An indie developer says he’s removing his game from Steam after his new girlfriend criticized his use of AI.
Hardest is a free-to-play roguelike card game that uses Rock, Paper, Scissors rules, but adds a number of new abilities, such as stopping time and conjuring tsunamis.
The game was released on Steam on July 1, 2025, but developer rakuel (real name Eero Laine) says he plans to delist the game on January 30.
Lane said the game would be removed because the card illustrations were created using AI image generation, which was initially thought to be OK.
However, Lane says his new girlfriend convinced him that generated AI was ethically wrong, and he decided to remove the game from Steam entirely rather than replace all images with his own original work.
“I made this game a few months later in the summer and thought of using AI because there is so much brainwashing of students in universities and all the tools are provided for free so you can generate unlimited images for free,” he said.
“But we realized that AI is not actually free, and it has a huge impact on the economy and the environment. Some AI companies can use the mere existence of this game as a reason to increase investment in their AI companies, but it benefits no one and instead sucks the resources of the economy away from hard-working people.
“Since I coded everything myself, in the future I can create new games using real assets if I want to, but the game as it exists in its current form is an embarrassment to all game makers and players.
“The only ethical thing to do is [decision] To delete the game from Steam. My girlfriend, who we’ve been dating for a month, made me realize this. ”
Starting in 2024, Steam will require developers to disclose whether generative AI is used in their games when submitting games to Steam. This will appear on your game’s store page in a section called “Disclosure of AI-generated content.”
A July 2025 analysis revealed the use of generative AI in approximately 8,000 titles released on Steam in the first six months of 2025, compared to approximately 1,000 titles in all of 2024.
