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.

what I want with AI games: Free conversations with NPCs who react to your actions.

what I don't want, endless slop

I figure if people can’t be bothered to develop the games then I can’t be bothered to play them either.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I wonder if games with UGC report they have AI content. (Games that allow for outside assets and code)

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.