Once AI agents can play games reliably, Valve can secretly create an internal Steam AI Score, a number generated by a collection of agents evaluating each game automatically as they play it. Metrics might range from basic material concerns such as "is the game runnable" to fairly abstract ones like "is the game fun." Current AIs are surprisingly good at generating decent and consistent results even for soft concepts, so as long as Valve is careful about how they generate such metrics, their agents will do a fair job at it. Such techniques make not only Valve, but the games industry at large, a way more defensible market against AI slop than other comparable entertainment industries. Not only is the score hidden, Valve doesn't have to tell anyone they're doing this and ranking games on their store based on it, but it is genuinely hard to cheat, since the agents are actually smart and will be judging games with a great degree of actual taste, direction, and adherence to the rules Valve sets in place for them. I have absolutely no idea if this isn't happening already, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, in one form or another.

There are obvious concerns with this, such as not measuring "soul" or the tails of the fun distribution properly, but this is where Gaben's massively downvoted greedy long reddit comment comes into play. You simply have to trust that Valve is focused on long term value creation rather than short term value extraction, and that their inherent interest is in the long term health of the industry. I think they've definitely earned that trust, so I'm not worried about it.

Ah, looks like the comment is not downvoted anymore:

Epic reddit win!