How many of the ~6,818 titles now disclosing generative AI use were already on Steam in 2024?
I.E. are a lot of these just games that had already been released, updating their disclosure statements based on Valve’s new rules?
The article says 1/5 games released this year use it. I’m not sure if ~34,000 games have released on Steam in the last year
It is a little insane how many games release on any given day. On July 15, 2025, 150 “titles” (of which 78 are actual games, not demos or DLC) were added to the Steam store. I would guess that their data includes all titles, but even just 78 real games on what should be a slower-than-average random Tuesday could totally contribute to 34,000 games released in a year.
Yeah, that’s why I’d like some more insight.
The initial headline doesn’t exactly pass a sniff test… It’s possible, but unlikely.
If ~34,000 were added in the last year, that means over 25% of Steam’s library of ~114,000 was added in the last year…
If only 1/5 of those were using generative AI, why was there such a massive increase over the last year?
Has Steam made it easier for cash grabs, or… it just doesn’t make a lot of sense without more information
I read a story recently about how a graphic designer realized they couldn’t compete anymore unless they used generative AI, because everybody else was. What they described wasn’t generating an image and then using that directly. They said that they used it during the time when they’re mocking up their idea.
They used to go out and take photographs to use as a basis for their sketches, especially for backgrounds. So it would be a real thing that they either found or set up, then take pictures. Then, the pictures would be used as a template for the art.
But with generative AI, all of that preliminary work can be done in seconds by feeding it a prompt.
When you think about it in these terms, it’s unlikely that many non-indie games going forward will be made without the use of any generative AI.
Similarly, it’s likely that it will be used extensively for quality checking text.
When you add in the crazy pressure that game developers are under, it’s likely that they’ll use generative AI much more extensively, even if their company forbids it. But the companies just want to make money. They’ll use it as much as they think they can get away with, because it’s cheaper.
What I dread is a game lengthening dialog using AI. Some folks mistake quantity for quality, and make their games unbeatingly tedious. Just like games that lean heavily on procedurally generated content.
Funnily enough, I’m excited for new dialog in video games using generative AI. It would be nice for random NPCs to not have the same 3 recorded voicelines, but to actually change what they say based on what’s happening around them.
But that’s obviously a limited use for AI. It should definitely not be used to lengthen the game and clutter up storylines as you’re kinda describing.
For background NPC, sure nothing lost, at least nothing lost that isn’t already being lost in the “put big exclamations/question marks over NPCs with something actually important to say”. Once upon a time there was a nice experience of evaluating NPC text to determine if there’s an interesting side quest or at least an interesting side story playing out in the dialog. But with the push for more credible ambient NPC instead of big cities with like 25 people living in them that has been significantly lost anyway.
Yep, not excited for Starfield generated planets type of deal when it comes to dialogues and such.
My personal issue with the idea of “infinite NPC dialogue” is that it defeats the purpose of minor NPCs. They’re just there to give you a nudge in the right direction or give flavor text (“Bandit activity sure has been picking up!” or “The king? He’s probably in his castle to the west.”). Turning them into a chatbot just means a player potentially spending all their time there with nothing to gain that they couldn’t get from Character.AI instead of playing the game.
I’m also curious about the implementation. AI API use isn’t free so you’d likely be requiring players to pay if they don’t meet the hardware requirements to host locally.
Yeah, already things were getting harder to follow as people went to address the “strangely sparse cities” problem by flooding the environment with way more stuff aiming for more plausible, but it’s more than you can ever consume and it’s generally hard to know when you are actually supposed to pay attention or not. Finding interesting side quests among the flavor text used to be a thing, but now the flavor text is just overwhelmingly too much for that.
Of course, there’s recognition of that and games start putting indications of “THIS RANDOM NPC HAS SOMETHING TO SAY” bright over anyone vaguely important. So I suppose in that context NPC flavor text vomit might as well be AI since it’s been clearly indicated as stuff to ignore as background noise. Still disappointed in the decline of “is this important or not” determination being organic.
