Steam Next Fest, Valve’s festival of indie games and demos, kicked off earlier today, and while it usually has a ton of low-effort games, there seems to be more than usual this time around.
Browsing the Next Fest, it’s easy to spot many games whose artwork looks like it was generated with a ChatGPT quick prompt. And now that Claude Opus 5.5 has been released and been at the center of the explosion of decompilation and mashup mods that has occurred over the past few weeks, it’s no surprise that there is a deluge of games that are either promoted using AI-generated images or simply generated with AI.
Unsurprisingly, many Steam fans aren’t exactly keen on having to dig through these AI games to find human-made material, with one user directly begging Steam to filter out the slop. In a post on the Steam subreddit, user ScalesGhost wrote: “I’ve been through the Next Fest and I really like the Discovery Queue feature, I just wish I could customize it a little more. Specifically, I’d like to have the ability to filter out all games containing AI-generated content (after all, Steam already requires you to disclose it), and I’d also like to exclude certain tags, for example incremental games.
Steam already has a robust tagging system, so this type of filter wouldn’t be a huge effort to implement, but Valve reduced the number of user-defined tags in May. For this type of filter to exist, Valve would have to add “AI” as a tag.
ScalesGhost is far from the only person who noticed the number of low-effort submissions at this Next Fest. In another thread about how AI “ruined Next Fest”, user EmmaBooney said: “Yes, I noticed it myself. Usually I scroll down and look for interesting games… it’s just AI crap and I don’t want to participate.”
Meanwhile, user aesoprowwy said: “I hope there is a significant drop in engagement metrics due to the glut of mood-coded games being featured and that Steam implements stricter guidelines for submissions.”
