Steam faces backlash for promoting excessive AI-created games
Facepalm: Some gaming companies have expressed their unconditional love for assets generated through AI algorithms, but customers aren’t exactly enamored with it. Even Steam, the largest gaming platform for PC, could be contributing to the promotion of AI-generated content at the expense of human-made, coherently developed experiences.
Valve is celebrating new games coming to Steam with its latest Next Fest event. The digital delivery platform is promoting hundreds of free demos, streaming events, and chats with developers until March 3. However, some users feel that the Steam Next Fest is being spoiled by an excessive amount of games that clearly rely on AI-generated assets.
The number of titles featuring AI art, generic anime girls, dark fantasy settings with “Balenciaga AI” faces, and fake pixel art promoted through Next Fest is becoming “tiresome,” according to one user. Beyond graphics and artwork, AI is also reportedly taking center stage in many games’ voice and audio assets.
Valve recently introduced a new policy for AI-generated content, requiring game developers to disclose when they’ve used generative AI in their projects. This policy change led Activision to acknowledge the growing use of AI assets in its Call of Duty series.
Some game categories seem to be particularly affected by the overwhelming amount of AI assets. The “Simulation” section of Steam’s Next Fest is filled with similar titles, while other questionable candidates aren’t disclosing their use of AI art at all. According to Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, Valve’s attempt to tweak its recommendation algorithm could be the real source of the issue.
Valve decided to take a different approach to game recommendations, Carless said, showing more random titles during the first days of the Next Fest event. While these picks are still personalized based on games already played by users, they now also include smaller, and perhaps “weirder,” games.
Valve is trying to diversify its suggestions with a more egalitarian approach, Carless explained, instead of focusing solely on the biggest, most trending titles. Gaming marketing expert Chris Zukowski suggests that the Steam algorithm is testing a few smaller games to see if they can survive the platform’s popularity contest.
Over the coming days, the Steam Next Fest will likely return to “normal,” and AI-generated games should return to the darker corners of the platform where they belong. Valve should then focus on the real problem affecting Steam right now: properly promoting the huge number of good, human-made games released on the platform daily.
