I remember going to the Radio Shack in the early 80s and seeing dozens of different Atari carts, priced at like $4.99 (which was a lot more then, ofc, but it still felt cheap), pretty much all of which were garbage.
It pulled down the price that good games could charge and killed the industry for a bit. I feel like peer communication is for now easier, so games like BG3 can still command a price premium given their quality, but the slop cannon is not a good thing for the industry generally or Valve in particular.
It does feel like we are barrelling headfirst into another gaming industry collapse, doesn’t it?
Between the whole soulless, overpriced, MTX-riddled “AAAA” crap crowding out the top, tonnes of AI-slip flooding the bottom-end, and the antagonism towards physical media - it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time.
Especially given how there is a literal lifetime’s backlog of quality titles from half a dozen console generations - gamers could survive an ice-age. Developers and publishers can’t.
I have yet to see the actual numbers about this, I’m pretty sure it’s worse than what my gut feeling (and anecdotal observation) tells me: I download a TON of demos during Next Fest, it’s my favourite events of the year, so I tend to browse through hundreds of demos sorted by charts.
- February had around 3000 demos and 717 of those has declared using generative AI (keep in mind there’s also a bunch that did NOT declare using it, a lot of Steam capsules artwork are generated by AI despite no disclaimer for example)
- June had 4411 demos (27% more) and 553 of those (12%) has declared using generative AI (27% less) (that can mean either less demos using generative ai OR more demos hiding the fact they’re using generative ai)
- October (current edition) has 6509 registered demos, that’s a huge jump (57% more)
It’s 8000 actually.
Oh, my source might be wrong then, where did you get the number?
From the next fest page.
If you ask me the huge jump in committed demos is very likely due to vibe coding quickly becoming the de facto standard over the summer and turning out massive amounts of code in a few hours. I assume many “developers” have already accepted that this is how things are done for the moment and don’t even declare AI use anymore. “I haven’t written a single line of code last month!” is something I keep hearing lately. Even from indie devs who have already launched somewhat successful games on Steam. Some of them seem so happy about it that I wonder if they have any critical thinking skills at all because them essentially not working anymore means they’re all out of the job soon.
Making a game involves a lot more work than just coding. You don’t necessarily have to be out of work due to that. Some people may even be in work due to that, if they had a good strong vision for a game and it’s mechanics but we’re lacking coding skills. Still, it’s a complicated situation so it’s not black and white.
I’m pretty sure its companies capitalising on the hype.
They shit out a 75% complete game, then use AI to wrap models on a skeleton to make a “game”, that makes a good demo. Unfortunately the original company only wrote so much original code, so all these demos really can’t get past that (which makes an insane sales pitch, your hard work finally made your dream come true - just pay us $12.99 a month!).
Stringent labeling rules are a must. Not just on Steam but on everything “si” slop based.
Slop intelligence.
even flash games from the early 00s had soul in them
And now they’re ported to rust and hosted on steam! :cry😢
GabeN will never allow that because it will eat into his bottom line
You mean the guy who owns and controls the only storefront in the entire industry with a forced AI disclosure?
Forced AI disclosure.
Only to Steam themselves and not the consumer. And really just for copyright reasons.
There’s plenty of games that don’t disclose it on the store page. Because they don’t actually need to.
Those disclosure sections on a game’s store page are written by the devs/publishers. Not Steam.
And there’s nothing stopping them from downplaying. Or just outright omitting it.
For now, for players browsing the thousands of Next Fest demos, finding genuine, hand-crafted games has become an exhausting chore. On the other hand, indie devs are afraid of AI-generated copycat games and some go as far as pulling out of Steam Next Fest to avoid getting their game stolen.
Any small game developer would have to be a fool to use Next Fest as is. This is awful.
Can I search only for games that do use it so I know it’s not been slung together by elitist pricks who don’t know how to code and refuse to use tools to help?
Oh wow another post from a licker who can’t consider the various nuances of this topic.
A production team using tools to automate portions of their workload is not the problem. I would argue we should have another term for these “AI” tools so that we can talk about them without the rightful fury we have towards AI as a whole.
Generative AI is a blight. Vibe-coding is a blight. A large number of people who have not drunk the AI enhanced kool-aid can see this clear as day.
