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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Steam should combat shovelware whether it's AI slop or human slop
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.
I figure if people can’t be bothered to develop the games then I can’t be bothered to play them either.
The conversation around gen AI seems to go to putting people out of work or replacing tons of human effort, and I'm sure some companies are led by people with those naive dreams, but that My Summer Car example is exactly where my head goes when I think what the future of the technology is. It's artwork that ought to be there, because the scene demands that there's art on the walls, but what that artwork is basically doesn't matter, so if gen AI can get the job done cheaply, it's probably the right tool for the job. However, I'd have thought that the scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution were another prime use case for it too, but people rioted over that one. Even if it's a good tool for the job, if it's poison in the marketplace, it's no longer a good tool to use.
I find this outlook to be pretty sad. The idea of chunks of your art “not mattering” and just being there as filler.
One of the joys of creating artwork is that during the process of creation you are actively figuring out what is important. Perhaps you start out creating a simple texture just to have something on the walls, and in the process you realize there’s an equally simple yet creative way for you to tell a little story with that wall. Something most players will never notice but a year from release gets thrown in “small details you missed” compilations.
It may be that the idea you came up with for that wall goes on to influence the main story, and spur on a totally different and more interesting game than you initially imagined.
A lot of non-artists have this concept of art, where it forms completely in your head in a single burst, and then you just have endure the tedious labor of constructing it. I think that’s why people are so easily persuaded by the ‘promise’ of AI. They think it’s just making the boring parts easy. But in reality it’s making the creative parts boring
Elevator music is a surprisingly profitable commercial niche. For that matter, there are always going to be soulless, insipid, overused imitations of real art that gets turned into staggering commercial success precisely because it's bland and meaningless. "Live, love, laugh" for example.
Not everything has to have meaning and significance, but we also have the right to judge it when it should.
The problem with AI is that a lot of artists literally rely at least to some extent on the money that flows from that soulless commercial drivel, either with their eyes fully open to the situation, or by convincing themselves that it does have meaning to somebody, or just themselves if nobody else. They need to pay the bills and put food on the table and a huge source of that comes from commercial art work which has a high bar for visual impact and a very low bar for ideas or meaning.
If AI replaces the meaningless filler content of the art world, how do artists survive if that's their bread and butter? It's never going to directly replace real human art, but if it removes their meal ticket, the outcome will still be the same. Soon there will be almost no real human artists left, as they'll start to become prohibitively expensive, which will drive more people to AI in a self-reinforcing feedback loop until only a handful of "masters" and a bunch of literal starving artists trying to become them without ever earning a penny. The economics of the situation are pretty dire and it's increasingly hard to picture a future for human art that doesn't look bleak.
I'm planning to do my part to make sure exclusively human-made art is always the choice I'm going to make and pay for, but there are bigger forces at play here than you or me and I don't think they're going to push things in a happy direction. The enshittification of art will happen, is already happening, and we're just along for the ride.
A beautiful post, thank you. There’s a lot in here that I could further clarify my positions on but I don’t disagree with you.
My hope is that enough people will emphatically reject it in order to keep things alive. A band doesn’t need ten million listeners to thrive, even 1,000 people who buy your albums and come to your shows can keep you moving. It may be that we become a counterculture of a bunch of artists who support each other.
But I do also have confidence that human ingenuity will always be more powerful than the slop that literally anyone can churn out on their phone in two seconds. So the scene may change but I think there will always be a somewhat large market for when people want more than just inoffensive elevator music
I think when you've got a small enough team making something as multifaceted as a video game, there will be parts of it you find boring and relatively unimportant. If you can make it cheaper, you get that much closer to the possibility of breaking even. Parts of this can scale up to larger projects, but in the end, this is a matter of choosing your battles. There's an adage that's something like, "Your game is never done; you just stop working on it," and the sooner you can stop working on it while still delivering a product that people are interested in, the more sustainable the whole endeavor becomes. Chunks of it will be filler or less important than other chunks, always. It's why there's a Unity and Unreal asset store; and why you can hear the same sound library used in Devil May Cry, Soul Calibur, and Dark Souls menus. Those parts of the game were less important to be specifically crafted for these games, and they chose other battles to care more about.
Eh, the small team argument doesn’t really carry any water I think. Some of the most beloved indie games of all time have simple, geometric graphics. Thomas Was Alone even managed to tell a tear jerking story between characters who were monotone squares and rectangles.
Using AI to totally gloss over some of your most basic creative questions, such as “what are my capabilities?” And “What can I do given those limitations?” Isn’t going to lead you to a better product. If something is truly that unimportant it can be arranged trivially or cut. Even choosing to cut something is an inherently creative decision; another layer of the process which is lost if you train yourself to reach for AI to implement something that suits your first whim.
The asset store angle is also not really comparable. You’re still collaborating with another artist. We could ride this train all the way down to you didn’t personally mine the silicone for the computer you personally designed if we felt like it. It’s disingenuous and ignores the material differences between these technologies.
In summary, I basically think that you are narratively framing this as something that empowers the little guys, but I disagree that it is actually doing so in practice. It’s a product that’s only on our minds because of a massive concerted effort on the behalf of mega corporations whose explicit goals are to rob and disenfranchise us
I imagine a lot of indie games can't really afford to pay or commission artists but still want to have a product that looks presentable. I know someone who does mostly programming but is now considering being a solo dev on a game because generative AI enables him to do it alone.
There definitely exists a spectrum between shovelware, large studios being too cheap to pay actual artists and indie devs having little to no other options.
I'm working on a game. I'll be using AI for anything it's good for. If some people don't want to play because of that, fine, but AI used properly is a productivity multiplier that cannot be ignored.
Slop.
Slop
Feel like "anytime it's good for" could be subjective.
There are likely folks who think they can just vibe code up an unreal tutorial and say AI was good at "all of it".
if some boilerplate mechanics are AI code completions, or you had it generate a skybox for you, ok. If it's generating a significant chunk of your "foreground" assets, then I'm likely to find out as disinteresting as the titles that have leaned hard on stock assets.
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.
Good. Let's normalise it so the rest of us can actually fucking use it!
Let's not. Generative AI is bad for environment, it's also using stolen assets.
What’s stopping you from buying games from the nearly 8k that use that stupid AI shit? There’s gotta be some slop in there that suits your tastes.
That's a pretty big jump in a very short amount of time.
I think it's mostly garbage shovelware
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.
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