Okay, so I was just scrolling through this Reddit thread, and it’s all about this whole drama with Steam and Epic Games. The main spark was Valve, you know, the company behind Steam, deciding they’re going to start requiring games to label if they used AI-generated assets. And Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, publicly criticized that move, saying it was a bad idea. Well, the internet had *thoughts*.
People are just piling on Epic and Sweeney. There’s this overwhelming sense that Valve made a really smart, pro-consumer choice here. A lot of folks are pointing out that Valve can do this precisely because they’re a private company—they didn’t go public. They don’t have to chase endless quarterly growth or please shareholders who only care about profit margins. Their whole thing is just pleasing their customers. Someone even said Valve is a prime example of why the stock market is, in their words, “the single worst thing humanity ever invented,” which, you know, is a pretty strong take.
The core of the anger is about transparency. People are drawing direct parallels to historical fights, like when food companies fought against putting nutrition labels on products. The sentiment is, “If you’re fighting against telling people what’s in your product, you’ve probably got something to hide.” They’re saying it’s extremely telling that a CEO wouldn’t want customers to be informed, and it feels tone-deaf. There’s a real fear that consumer rights are eroding, especially in tech, with references to things like Epic’s terms of service trying to waive rights to class-action lawsuits.
And then the conversation naturally pivots to how terrible the Epic Games Store is compared to Steam. It’s almost a ritual at this point. People are listing all the ways the Epic launcher is bad: it launched without a shopping cart, it’s still slow and clunky after years, it doesn’t have proper user reviews—or its review system is designed to be more positive for publishers. Some mentioned that their Epic library, bloated with free games, becomes unusable, while their Steam library with over a thousand games runs perfectly. The joke is that the only reason anyone has the Epic launcher installed is for the free games; if you’re actually spending money, you go to Steam or GOG.
There’s a lot of speculation about *why* Sweeney is so against the AI label. The prevailing theory is that Epic is already using, or plans to heavily use, AI in its own products, like Fortnite and Unreal Engine. They suspect Epic is laying off human artists and developers to replace them with cheaper AI, and they don’t want that flagged for customers. People find it ironic that the AI boosters, who are always talking about how revolutionary the tech is, seem so afraid of a simple label. You’d think they’d be proud to show it off if it was so great, right? But the consensus is that current generative AI often produces low-effort “slop,” and companies know gamers are hostile to it, so they want to hide its use.
Throughout all this, Valve comes out looking like the quiet, competent hero. The discussion paints them as a company that just focuses on building a good platform with features customers actually want—family sharing, a solid refund policy, integrated mods, a functional library. They’re not perfect, they’re still a corporation, but the feeling is they’ve earned loyalty by generally putting the customer experience high on their priority list. As one person put it, it’s just another day of Valve leading the market by simply “not being comically stupid.”
The whole thread has this weary, frustrated vibe. It’s less about the specific AI label and more about a broader battle: informed consumers versus corporations that seem to view transparency as a threat to their profits. And in this particular story, Epic is playing the villain.
