IT Home On October 26, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been criticizing Steam’s AI content disclosure rules for several months. During the ongoing debate with Valve over Steam’s AI policy, he has spoken publicly once again.
Just a few days after Epic completed the redesign of its store, Tim Sweeney posted on the X platform, criticizing Steam’s mandatory AI disclosure policy as repulsive. It was only after this redesign that people realized that Epic had actually been using “vibe-coded” methods to promote AI tools in its internal workflows.
Fal media company’s Matt Workman presented a view that by 2026, the significance of AI disclosure will be minimal. Tim Sweeney commented on this post. He said on X that the AI disclosure label is equivalent to forcing developers to write a “political statement that can easily be used as a tool by online extremist groups to attack them.”
Although using generative AI has drawn criticism from many players against developers, many studios say that AI is just a tool to assist, and it is not the same as creative ideas or content creation itself.
IT Home noticed that in a previous interview about Steam AI’s policy, Tim Sweeney said: “I think Valve is acting very irresponsible,” and also mentioned that there is a “group of people who want to destroy the gaming industry.” However, Valve has always held its original stance, and platform regulations still require developers to inform players if they use AI-generated content.
This issue is not new: Steam began requiring studios and developers to disclose the use of generative AI in their production processes as early as 2024. However, now developers no longer need to report to Valve any AI tools used to assist with coding. Steam only requires that when visual assets, music, game mechanics, text, and promotional materials are created by generative AI, they must be labeled.
Since then, AI tagging has gradually become the norm. Among the more than 8,600 trial versions at the Steam New Arrivals event, nearly 1,700 have been tagged with this method, and generative AI accounted for nearly 20% of them. Many popular titles, such as “Light and Shadow: Team 33” and “Arc Raiders”, also received AI tagging, still achieving extremely high popularity.
Epic has also launched a new version of its marketplace that uses ambient encoding technology. The official claim is that it starts up in just 5.47 seconds, which is faster than Steam’s 10-second startup time. However, many Epic Marketplace users have reported various bugs and issues with the new version, and Epic has not fixed them yet.
And Steam uses a similar operational approach to large online games to retain users. It has never responded to Tim Sweeney’s numerous criticisms on various issues, including the recent increase in prices for the Steam Deck.