Steam Next Fest is Valve's festival of indie games and demos that kicked off today, and what it can boast this time around is a massive number of games – if that’s something to boast about. I say that deliberately, because most of these are titles where it looks like minimal effort was invested, having been generated as a result of AI prompting. And we’re not just talking about images or textures generated with the help of AI, but entire games made using the technology in question.
That in itself is a much bigger problem than it might seem at first glance. While we all now struggle to navigate Steam or any other digital storefront, developers are suffering far more—especially the creative ones. Now, even when a developer has a great idea they could monetize, they run into two major issues: the first is that it's extremely hard for anyone to actually spot the game in a sea of low-effort titles, and the second is that even if an idea turns into a hit, plenty of people will quickly copy and launch it using AI.
Plenty of Steam fans have also taken to social media calling for some kind of filtering system to be introduced, as the situation is getting out of hand. So far, Steam does have the option to filter by games that use AI, but the issue is that titles like ARC Raiders end up on the same list as Cinema Business Simulator.
Steam's current practice for determining whether a game used AI during development comes down to developers being transparent about it and disclosing it themselves. We have definitely reached a stage where Valve needs to reform its rules.
Discussion(0)