And we arnt even talking about the blight data centers and their out of touch tech overlords are bringing to the conversation; its all entangled.
I dont give a shit if a team wants to use a model to help with certain tasks and then review it by hand before PR. That leaves a human in the middle who presumably understands the output based on their prior experience / years of hard earned knowledge. I also dont care if an artist wants to train a model on their own content to help with content creation, that’s a cool use case. Or a model trained on royalty fee / public domain…I can see a use case for this but we still need to weigh that against “could I have provided work for a local artist, programmer, etc.” Are we disincentivising these passions by taking away the already limited income sources available.
Anyway I forgot the point I was trying to make, Fuck AI (outside of a few morally acceptable use cases)
You do realise they’re the same fucking tools, right? Your wilful ignorance doesn’t change that.
You read my post and consider me ignorant? Get lost.
You probably could do that. Even if it makes no sense to search for spam or slop content.
Yeah, because the elitist pricks who don’t kbow how to code are definitely the ones NOT using AI.
The elitest pricks are the ones refusing to use the extremely useful tools available
Dude, I don’t mind the usage of AI on a small scale to solve small problems, but there are people generating 90% of the game with AI and only developing the remaining 10%, what the hell.
And? Your point? What is the cut off for human gruntwork to make it good and not badwrongfun?
Your point?
Lower product quality. It’s visible that the game is using the same generic assets, characters and voices that many AI generated games are using. I can’t say they are buggy because I don’t buy the games since they never appeal to me.
People are still free to generate and purchase AI games if they want, but the quality looks bad to me.
What is the cut off for human gruntwork to make it good and not badwrongfun?
As long as it doesn’t feel generic and poorly developed, which can be AI and non-AI generated games. Doesn’t have anything to do with elitism.
By the way, your initial comment talks about “elitist pricks who don’t know how to code and refuse to use tools to help”. In my previous comment I was trying to differentiate between professionals using AI to assist them and people generating almost an entire game with AI with no thought behind it, which produces the low-quality products I mentioned.
Ah, Mr. Sweeney. Don’t you have some CSAM to generate?
What the actual fuck is wrong with you?
Steam/Valve doesn’t care.
Valve loves AI
What makes you say that?
I’m not going to pretend like Valve is some sort of Angel Corp but they also definitely have repeatedly skipped the opportunity to screw their consumers.
*every cooperation loves Ai.
I think at this point there isn’t a single player pushing back against it.
IDK nintendos stance on it, but even Capcom is updating the RE engine to have AI stuff now.
Maybe you who doesn’t understand what it is might be in the wrong?
While I want an AI filter, it isn’t the kind these people want. What I want is an AI that looks at my owned games, reviews, wishlist, and personal sentiments, then assembles a list and calendar of games that I am likely to play.
I enjoy hentai games - but don’t like ladies with big boobs nor thicc butts. Your standard filter wouldn’t be able to understand that.
Doesn’t the new Steam personalized calendar work for you? On paper it sounds like exactly what you’re describing https://store.steampowered.com/personalcalendar/
Not quite. It only takes hashtags, it doesn’t consider things that can be described in plain English. IMO, one of the valuable things about AI is that it can take multiple factors into account and determine whether something is the right mix to interest me.
For example, I like Shoot’em Ups, but only if they got upgrade progression systems similar to Tyrian 2000 and Sky Force. Temporary power ups and roguelike Shmups aren’t my thing. An AI can parse the game description and screenshots, then determine whether it has what I personally enjoy.
Oh that makes sense yeah
Maybe something like the interactive recommender but with a lot more sliders so you can adjust specific aspects https://store.steampowered.com/recommender
This kind of slop isn’t exclusive to AI, it just made the cost of making one less
Just look at the publisher Playway, they were already doing barely functional slop way before
The massively reduced effort and cost is the problem here, though
Not really. Maybe gamers will have to be a little more selective with the games they buy. That would actually work out better than what we had before AI.
Are games required to disclose? There are some aggressively AI looking games with no mention in their description. I genuinely ask since a filter would do nothing if it’s not enforced.
