Steam Next Fest is usually one of my favourite Steam events. As someone who enjoys discovering and writing about indie games, it’s basically Christmas but several times a year. Thousands of demos, countless hidden gems, and never enough time to play everything that catches my eye, not to mention the joy of bonding with others over gems they have found that I’ll have to add to my wishlist. It’s great.
This time around, though, my excitement evaporated surprisingly quickly.
I don’t care if a game looks rough. I don’t care if a demo is unfinished (I mean, it’s a demo, right?). In fact, some of the most memorable indie games I’ve played started out as more than janky prototypes with more ambition than polish. What I care about is seeing human creativity on full display with a game reflecting someone’s ideas, effort, values and artistic vision, regardless of budget. That’s what “Indie” is about to me.
Instead, I found myself repeatedly running into games featuring AI-generated content, with a lot of the titles not even disclosing it properly.
Steam Next Fest has gone through several iterations over the years, and Valve has generally done a decent job with improving discoverability, but despite that, the event still very much relies heavily on recommendations (not just from friends but also from sites like this one) to surface games based on your interests. There is an algorithm but it hasn’t picked up on my disdain for AI slop yet. No algorithm is perfect but even a perfect one wouldn’t be able to cope with the sheer number of titles involved each Steam Next Fest.
The one thing that would solve all of this debacle would be a simple yet meaningful way to filter out games that use generative AI.
To Valve’s credit, stuff has indeed gotten better with developers being required to disclose Generative AI on the store page when the game features pre-generated or live-generated AI content… This is very important for the sake of transparency!
Still, transparency only works when people can actually see it. Steam’s AI disclosure appears all the way at the bottom of the store page, tucked beneath screenshots, gifs, trailers, feature lists, curator reviews/quotes, and other information. It’s remarkebly easy to miss it unless you’re actively looking for it. For something that many players consider a major purchasing factor, that feels rather inadequate, not to mention that it can easily be mistaken for just a mature content warning since it’s styled in the same format.
An easy way to improve the situation here would be to just have a dedicated icon or badge near the top of the store page introduced… or to just give players the option to filter out games that feature AI-generated contents from all recommendations, event pages, and search results.
The current system also almost entirely relies on self-reporting, which further complicates matters.
There are cases where disclosures are inconsistent, incomplete, or flat-out removed entirely over time. Some games have disclosed AI-generated assets during development and then later removed those disclosures when the content was replaced. While the final product may no longer contain AI-generated material, Valve’s policy specifically references content created with AI tools during development.
That raises, in my opinion, an obvious question: Should those disclosures even remain visible?
Take Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as an example. The game launched with an AI disclosure claiming that some concept art that never made it into the game was done using AI, which was eventually removed some days after launch. The publisher claimed there never was any generative AI in the game, but players spotted placeholder artwork that made it into the final build, after which the devs and publisher backtracked heavily.
In the end, the game was disqualified from some awards. Now, Clair Obscur is a great game, don’t get me wrong, but had I known that it contained AI, then I wouldn’t have accepted the review key. In fact, to this day, I have yet to write about the game, but I refuse to review it given my stance on generative AI. That’s what integrity is about, not that the developers would know. If you use it, stand by it. Don’t hide it. Be proud of what you’ve done and accomplished… or rather what those millions of artists whose copyright was infringed upon accomplished.
The Alters had their own controversy a while back with AI-generated text featured in the final product, which – again – quietly and quickly got removed. Despite this, there is no AI disclosure on the store page. There never was, and there never will be, a disclosure about this.
While the final games don’t contain AI-generated assets anymore, AI tools were still part of the development process, no matter how many retcons happen in the developers and publisher’s explanations. Whether that should require a permanent disclosure is a debate worth having, but the current situation highlights heavily how unclear and inconsistent the system can be.
The result is that players who want to avoid AI-generated content often have to investigate games individually rather than relying on Steam’s own tools. The same, naturally, goes for a plethora of other storefronts, including Nintendo’s e-store. Can’t I just enjoy games without having to become a sleuth, reading through dozens of discussions and forum posts to find out whether or not I can take a developer’s word for it when they claim that there’s no AI in their game?
Out of 8682 games taking part in Steam Next Fest this month, a grand total of 1694 titles have AI Content disclosed. That’s 19.5% of the entire event comprised of AI slop. Since those figures rely on self-reporting, the real number could obviously be much higher, but even taking the disclosures at face value, nearly one in five participating games acknowledges some form of AI usage. At that scale, the already poor discoverability becomes a genuine issue, and the true creatives in the indie sphere with their gems waiting to be discovered are threatened to get drowned out by games that will get quickly churned out and then discarded.
Now, I’d simply focus on covering the games that interest me most but the problem for me is finding those very games increasingly requires digging through store pages, checking disclosures, and trying to determine whether the information presented is complete. That’s not something I enjoy doing nor have the time for, and it’s certainly not why I look forward to Steam Next Fest in the first place.
Steam Next Fest is supposed to be a celebration of creativity and discovery. It’s where small teams get a chance to put their work out there in front of millions of players. If Valve wants discoverability to remain meaningful, then users need better tools to find the games they’re looking for. For me, that starts with an easy way to identify games utilizing generative AI. I want to make educated purchases. Now, obviously, there are opponents to this who will argue in bad faith, like Tim Sweeney, EpicGames’ CEO, who claimed that people should not care about AI as much since it will be involved everywhere anyways, but I find it baffling that someone who runs a storefront so openly admits to not care about transparency. Any customer who’s allergic to nuts would be upset if their food contained it, subsequently nearly killed them, and if the store owner claimed that it doesn’t matter because nuts will be in all the food anyway at some point.
No, AI shouldn’t be everywhere. It’s built on theft and continues to threaten the livelyhoods of a ton of people while continuing to destroy the planet. AI is nothing I’m here for. Until there’s a good and easy way to filter out the AI slop, browsing Steam Next Fest will feel more frustrating than exciting for me.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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