Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney criticized rival Valve for forcing studios to disclose when they use AI in game development.
Starting in 2024, Valve will require developers to disclose on Steam whether generative AI was used to create their games. This will appear on your game’s store page in a section called “Disclosure of AI-generated content.”
This was reportedly adjusted in January 2026 to make it clear to developers that the two main types of AI that must be disclosed are the use of AI to generate content for games, or AI content generated during gameplay, and that “AI-powered tools” such as code helpers do not need to be disclosed.
In a new interview with PC Gamer, Sweeney criticized Steam’s requirements, arguing that developers who declare they use AI to generate content for their games risk being vilified by players.
“It’s unfortunate that we’re in this situation,” Sweeney said. “It’s unfortunate that so many developers are currently in this position.
“If you launch a game and you want to promote it as widely as possible, you need to publish it to Steam so people can wishlist it. And if you want to play it on Steam, you need to attach this AI scarlet letter to your product. And now there’s a community of hate trying to kill the game.
“I think Valve is really irresponsible. Valve shouldn’t do that, because it makes it very, very difficult for game developers to have a chance of success. They have to choose between not using tools that can make them significantly more productive, or if they do, they’re probably going to fail competitively.”
Sweeney’s comments aren’t surprising considering Epic Games started talking more this month about the upcoming Unreal Engine 6 and its focus on integration with AI models like Claude and Gemini.
At the State of Unreal event in Chicago earlier this month, Epic demonstrated how AI Large-Scale Language Models (LLMs) can be used directly in Unreal Engine 6 to generate content. During the demonstration, we used the Claude prompt window to request items and provide a virtual apartment obtained from the asset library.
We then showed how you can change the lighting of a city scene by asking Claude to change the time and by using a static photo as a reference. Epic emphasized that developers have ultimate control over their creations and can manually change the results.
Last year, Sweeney said in X that there was no point for digital game stores to report if a game used AI during development, arguing that “it doesn’t make sense for game stores where AI will be involved in almost all future productions.”
