“Consumers need to be informed” – with that simple line, a Valve artist waded into the debate over Steam’s artificial-intelligence labels and laid out why the platform insists on keeping them, in a clash that many PC gamers say perfectly sums up why they stick with Steam instead of the Epic Games Store.

A single social-media post was all it took to light the fuse on an open conflict between Steam and the Epic Games Store. It started when a user asked Valve to remove the notices about AI use from product pages on its platform, complaining about the new labels. Both major PC-gaming stores ended up responding to the thread, and the discussion quickly escalated. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney turned on the crowd, insisting that it “did not make sense” to flag the use of these tools for customers. On Valve’s side, one of Gabe Newell’s artists stepped in and argued that people who buy games deserve clear information, then broke down the logic behind the company’s decision.

A Dispute That Sums Up The Gap Between Steam And Epic

Tim Sweeney argues that AI labels belong in contexts like art exhibitions, where authorship matters, or digital-content licensing markets, where buyers need to understand the rights attached to each piece. In his view, that logic does not translate to video-game stores, where artificial intelligence will be baked into almost every future production anyway. In a pair of posts, he even joked that if AI has to be disclosed, developers might as well be forced to add mandatory notes about what brand of shampoo they use. The response from players, however, was anything but warm. Many openly mocked the stance, with one user summing up the mood by saying, “Then they wonder why we chose Steam.”

Speaking for Valve, environment artist Ayi Sanchez, who has worked on Counter-Strike 2, offered a completely different perspective. She compared AI labels to ingredient lists on food, arguing that customers need this kind of information if they are going to make a meaningful choice about what they buy. In her view, saying that such data is unnecessary is like arguing that groceries should not list what is inside. Sanchez also pointed out that most people would absolutely want to know if their clothes or coffee were produced with child labor, or whether a car engine has specific technical characteristics. All of that, she said, should be visible to everyone, so consumers can make an informed decision instead of walking in blind. Her post has since been deleted, but screenshots of it have spread widely.

Seen through this lens, the controversy also highlights how Valve usually gives buyers more up-front information than Epic Games. On the Epic Games Store, video games are not required to clearly indicate what anti-cheat system they rely on, or whether they include any DRM solutions such as Denuvo. The details that do exist can be easy to miss, often tucked away at the bottom of the minimum-and-recommended system requirements section. Steam, by contrast, uses brightly-colored banners and clear notices to call out terms of service, third-party software, and other important conditions before you hit the purchase button.

In his most recent comments on the subject, Tim Sweeney went even further, claiming that Valve is steadily taking opportunities away from small developers by making it easier to run cancel campaigns and organize review-bombing against whole new categories of games. He argued that Steam once focused primarily on making downloads easier, but then moved to monopolize the payment system, squeeze price competition, push out cryptocurrencies, and is now doing the same with artificial intelligence. For now, that is where the argument stands, with the player community sharply divided over whether clear labeling or a hands-off, market-driven approach should win out.

Source: 3djuegos