{"id":888578,"date":"2026-10-20T07:02:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T07:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/888578\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T07:02:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T07:02:15","slug":"steam-next-fest-seems-to-have-a-lot-of-ai-produced-games-and-fans-are-upset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/888578\/","title":{"rendered":"Steam Next Fest Seems to Have a Lot of AI-Produced Games and Fans Are Upset"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steam Next Fest, Valve’s festival for indie games and demos, started earlier today, and while there are usually a ton of low-effort games included, there seems to be more than usual this time around. <\/p>\n

Browsing through the Next Fest, it’s easy to spot plenty of games with art that looks like it was generated with a quick ChatGPT prompt. And now that Claude Opus 5.5 is out and has been at the center of the decompilation<\/a> and mashup mod explosion<\/a> that’s been happening over the last few weeks, it’s not surprising that there’d be a deluge of games that are either being promoted using AI-generated images or were just flat-out generated with AI. <\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of Steam fans who aren’t exactly excited about having to dig through these AI games to find human-made material, with one user straight up begging Steam to filter out the slop. In a post on the Steam subreddit, user ScalesGhost wrote<\/a>: “I’ve been looking over the Next Fest, and I really enjoy the Discovery Queue feature, I just wish I could personalize it a bit more. Specifically, I would like the ability to filter out all games that have AI-Generated content in them (after all, steam already requires you to disclose it), and also I’d like to exclude certain tags, e.g. Incremental Games.”<\/p>\n

Steam already has a robust tagging system, so this kind of filter wouldn’t be a huge lift to implement, but Valve did cut down the amount of user-defined tags back in May<\/a>. Iin order for that kind of filter to exist, Valve would have to add ‘AI’ as a tag. <\/p>\n

ScalesGhost is far from the only person who’s noticed the amount of low-effort submissions in this Next Fest. In another thread about how AI has “ruined Next Fest,” user EmmaBooney said,<\/a> “Yeah, noticed that myself. Usually I scroll through and look for interesting games… it’s all AI slop and I dont want to participate.” <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, user aesoprowwy said,<\/a> “Hopefully there is a significant drop in the engagement metrics due to the overabundance of vibe coded games being featured and steam implements some stricter guidelines for submissions.”<\/p>\n

The 10 Best Steam Deck Games\"The<\/p>\n

Steam Next Fest being full of low-effort games is nothing new, however. Valve has long had a laissez-faire approach to curation on Steam, usually relying on the algorithm to boost popular games and bury the low-effort slop. And while this Next Fest does seem worse than previous events, most people are probably better off ignoring the event for a couple of days until the popular demos naturally rise to the top and most of the shovelware gets buried. <\/p>\n

But this comes at a time when AI in game development is getting more common by the day. Just last week Epic delayed its upcoming Star Wars shooter<\/a> in order to pursue an “AI-first” direction. Epic’s CEO also bragged on Twitter last week about how the company has vibe coded the Epic Games Store launcher<\/a>. Even Capcom seems to have embraced AI, using it as part of its REX program,<\/a> which will reportedly help it continue to improve the RE Engine that has been used in some of the best games of the year, like Resident Evil: Requiem<\/a> and Pragmata<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Jacqueline<\/p>\n

Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her\u00a0@Jackiecobra<\/a><\/p>\n