In years past, I’ve enjoyed checking out Steam Next Fests. These regularly scheduled Valve-sanctioned events encourage devs working on indie games to put together a demo and share it as part of a larger promotion. However, the most recent, currently ongoing Steam Next Fest is a nightmare with thousands upon thousands of demos, many filled with AI slop. At this point, the vibes are completely rotten, and it’s only made me more worried about the future than excited.
In theory, Steam Next Fest should be a great event for developers. A big pile of new free demos for upcoming games attracts many gamers who are looking for the next cool thing. And Valve promotes it with its own big storefront and menus, making it easy for people to quickly download and play dozens of demos and hopefully wishlist and eventually buy some of them, putting money in Valve’s pockets as well as the devs’ and publishers’ own coffers, too. Plus, fans get to play a bunch of free demos, and game critics and content creators get a batch of neat new games to cover while getting a peek at the future. Sounds great!
But this time around, Steam Next Fest features nearly 7,100 free demos. And that’s just far too many free demos for Next Fest to be usable or useful as it once was for so many people.
It wasn’t always like this. In the past, the number of Next Fest demos was smaller. As reported by Game Discover, during the last Next Fest in June, there were around 4,300 demos. In October 2024, there were around 2,700 demos. And back in October 2023, there were around 900 demos. In those days, it was easier to find cool games and for good stuff to bubble up to the surface. As the number has grown, it’s become harder and harder to actually stand out in the pack or find anything in the flood of games. Now that Steam Next Fest has reached over 7,000 demos, it’s just become an overwhelming nightmare to dig through.
That many demos alone would make Next Fest miserable. However, the other big problem with this recent Next Fest is that so many of the demos are AI slop or crappy clones, or were quickly slapped together via vibe-coding. This was a problem last year, and it’s only gotten much, much worse.
I hopped around Steam Next Fest for a bit today and repeatedly encountered games that looked like they had been cranked out by Claude in a few hours. Many games just openly admit in their AI disclosures that vast portions of their codebase and assets were completely AI-generated. To peruse Steam Next Fest right now is to jump into an ocean of AI garbage and slop. It’s depressing, and has killed all my excitement for Next Fest.
I don’t seem to be alone in this reaction. In general, the vibes around Next Fest this year feel especially rotten and miserable. My timeline is filled with devs, writers, and fans who just seem defeated by the flood of Next Fest demos and AI slop. What was once a joyful Steam event that got people talking about upcoming games with excitement is now yet one more example of how everything is being corrupted and ruined by genAI tools and models.
Steam Next Fest is facing huge backlash over the rise of AI-slop and low-effort games.
The October event has 8,011 demos, nearly twice as many as June., developers say the flood of low-quality “AI slop” is making it harder for real indie games worth to play
Back in June,… pic.twitter.com/DgfugANUFY
— Pirat_Nation 🔴 (@Pirat_Nation) October 20, 2026
It also really makes me sad that Valve seems uninterested in curation of any kind and instead relies on its users tagging games and its own algorithms learning what people like and hopefully shielding them from the slop. Valve’s chokehold over PC gaming continues to make me nervous, as the company seems completely uninterested in lifting a finger to actually improve Next Fest or stem the amount of garbage that fills Steam every day now. And one of its only real competitors, Epic, is fully embracing AI and vibe-coding, making it a less-than-stellar replacement.
Earlier this month we reached a depressing milestone: More games have already been added to Steam this year than in all of 2025, a trend that shows no signs of stopping. And now that AI coding tools have become even more capable of spitting out “games” and mods at record speed, leading to a huge influx of vibe-coded software in recent weeks, I suspect that future Next Fests will be even bigger and even worse. The future is grim, folks.