First, we are updating the Content Survey that developers fill out when submitting to Steam. The survey now includes a new AI disclosure section, where you’ll need to describe how you are using AI in the development and execution of your game.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618
But Valve has never been one for actually moderating their store or forums, that would require actual investment of both money and time.
I wonder if this will finally make them act.
Login to steam Home>Account>Store Preferences>Tags to exclude I put AI and Artificial Intelligence. It seems to do alright at filtering out the “ai” slop. Doesn’t stop me from checking to see if the ai warning is still there but haven’t seen any in awhile since doing that.
That filters out human-made games that are about AI
those are mostly for gameplay tags, you’re filtering out the Talos Principle games for example
I forgot we could do that. Will definitely enable this filter, the AI generated games are so annoying 😩
That’s a good start, but it only works with games where AI use is disclosed.
Games with no AI… do you know what games are? Because no
Such filter would be problematic in itself, because it is publisher information. That means any non Ai tagged project is falsely advertised as non Ai.
Would still be help filter out some of the slop.
I think it would do more harm than being useful.
Why wouldn’t you want to filter viruses that the developer says is a virus?
I think you did not understand the issue. I do not want to trust a virus scanner, that only trusts what the developer of a virus declares to be a virus or its safe.
Why wouldn’t you trust a developer that tells you that their software is a virus?
I think you didn’t understand the issue. I do not want to trust a virus scanner, that ONLY (important part is the word “only”) trusts a developer of a virus, that declares it to be a virus, or lies about it and declares it to be safe. I do not want to trust a virus scanner that just trusts the word of a virus developer.
Is it really hard to understand my English? Am I speaking Chinese?
Is it so hard to understand that your analogy is not applicable? This is not an AI detection tool. This is developers declaring “yes, this game was made with AI”.
No, it’s a first pass filter. People against AI like myself know it’s a publisher declared thing but that’s still hundreds of results less I’d have to filter through. No virus scanner promises 100% accuracy, it promises to be part of a solution that still requires user diligence
That’s the issue with such Ai filter. Its useless if we have to trust publishers tag it correctly. If they do this ai slop, do you trust them doing that? It will bring false security for users trusting the filter would work correctly.
There will never be a perfect system. Already users rely on the AI tag on Steam, why not just make it easier to exclude those?
You’re letting perfection be the enemy of progress. You will never outsmart the most malicious dev or the laziest user. Ever. What you can do is make progress, take in feedback of how that improved things and where it still fails, and then make more progress.
Nah he’s right. If you add an AI filter then companies will just stop tagging their games as AI generated. It’s not a matter of anyone outsmarting anyone else it’s just common sense. There wouldn’t be any progress here, we would actually make things worse.
Steam needs to do something on their own, or crowd source it somehow. But they’ll never do that. They don’t even review games for quality level as it is.
I don’t think most malware devs care about brand reputation
I think that has nothing to do with my objection.
Well if a virus dev lied and hurt their rep it wouldn’t matter.
A steam dev lying has brand reputation to care about. Any company larger than a 3 person indie team has to care about PR if they want to be more than a one hit studio.
So I think it matters because its an impactful distinction between reality and your anecdote
Well if a virus dev lied and hurt their rep it wouldn’t matter.
I didn’t say virus dev, but an antivirus dev / tool. It’s like you trust only an antivirus tool, that relies on what the virus devs report. The antivirus tool represents the Steam filter in my objection.
Grandfather those in explicitly.
Just make the options yes AI, no AI, and unreported AI.
Takes the burden off small devs, but requires accountability for long, big projects
What accountability? Companies will just say “no AI” so they aren’t filtered. How will you enforce the tag while also providing due process for developers?
Slop games have always been a problem on Steam. I can’t remember who it was since it was forever ago, but I used to watch a YouTuber who would “review” the shovel-ware that would show up on Steam. That being said, LLMs sure make putting out slop so much easier. The skill floor for creating garbage is even lower than it was before, which is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.
Before those AI-slop games I think it was asset-flips with tons of achievements. We really need Steam to finally do something.
I’ve thought for a while they should put the AI disclaimers at the top of the pages instead of at the end of the game’s description and you have to click ‘See More’
Actually, seems like you don’t have to press ‘read more.’ But I always think you do.