Honestly, maybe I’m an old fart, but I refuse to knowingly buy games if they use AI instead of paying talented people to create works of art.
Well that’s the problem isn’t it it depends entirely on what the AI is being used for. The truth is we don’t know because Steam doesn’t tell us.
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That’s their fault. They decided on ambiguous definition of AI.
What if talented artists use AI to enhance their original work?
An interesting use case for me in programming has been prototyping. Stuff I otherwise wouldn’t have the time to experiment with suddenly becomes something feasible. And then, based on what I learnt while having the AI build the prototype, I can build the actual thing I want to build. So far, it has worked out pretty nicely for me.
If you’re AI upscaling a low resolution texture or something I can see that. But if I want a computer to rip off somebody else’s work and regurgitate a story based on some amalgamation of its questionably sourced training data, I can do that on my own for free.
That thumbnail’s got some hand body horror going on.
I would charge extra to do her manicure.
Steam should combat shovelware whether it’s AI slop or human slop
The way that valves AI tag works is kind of a problem.
There is no subtlety to it at all, if you use AI in any capacity during the development of the game you need to declare it via that tag yet all the tag then does is say “AI in this game”, but there’s a big difference between having the AI develop the entire story or produce all of the artwork, and having AI write boilerplate camera controls for a farming simulator.
I agree that having more degrees of usage would be useful, but erring on the side of caution and declaring any AI use as a first step is better than doing nothing.
Okay so there is this whole arguement going on about The Altars how apparently a tiny piece of background art has AI generated text in it. Personally I feel that’s absolutely fine, as otherwise it would have just been Lorem Ipsum, and really doesn’t need to be declared but technically, under the strictest interpretation of that tag, it should be declared even though you can’t even see it unless you zoom in.
I would very much like valved actually come up with a concrete policy rather than a vague one-line statement.
With how many games are released on Steam, how can AI be quantified and enforced?
E.g. Does using Intellisense need to be declared?
Would syntax highlighting?
Does using copilot to code count as “made with AI” too?
Of course, that’s why we need better guidelines. It’s like beauty ads that have to declare they used Photoshop. Every photo is edited if you don’t make it clear what you mean
Yeah, I suspect the AI tag should apply to even more games then.
Hence the problem
What? It shows up as a footer under the description, and inside is the game developer’s description of how they used AI. Look at Stellaris for example, I remember they claim to use it minimally (in very vague words), but they certainly get to say their piece.
I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it’s no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated “artwork.” IMO it’s no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren’t just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn’t capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.
what I want with AI games: Free conversations with NPCs who react to your actions.
what I don’t want, endless slop
what is the appeal of talking to an NPC that uses chatgpt to respond? you would get the same experience talking to a cat or a houseplant
instead of writing pages of dialogue, write a lot of back story, personality, interests, knowledge, info they have, quests they have to share, sample of how they talk…
fine tune models… this way each character would sound unique, rather than standard chat gpt.
a good prototype would be about a village with about a dozen of NPCs.
no thanks
another use, draw assets for a age of empires like game. then generate a diffusion model on them. now you can make rows of houses and non of them will be identical and all will fit in the art style.
same things with textures, no more repeating textures.
Yes pls
I don’t know if you have heard about the game AI2U: With You 'Til The End that’s basically a Escape the room game where a Girl kidnapped you and you need to escape. You can talk to the AI girl about any bullshit, interact and show them items in your inventory etc. If you make them upset they will maybe kill you, or they can like you so much that they will help you escape. I had a lot of fun with this game.
thanks, looks like a cool concept
Same, so used as a tool to help textures load better, to make the game function better, great.
If you pay an actor for their voice, why not ai infinite dialogue? Nobody is losing work because a human literally cannot do that job.
without that tech they would have hired a voice actor anyways, or what would be better, get a voice actor, create a character, have him voice a shit ton of lines with different emotions, timber, whispers… fine tune a model in that character, that would make every character sound unique and much less robotic.
