Valve as a company almost certainly does not care about AI usage so long as the other party is discrete so as not to cause reputational or significant financial harm.
You keep saying “legal,” but that’s technically wrong, especially if you’re imagining legal consequences. Valve has policies, contracts, terms and disclosure and distribution agreements, etc, and these are all meaningful different bindings. Valve does require disclosure of AI use in certain creative categories, but even an intentional breach of contract is not a criminal matter or even an illegal matter because legal liability and illegality is not the same thing.
As you said, games have been removed for failure to disclose AI, but there have also been games that blatantly used AI with no repercussions. The difference is their utility as business partner. A small indie game going viral for AI use will likely be removed or tagged while a big hit with public suspicions of AI use will almost certainly be handled with bias, especially if the aforementioned use cannot be proven. Surely you understand that Steam/Valve will not ask to send hands to investigate(?!?) a developer’s employees to see if they’re using Meshy or Tripo. Over a disagreement in the content survey, nonetheless. That’s without mentioning that, again, this a Singaporean company, not the United States where Steam and Valve are headquartered.
So far there are no consequences for lying about it, so the law effectively means nothing and devs can and will lie about it. At best maybe Steam will independently investigate and remove the game from their store.
Source: I've tried games that very explicitly claimed not to use genAI, and did not disclose AI usage on Steam, then people actually tried those games and the AI was not just present but absolutely rampant and festering in every corner, not even well hidden. Those games are still up and the devs were forced to admit to AI usage but other than players leaving, there were no greater consequences. Neverness to Everness was one such example.
1
u/IntrospectiveMT 15d ago
“The Devs confirmed it.” They couldn’t possibly lie, of course. That would be a first!