Steam Next Fest is drowning in AI slop, and gamers demand filtering systems from Valve

The October Steam Next Fest has drawn a wave of criticism from developers, journalists, and players. According to GameDiscoverCo, the event features almost 7,100 demos, compared to 900 in October 2023. A noticeable share of them turned out to be low-quality AI-generated content, cheap clones, or games thrown together in a couple of hours through vibe coding.

It all looks so bad that the festival is being called a massive disaster and a grim glimpse of the future.

When there were fewer than a thousand demos, interesting games rose to the surface on their own. At the current scale, standing out is extremely hard without an existing audience.

Many developers don't even hide their use of neural networks, and state directly in the dedicated disclosure section that a large portion of their assets is fully AI-generated.

Valve introduced that section in early 2024, but it only made the situation more transparent and did nothing to limit the number of such releases.

Against this backdrop, one of the most discussed posts on r/Steam was a message from a PC gamer:

Can we please get an option to hide AI games?

Many players believe Valve could simply turn the existing AI disclosure tag into a filter, similar to the adult content settings.

That solution has limits, though. Valve rules require disclosing only the AI content that ends up in the final game, such as graphics, audio, story text, and localization, while code written with the help of neural networks falls outside the requirement. A filter based on the tag won't catch vibe coding.

Many players go further and suggest separating AI-assisted development from generated assets, with individual filters for AI art, dialogue, and music.

Using Claude or Copilot to debug code mostly doesn't bother them. In their view, the problem isn't the tool itself but the stream of junk filling the storefront.

Others suggested letting the community vote on "made by AI" or "made by human" tags. Many warned, however, that such a system would quickly turn into a witch hunt, since people often can't tell AI content from handmade work and frequently accuse honest developers.

Indie studios take the hardest hit. Several developers in the discussion complained that their games made without generative AI get lost in the flood, and one team noted that it has been making games since 2005 but has never seen a market this oversaturated.

Many users openly criticize Valve for the lack of manual moderation. Valve relies on user tags and recommendation algorithms and takes no real steps to cut the stream of junk landing on Steam every day.

The danger is that if Steam gets overrun with AI slop, trust in the service will drop, and users may drift toward more curated platforms.