players over the last decade, making it a huge part of Valve's business. I have always been surprised the Chinese government allowed these loopholes, as many other global services are normally unavailable, and the domestic client is so limited because it follows local laws, meaning that the government are permitting their populace to skip it. It would be very easy for the government to tell Alipay or Wechat Pay to stop processing Steam payments and the money tap from China would go off in a second. I suspect there is some financial incentive coming through here (whether the Chinese VPN networks or other places down in the payment chain) to quash any competition that would threaten the revenue coming from these Steam loopholes. I can't come up with a better theory, but am open to others from people; you know, ones who who aren't Steam bots.

LOTR is arguably the single greatest example of moral realism in all of literature. Injecting moral relativism into Middle Earth fundamentally misunderstands Tolkien and flies in the face of everything he stood for. And don't come at me with 'moral complexity.' Relativism isn't complexity. It's confusion. It's a collapse of distinctions that has nothing to offer but meaninglessness and despair. In order to have meaningful 'moral complexity,' you have to establish a distiction between light and dark, right and wrong, good and evil. The complexity arises among characters that must navigate a world where both forces act around, upon, and within them. What modern Hollywood calls 'moral complexity' is actually just the erasing the distinction between good and evil. If a story can't show you light and dark, it can't say anything meaningful about them. Classic storytellers understood this. Modern Hollywood has completely memory holed it.

Nice! Oculus creator Palmer Luckey’s company Anduril is teaming up with Qualcomm to make ultra rugged computers in America. As much of mobile computing has evolved into fragile art, there’s a huge unmet demand for durable work tools.

IMO, every game studio needs to be restaffed for AI and everyone rehired or sent packing. You can’t have this thing where people are bitter about “do more with less”. You need people who are excited about doing so. Doing more with less is about getting rid of the people who are a drain on the team and concentrating on the people who want to win.

@mahboi779668398 @slightextr This is what I am saying. It is the weirdest fucking thing that you get swarms of these low follower bots that are pro Steam. It makes no sense because I don't think Valve would go out of its way to support networks like this so I am puzzled as to who is actually behind it.

@mahboi779668398 @slightextr This is what I am saying. It is the weirdest fucking thing that you get swarms of these low follower bots that are pro Steam. It makes no sense because I don't think Valve would go out of its way to support networks like this so I am puzzled as to who is actually behind it.

Hey everyone, there’s been some questions going on around here about Epic’s use of AI in Unreal Engine development. I’ve answered some questions from the good folks at This Week in Videogames. TLDR: Yes we are using AI in UE development (as we actually mentioned back at Unreal Fest) and it’s helping with pretty much everything.

Disney is all-in on AI. If they are with it, any other media company is a fool to not be. Disney's new CTO came from and their upcoming games are all with AI-first development teams.

In simple terms: Anthropic is already generating significant revenue even though its biggest corporate customers are still spending only a tiny fraction of their budgets on Claude — suggesting lots of room to grow within existing customers.