STEAM Greenlight was an incredibly controversial process on Steam whereby almost anyone could sell a game on the online storefront.
It required a certain number of community votes to gain Greenlight status, and could then be sold on Steam.
However, there were easy ways around this, such as giving away your game for free if people voted for it, or even paying for votes.
This means that low-quality games that contained numerous bugs or weren’t even unplayable, managed to make it through the Greenlight service.
Steam discontinued the Greenlight system in 2017, in the hopes of increasing the quality of games on the storefront.
However, a recent announcement has fans concerned that the quality of its games could drop again.
In June 2023, Steam announced that games made with AI-generated content would not be allowed on the platform.
While the majority of games contain AI, such as how enemies attack or how NPCs react to you, this AI is programmed by the game developer.
Steam was expressly forbidding the use of AI to generate parts of the game such as the in-game art or music.
AI-generated content is mostly seen as lower quality, as it contains numerous errors that human work does not.
It is also gray from an ethical standpoint, as AI is used to do work once carried out by humans.
Steam has now reversed the decision to ban AI-generated content, saying that “the vast majority” of AI games will be allowed on the platform.
The blog post reads: “Today, after spending the last few months learning more about this space and talking with game developers, we are making changes to how we handle games that use AI technology.
“This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it.”
The latest statement has raised concerns from fans that Steam will return to the Wild West it was in the Greenlight days.
This is made worse by the fact that Steam says it will curate content based on players reporting issues such as copyright infringement, rather than checking before release.
If you want to read more about Steam, check out the free Portal game you can grab right now.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
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