IT Home News on October 20: Valve's Steam Next Fest, the event for indie games and demos, has opened. Although every past Next Fest has seen an influx of shoddily made games, this edition appears to feature even more of them than before.
Browsing the new releases festival page, it's easy to notice that a large number of games have art styles that look as if they were generated through simple ChatGPT prompts. With the release of Claude Opus 5.5, the past few weeks have seen an abundance of decompilation and mashup mods springing up around it, and many games either use AI-generated images as promotional material or are directly generated by AI — so this phenomenon comes as no surprise.
IT Home noted that many Steam players are dissatisfied with this, as they have to sift through a sea of AI-generated games to find works made by human hands. Some users have directly asked Steam to filter out these low-quality works. In a post on a Steam community subforum, user ScalesGhost wrote: “I browsed the Next Fest and liked the explore queue feature, I just wish there were more customization options. I would particularly like to be able to filter out all games containing AI-generated content (after all, Steam already requires developers to disclose such content), and also to block specific tags, such as incremental games.”
Steam already has a well-developed tag system, so implementing this kind of filtering feature would not be difficult, but Valve cut the number of user-defined tags in May. To launch such a filtering feature, Valve would need to add an “AI” tag.
ScalesGhost is not the only one who noticed the flood of low-quality submissions at this Next Fest. In another post discussing how AI is “ruining the Next Fest,” user EmmaBooney said: “Yeah, I noticed it too. I usually dig around for interesting games… Now it's all AI slop everywhere, and I don't even want to browse anymore.”
Meanwhile, user aesoprowwy said: “I hope the flood of these hastily AI-assembled games drags down overall engagement metrics, prompting Steam to introduce stricter submission rules.”
That said, Steam Next Fests being flooded with shoddy games is nothing new. Valve has long taken a lax approach to content moderation on Steam, generally relying on algorithms to recommend popular games and push low-quality junk works down. Although this Next Fest looks worse than previous ones, most players might do well to wait a few days until quality demos naturally climb the rankings and most of the junk gets buried by the algorithm.
All of this is happening against the backdrop of AI being increasingly adopted in game development. Just last week, Epic delayed an upcoming Star Wars shooter under its banner in order to shift to an “AI-first” development approach. Epic's CEO also said on social media last week that the Epic Games Store launcher was quickly developed using AI. Capcom is likewise embracing AI, using it for Project REX. According to reports, that project will continuously optimize the RE Engine, which was used to build several high-scoring games this year, such as Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata.