Steam Week in Review: Steam Next Fest has over 8,000 demos, as worthless vibe coded slop levels up

We are drowning in shit. Steam Next Fest, which kicks off tomorrow, currently has 8,011 matches on its press preview landing page. That's roughly double the amount of demos featured in Steam's June 2026 Next Fest. In June 2022, Next Fest boasted just over a thousand demos.

The vast majority of these demos will be meritless slop. And I daresay many of them—though I have no way to confirm—didn't exist as concepts before October.

If you use social media, especially X, you've probably noticed an explosion of terrible clones and vibe coded mash-ups this month. You can largely thank Anthropic's new 5.5 update to its Claude Opus model for that, which offers massive efficiency gains for vibe coders. It's also been widely used to decompile commercial games and, maybe most famously, jailbreak the PS5.

It definitely feels like we've crossed a threshold this month. On October 10, the creator of Escape the Walls, an incremental punching game which itself uses AI to "increase the speed of creating the game", posted in-progress footage from the game on X.

Prophetically, a user replied: "You have exactly 7 hours before someone makes this on Roblox and gets 20x your revenue".

Right now, on October 19, there are at least seven Roblox clones of Escape the Walls. A competing studio had the audacity to tweet their own clone to the original game's creator. "Our Steam page is live too!" they posted. "Nothing wrong with friendly competition!"

Leaving aside the fact that Escape the Walls is itself pretty crappy looking, the situation highlights the perils of marketing independent games in an age where a clone can be turned around in hours. To wit: as Rick Lane has already reported, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux, a "Russian roulette drinking survival" game, has announced it will no longer publish its demo on Steam as planned.

"We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game's presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game's launch," a spokesperson for studio Alliance Arts Inc. wrote. The studio will instead hold closed environment play sessions for people who read and agree to a series of "participation requirements".

Elsewhere NoGlyph, the creator of Needle In A Haystack, which is itself a rapid clone of Needle In A Haystack Simulator (see: haystack slop), has accused yet another studio of copying their code in their own clone. "Yesterday, on October 16 a game called A Game About Needle In A Haystack by Little Field Studios came out on Steam," NoGlyph wrote. "It contains code copied from our game. To be clear, this is about our actual code, not a similar idea or similar mechanics."

NoGlyph moves on to offer further proof that the offending studio pulled code directly from their game. "The haystack in our game, meaning how it's drawn, how you dig into it and how gold, lapis and diamond hay work, is something that took a long time to get working properly. When we looked through their game's files, we found 13 of our classes inside it with the exact same names. More than half of the functions in that part match ours exactly. Some of our own error messages are still in there word for word, including one that points to a shader from our project that doesn't exist in their game."

NoGlyph has filed a copyright notice with Valve.

Damn, it sure would be a shame if independent studios stopped releasing demos, or were prevented from marketing their games, because talentless bottom feeders were quickly flipping their ideas into monetizable slop!

Many have made the argument that AI is "good" because it democratises specialised skills and art forms like music, writing, coding, art, and videogame development (which deploys all of the aforementioned). But where videogames are concerned it hasn't democratised anything: it has just emboldened hacks, philistines and scam merchants. Vibe coding a 20 minute blockbuster-looking videogame that resembles the Marvel / Star Wars / Fortnite universes, or vibe coding a Roblox clone of a viral indie, doesn't make you a videogame developer: if anything, it demonstrates why you aren't.

Forgive me, but I don't think someone who hasn't committed time and thought to mastering those pursuits has much hope in producing something valuable with the assistance of AI. You may be able to make something that looks like something else, but you probably don't have ideas. Spending years and years thinking about your craft, being a practitioner, is what generates ideas. Without ideas, you are just playing with the most expensive toy ever built.

Anyone who has made that moronic "democratising" claim has only to look at Roblox and the great piles of worthless slop on Steam to see the actual reality. Steam's discoverability algorithm will probably keep the vast majority of the 8,000+ Next Fest demos out of the public eye, but for those that do go viral, or find an enthusiastic audience, there are hordes of leeches ready to rob you blind, utilising the same technology that's turning PC gaming into a rich person's hobby.

Top Steam games by revenue (October 6 - 13)

You know it's a very boring week on Steam when Dota 2 takes first spot in the revenue chart. So nothing very interesting released, then?

Well, Star Wars: Galactic Racer did, right on October 6, and came in at number four. Given how positive reviews were, and that it's Star Wars, I did kinda expect it to come in at number one.

Gears of War managed to latch onto a top ten position after ranking sixth last week during its first week on sale (it was available as a pre-order before that). Risk of Rain 2 got an actually-decent update and expansion, hence its appearance, and Steam Deck reanimates at number six: there must have been a stock replenishment.

As for Aion 2, people continue to not really like it, based on Steam user reviews, but it's still making bank for NC anyway.

Last week's Steam deep cuts