How is it possible to hire a voice actor to make up infinite lines based on my specific questions? For every player? It isn’t
not infinite lines, just enough to find tune a model for a specific character.
also, i mean proper voice actors, the ones that can make countless distinct characters with different voices and accents.
i don’t mean buying someone’s voice, i mean hiring a voice actor to make up a specific character and have ownership of that character.
I figure if people can’t be bothered to develop the games then I can’t be bothered to play them either.
I always wondered if I could play Skyrim but with an option to say or ask custom things to NPCs
I think someone made a mod for that because of course they did.
They absolutely did, awhile ago too. It’s the Mantella mod. Used to be a nightmare to set up but now it’s good. Pretty fun talking to characters.
Is it bad that I know what the Mantella is in Elder Scrolls lore?
I have an acquaintance who is a lead Dev at an Indie studio where he is developing and training an NPC behaviour engine with thousands of responses and actions. Think fallout or mass effect response wheel, where 2-4 dialogue choices have 2-4 outcomes, but instead you can tell the NPC anything and it will have a different response. Or it will do different things whether you hand it a book, give it book, throw a potion at it or cast a healing spell on it or hug it. It could also change tactics if you tried to snipe it vs if you went at it melee. All of these are trained and accounted for and made in a way where it can be built into any game using a certain engine. And this is just aimed at generic npcs, not companions.
So if this is what disclosure of the use of generative AI means, I’m not against it. I think there is nuance to what can be done with it. Using final art assets? It’s theft. Writing? Theft. NPC behaviour? Definitely not.
Strange to not qualify the last one as theft. If it’s out putting code, it’s from the same kind of training set. If it’s out putting character responses, they’re from that same literary training data.
Open-source training texts intended for pairing with your intended style of output have been around for far longer than OpenAI has been grifting data from the entire Internet and collected book works. It came across like that’s what they’re using, not some shit off HuffingFarce that was built off of AO3 and Harry Potter.
That’s a pretty big jump in a very short amount of time.
I think it’s mostly garbage shovelware
I wonder if games with UGC report they have AI content. (Games that allow for outside assets and code)
Are algorithms the same as AI?
Oooohhh Grooosssssss! It’s gonna fucking overtake the real content so fast, now. jfc, how do we even sort them out if the “creators” don’t follow the disclosure rules?
Read reviews. Examine promotional materials. Discuss with friends.
So at the end of the day we all have to go digging through muck. Horrible.
It doesn’t take very long to look at ratings. If it’s crap it’ll have crap ratings.
A lot of great games get middling reviews, but I’m expected to parse whether or not something contains slop by a glance?
I mean that’s exactly how it’s always worked. What’s the difference just because the AI exists
No, theres a fucking difference, mate. AI has empowered the worst people to make shit they otherwise couldn’t have, and it has degraded the works of anyone with some level of skill.
Yeah because there hasn’t been a bunch of asset flip slop before. All it’s changed is that they have new tools to make it but there was always crappy stuff on Steam
You need to train your ability to spot AI.
AI art has a very distinctive style. Weird shadows, impossible architecture, and having a blatantly incorrect number of fingers are dead giveaways.
AI text tends to talk at you rather than with you. It has difficulty remembering context, so it tends to forget what you said 10 lines ago.
How about we figure out a better way to detect and sort it so I don’t have to waste time making judgements?
You’re assuming that the detector can be trusted. The detector could be someone who is being paid to mislead you on purpose.
If AI presence really matters to you, you need to trust your own two eyes for this sort of thing. Offloading that work to someone else is a considerable risk.
And to be honest, detecting AI is pretty fast once you’re able to spot it. I can spot the typical variants of AI art in just a few seconds.
I’m not assuming anything, I’m saying we should make something happen.
The halting problem makes that somewhat impossible to make. Detectors have a notable weakness with detecting themselves.
I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it’s no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated “artwork.” IMO it’s no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren’t just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn’t capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.
If I see some AI Slop thumbnail for your shit ass ripoff game then you can bet your ass I’ll never play it let alone ever pay money for it.
