I remember about 2 years ago, the Steam Next Fest was basically of more importance than Christmas for me. Not only did it used to remind me of a time when demo disks were common for PC and Console games back in the day, it also finally made developers take proper demos seriously. What advertising is more honest than to actually let the players experience a snippet of your game. It was awesome?
Fast forward to 2026. The last Steam Next Fest was absolutely overrun with AI slop. I’m not talking some “placeholder” assets. I’m talking AI generated art, AI generated description and some of them looked like they where the first attempt of a local model to one-shot what the “dev” had in mind. The current Next Fest is a little bit tamer. But the last one was literally 90% slop.
In my opinion Steam really needs to have a big fat disclaimer required if any AI assets are present in the current game or promotional material, something akin to the warning that abandoned Early Access games receive.
They’re supposed to be tagged as such
Those are partially user maintained tags. Graveyard Keeper 2 had a recent controversy because the cover art appears to be AI and it wasn’t tagged as such, causing a lot of discussions in the community hub.
Aren’t these inherently new or forthcoming releases? One can’t expect community tags to be in place for newly released content.
Yes I did say “supposed to be”. Meaning you should at least be able to filter the ones that are tagged, while reporting the rest.
Unfortunately, these are not the usual “tags” that you can use to filter. AI useage is a notice from the developer, a bit further down the page, just above the system requirements.
Supposed to, but with zero repercussions for failing to disclose. And a missing disclosure isn’t considered a valid reason for refunding, so customers who realize they have been conned can’t even request a refund.