Steam Next Fest, Valve's festival for indie games and demos, started earlier today, and while there are usually a ton of low-effort games included, there seems to be more than usual this time around.
Browsing through the Next Fest, it's easy to spot plenty of games with art that looks like it was generated with a quick ChatGPT prompt. And now that Claude Opus 5.5 is out and has been at the center of the decompilation and mashup mod explosion that's been happening over the last few weeks, it's not surprising that there'd be a deluge of games that are either being promoted using AI-generated images or were just flat-out generated with AI.
Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of Steam fans who aren't exactly excited about having to dig through these AI games to find human-made material, with one user straight up begging Steam to filter out the slop. In a post on the Steam subreddit, user ScalesGhost wrote: "I've been looking over the Next Fest, and I really enjoy the Discovery Queue feature, I just wish I could personalize it a bit more. Specifically, I would like the ability to filter out all games that have AI-Generated content in them (after all, steam already requires you to disclose it), and also I'd like to exclude certain tags, e.g. Incremental Games."
Steam already has a robust tagging system, so this kind of filter wouldn't be a huge lift to implement, but Valve did cut down the amount of user-defined tags back in May. Iin order for that kind of filter to exist, Valve would have to add 'AI' as a tag.
ScalesGhost is far from the only person who's noticed the amount of low-effort submissions in this Next Fest. In another thread about how AI has "ruined Next Fest," user EmmaBooney said, "Yeah, noticed that myself. Usually I scroll through and look for interesting games... it's all AI slop and I dont want to participate."
Meanwhile, user aesoprowwy said, "Hopefully there is a significant drop in the engagement metrics due to the overabundance of vibe coded games being featured and steam implements some stricter guidelines for submissions."
Steam Next Fest being full of low-effort games is nothing new, however. Valve has long had a laissez-faire approach to curation on Steam, usually relying on the algorithm to boost popular games and bury the low-effort slop. And while this Next Fest does seem worse than previous events, most people are probably better off ignoring the event for a couple of days until the popular demos naturally rise to the top and most of the shovelware gets buried.
But this comes at a time when AI in game development is getting more common by the day. Just last week Epic delayed its upcoming Star Wars shooter in order to pursue an "AI-first" direction. Epic's CEO also bragged on Twitter last week about how the company has vibe coded the Epic Games Store launcher. Even Capcom seems to have embraced AI, using it as part of its REX program, which will reportedly help it continue to improve the RE Engine that has been used in some of the best games of the year, like Resident Evil: Requiem and Pragmata.