Steam Next Fest is in full swing, and the hopefully-washed masses are once again partaking of more demos than any one person can reasonably get through. This time around, though, there’s been a recurring theme to people’s hours spent sifting diamonds from the rough: AI art.
Across sites like Twitter and Bluesky, numerous Steam users have turned up their noses at unpleasant surprises populating their Next Fest feeds.
"Looking at the Steam Next Fest page, it's so tiresome how many games with AI art there are," The CRPG Book editor Felipe Pepe said on Bluesky. "And it's always the same crap: generic anime girl, grimdark fantasy guy with those 'Balenciaga AI' faces, or obviously fake pixel art."
"This Steam Next Fest has probably been the most AI infested ever, and it’s all been voice acting and art more than anything," a modder who goes by the handle Manny Calavera said on Twitter. "It's rough."
This week, Valve also added a mandatory AI disclosure feature to game’s Steam pages, which made headlines when it forced Activision to finally admit something that players have long suspected: AI cosmetics are becoming an increasingly prolific part of the world’s most popular first-person shooter. A quick perusal of Steam Next Fest’s “Simulation” section, especially, yields many similar disclosures from games with titles like Wrap House Simulator, Gun Factory Simulator, and Car Mechanic Workshop. Other games sport art that looks suspiciously similar to something generative AI would spit out, but they lack disclosures.
While it’s difficult to say for certain whether or not the latest Next Fest is more awash with slop than its predecessors, it wouldn’t be surprising considering the growing use of AI in game development circles – even if nobody is actually asking for this. But there’s also an under-discussed factor at play: Valve changed how Steam Next Fest functions late last year.
"If people think they are seeing smaller or weirder games in this Next Fest – and the one at the end of last year – Steam did switch to this different approach where they cut out the livestreaming elements of Next Fest [and] are showing you a more random selection of games for the first two-to-three days of the Fest,” Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, an agency that analyzes how players find video games, told Aftermath. “They will then show you personalized picks, based on what everyone else has been playing, later in the Fest."
It is unlikely, however, that Valve’s goal was to surface slapdash trash.
"This does lead to some odder, tinier games getting randomly surfaced,” said Carless. “But that's Steam deliberately trying to diversify and get more 'egalitarian,' as opposed to just showing the biggest trending games, which is something that was increasingly being gamed by studios launching a demo early and pushing it to influencers to get on top of the Next Fest charts for the first day."
In my experience, Carless' assessment appears correct. Several days into Next Fest, I'm now seeing far fewer suspicious recommendations, even in oft-criticized categories like "Simulation." Intriguing prospects like Wanderstop and Promise Mascot Agency, as well as meme-y but undeniably amusing concepts like Silent Hill soccer game FEAR FA 98, have risen to the top. Only once I scroll down do I begin to see dicier fare.
These days, Valve applies this general philosophy to most corners of Steam, explained Chris Zukowski, a video game marketer who regularly writes about Steam and discoverability.
"Overall, this 'Give every game 15 minutes of fame and see who survives' [approach] is a fundamental aspect to the Steam algorithm in several different areas,” Zukowski told Aftermath, pointing to a survey of Steam’s Discovery Queue he ran across 75 games of different sizes.
"Notice how Diamond, Gold, and Silver earners all start out with around 25,000 impressions on day one and two? That is the Steam algorithm testing the games. If a lot of people buy the game on day one and two, on the subsequent days, it is given even more visibility. If it doesn't do well, its visibility is cut,” he said.
Zukowski then pointed to the brown line on the graph.
“Those are games that had so few wishlists going into launch that Valve figures that the dev was too unsophisticated or just a shovelware scammer,” he said. “So they don't even give them the default 25,000 views on day one and two. This Discovery Queue algorithm is why I am not worried about an AI shovelware flood. If a scammer could churn out an AI-generated game per day, they would not have had enough time or spent enough effort gathering the minimum number of wishlists to qualify for the ‘15 minutes of fame’ at launch.”
For years, Steam users and developers raged against a glut of "asset flips" and fake games overrunning the platform. This was Valve's solution: to algorithmically create what are functionally two Steams – the one regular people see and the landfill. While games occasionally slip through the cracks in both directions, it's a relatively effective system overall, according to developers I've spoken to over the past couple years. But it does not solve the problem of nearly 20,000 games releasing on Steam per year; it only mitigates some of them.
Those who analyze Steam and similar platforms for a living aren’t sounding the alarm bells about an AI slop flood just yet. The bigger issue Steam developers face is the sheer number of high-effort, good games that come out on a daily basis. This is true of Next Fest as well. There are over 1,000 games in Steam's latest demo-palooza, and many of them look solid. Can an algorithm, no matter how much time Valve spends optimizing it to ultimately lure money out of your wallet, solve that problem? Should it?
For better or worse, the algorithm remains key, and Carless and Zukowski recommend keeping a close eye on it.
"The net result of [Valve changing its approach to the previous Steam Next Fest] was I think every game got less visibility. Even top-performing AA games got fewer wishlists during SNF. So it was less winner-take-all,” said Zukowski. “There is weird stuff on Steam, but most of it is filtered out by the algorithms.”
