OUR GAME NIGHT RUN GOT BANNED FROM STEAM

Wishlist Night Run (free!) on the Epic Games Store https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/night-run-51c60e Our game got rejected from Steam due to a rule change a month before we were set to release. In this video I’ll explain how and why that happened. First, some background to bring folks up to speed who haven’t been following along, and because it’s been a while since we released a devlog. Myself and the team at Thousand Ant have been building Night Run, a procedurally generated moto runner game where you ride through a city filled with artworks and listen to music. We’ve been working on it for the past year and our goal was to release it on Steam in early July. Those plans came to a crashing halt when we submitted our game for application review and were rejected because the game features images generated using generative AI. In our case, the images were not solely AI generated but did contain AI elements, the synthetic photography that we used to create the final imaginary billboard designs. We had actually seen and briefly discussed the earlier announcement by Valve about the ban but I naively and optimistically believed that it was about people generating images that violated copyright laws due to their subject matter, like an AI generated Sonic or Pikachu. Instead, as we learned, Steam is banning AI imagery due to their concerns about the underlying copyright of the training data itself. This means that any and all images generated with the widely used models that are out now like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion are affected by this ban. And so! Please wishlist Night Run on the Epic Game Store, please play it when it releases there for free. More than anything I just want people to play, experience and hopefully enjoy this game we’ve spent a year making. To those who’ve supported us this far, your support means the world and I can’t thank you enough. Thank you.