That's corporate speak for "seen ✅". I know people love Valve, but this is very standard playbook for how they operate in PR. Acknowledge the problem, say they are working on it, maybe in a year or 2 we get a nugget of an attempt to kinda poke at the problem.

Maybe Valve will prove me wrong here since this is ramping up quickly, but this also isn't anything that will threaten their monopoly in short order. If I was GOG, I'd be taking a hard anti-AI stance between Valve's timid response and Tim Sweeney's full on cannonball and reinforce what they already do in curating for handcrafted games.

---–

And I don't think the rest of their statement is promising. First part (the title) is irrelevant: you don't need to gatekeep tools to gatekeep obvious slop copies of games already announced and upcoming on your platform. Let along a bare quality window. Valve did that gatekeeping for the first 60% of its life. Maybe we need that back.

Second part is borderline tonedeaf :

Noting that games were being cloned long before AI came on the scene—just at a much slower pace—Giardino suggested that developers can protect their work by first building a strong community around it, and then focusing on continual improvements: "Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective."

So, "yeah just market more and work harder". The two expensive parts of making a game. From a billion dollar corporation. If any other AAA studio said this it'd be ratio'd to hell.

They aren't letting slop roll over them

And yet it rolls.

At least two of them, apparently, one with even the same exact name 🤮 (how is that allowed?).

Game's not my cup of tea, but I tagged both clones as slop (can't report them because none of the reasons would apply, as this kind of cloning is still legal), not that it'll do any good.

Least Vave could do is add “blatant slop clone” to the reasons to report a game.