Steam Next Fest flooded with AI slop and low-effort demos, users tell Valve

This year’s Steam Next Fest, which just started today (Feb 24), is getting a fair amount of criticism from players over what they describe as a high volume of low-quality demos built around generative AI or repackaged pre-made assets. Steam’s Next Fest events are promotional windows where hundreds of developers make free demos available to players for a week. The format is meant to help smaller studios get exposure and let players discover games ahead of launch. What some in the community are seeing, though, isn’t just new ideas, rather, it is an uptick in titles that feel rushed, unpolished, or overly reliant on generative tools.

On Steam’s own forums and community threads, players have called out what they refer to as "AI slop", which is a pretty common slang term these days for digital content generated with AI that comes off as low-effort, generic, or meaningless. One community member wrote that while they’re "loving the Next Fest," the sheer number of "crappy AI slop games" is "astonishing". The user also warned that quality titles risk being drowned out if discovery tools don’t improve.

To be fair, this concern isn’t entirely new. Industry coverage shows the rising share of demos tagged with Steam’s generative AI disclosure. Valve introduced this policy to make it transparent when AI tools were used in art, writing, or code. By some counts, more than 17% of Next Fest demos included that disclosure in recent Fest events. Gamers are seeing first-hand that games using AI are no longer a fringe presence.

Those criticizing the current situation don’t solely blame AI itself. On Steam’s discussion boards, there are ongoing conversations regarding separating the use of AI tools from the much bigger problem of asset flips - games assembled from pre-made components with very little creative input. Others are asserting that simply labeling games as "AI used" won't address the root issue, which is discoverability and curation on a platform with near-countless listings. 

In the past, Valve’s AI disclosure policy has also turned heads outside Steam Next Fest. For instance, Epic Games’ CEO has publicly questioned the value of tagging games for AI use. He argued that the practice could become obsolete as tools become ubiquitous.

We should expect these debates and discussions to only ramp up in the near future, since balancing openness with quality is increasingly difficult on an open platform like Steam, especially as generative tools become more central to game creation.

The Next Fest has too much AI slop and Asset Flipping
by u/SomeRandomArtist31 in Steam