How my Indie Video Game got Banned Off Steam for AI Usage
A few months back I discovered that there were a lot of Hentai games being sold on Steam and decided to see if I could get in on the market using AI Generated Art. See my video here outlining the development process
Generally, I took inspiration/prompts from the r/WaifuDiffusion subreddit:
And replaced all the character defining portions of all provided prompts with two characters I came up with, and generated 1000s of images using various prompts. I picked some of the best ones, refined them by generating grids of images with the same prompt and seed, but varying certain parameters like so:
Picked the best ones, and maybe used a bit of inpainting if there were any remaining issues in the image. Then I built a simple puzzle game where I could input these images, and have players solve a puzzle based off the image. Overall a couple of weeks of work generating images in the background, while I learned basic game dev, and I had a mostly functional final product.
I added translations for the few UI components I had for the most popular languages on Steam, and released the game. I made quite a bit of money off the first, and was hoping to keep generating more art, plugging it into my game framework, and releasing it as a new game to keep selling copies.
Unfortunately Steam has started taking an anti-AI generated stance and had shut down my attempts to create a second game:
For more details, check out my video on the AI Ban:
Steam had really seemed to have done this before. I looked over Google and Reddit and nobody had ever mentioned a ban based off AI content before. I made a post on Reddit which got very little traction. A few people had also submitted games with AI content before so they assumed it might have just been a quality based issue, and to re-submit my game after improving the quality of any art. However, I improved my art, and my game was still banned. Made another Reddit post about that which flew under the radar for 3 weeks, until it blew up and articles and tweets referring to it started to surface. A few other examples of people’s game’s getting banned were now showing up, and it seems like this is a decision that Steam has taken against AI assets.
Personally, while I would have liked to make a lot of money off this little scheme, I’m not too disappointed in this as my game was admittedly low effort. However, this decision has a lot of implications on the game development community at large, which I think Steam is still in the process of finding out.
How are they going to deal with existing games on their market with AI?
An existing AAA game titled Atomic Heart has a section involving AI generated artwork.
And the game This girl does not exist was created entirely by AI.
So will Steam’s decision impact these games, and any other with AI already in them, including my own game?
Unity is the most common game development engine used by Indie Game Devs, and they’re also working on adding AI tools for assisting users with the generation of content.
Will Steam have similar issues with any games with any content developed from these tools? And if so, that essentially locks these tools from usage by any devs who want their game to eventually be published on Steam. Overall, the future of AI is hard to predict, and it seems like the direction Steam takes with it’s decision on how to handle AI will have a lot of impacts on the future of the game development ecosystem.