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.
Yeah, that’s why I’d like some more insight.
The initial headline doesn’t exactly pass a sniff test… It’s possible, but unlikely.
If ~34,000 were added in the last year, that means over 25% of Steam’s library of ~114,000 was added in the last year…
If only 1/5 of those were using generative AI, why was there such a massive increase over the last year?
Has Steam made it easier for cash grabs, or… it just doesn’t make a lot of sense without more information
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.
Funnily enough, I’m excited for new dialog in video games using generative AI. It would be nice for random NPCs to not have the same 3 recorded voicelines, but to actually change what they say based on what’s happening around them.
But that’s obviously a limited use for AI. It should definitely not be used to lengthen the game and clutter up storylines as you’re kinda describing.
For background NPC, sure nothing lost, at least nothing lost that isn’t already being lost in the “put big exclamations/question marks over NPCs with something actually important to say”. Once upon a time there was a nice experience of evaluating NPC text to determine if there’s an interesting side quest or at least an interesting side story playing out in the dialog. But with the push for more credible ambient NPC instead of big cities with like 25 people living in them that has been significantly lost anyway.
Yep, not excited for Starfield generated planets type of deal when it comes to dialogues and such.
My personal issue with the idea of “infinite NPC dialogue” is that it defeats the purpose of minor NPCs. They’re just there to give you a nudge in the right direction or give flavor text (“Bandit activity sure has been picking up!” or “The king? He’s probably in his castle to the west.”). Turning them into a chatbot just means a player potentially spending all their time there with nothing to gain that they couldn’t get from Character.AI instead of playing the game.
I’m also curious about the implementation. AI API use isn’t free so you’d likely be requiring players to pay if they don’t meet the hardware requirements to host locally.
Yeah, already things were getting harder to follow as people went to address the “strangely sparse cities” problem by flooding the environment with way more stuff aiming for more plausible, but it’s more than you can ever consume and it’s generally hard to know when you are actually supposed to pay attention or not. Finding interesting side quests among the flavor text used to be a thing, but now the flavor text is just overwhelmingly too much for that.
Of course, there’s recognition of that and games start putting indications of “THIS RANDOM NPC HAS SOMETHING TO SAY” bright over anyone vaguely important. So I suppose in that context NPC flavor text vomit might as well be AI since it’s been clearly indicated as stuff to ignore as background noise. Still disappointed in the decline of “is this important or not” determination being organic.
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.
What if talented artists use AI to enhance their original work?
An interesting use case for me in programming has been prototyping. Stuff I otherwise wouldn’t have the time to experiment with suddenly becomes something feasible. And then, based on what I learnt while having the AI build the prototype, I can build the actual thing I want to build. So far, it has worked out pretty nicely for me.
If you’re AI upscaling a low resolution texture or something I can see that. But if I want a computer to rip off somebody else’s work and regurgitate a story based on some amalgamation of its questionably sourced training data, I can do that on my own for free.
That thumbnail’s got some hand body horror going on.
I would charge extra to do her manicure.
Steam should combat shovelware whether it’s AI slop or human slop
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.
Yes pls
I feel you, but imagine if a game dev trained their own LLM exclusively on their own content. Only their own dialogue and lore. Could be fascinating then. Not something I wanna see a lot of work out into at the expense of other things, but could be interesting.
And to reiterate, I genuinely mean only trained on data the studio has a copyright on already.
I don’t know if you have heard about the game AI2U: With You 'Til The End that’s basically a Escape the room game where a Girl kidnapped you and you need to escape. You can talk to the AI girl about any bullshit, interact and show them items in your inventory etc. If you make them upset they will maybe kill you, or they can like you so much that they will help you escape. I had a lot of fun with this game.
thanks, looks like a cool concept
Same, so used as a tool to help textures load better, to make the game function better, great.
If you pay an actor for their voice, why not ai infinite dialogue? Nobody is losing work because a human literally cannot do that job.
without that tech they would have hired a voice actor anyways, or what would be better, get a voice actor, create a character, have him voice a shit ton of lines with different emotions, timber, whispers… fine tune a model in that character, that would make every character sound unique and much less robotic.
How is it possible to hire a voice actor to make up infinite lines based on my specific questions? For every player? It isn’t
not infinite lines, just enough to find tune a model for a specific character.
also, i mean proper voice actors, the ones that can make countless distinct characters with different voices and accents.
i don’t mean buying someone’s voice, i mean hiring a voice actor to make up a specific character and have ownership of that character.
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.
I figure if people can’t be bothered to develop the games then I can’t be bothered to play them either.
I always wondered if I could play Skyrim but with an option to say or ask custom things to NPCs
I think someone made a mod for that because of course they did.
They absolutely did, awhile ago too. It’s the Mantella mod. Used to be a nightmare to set up but now it’s good. Pretty fun talking to characters.
Is it bad that I know what the Mantella is in Elder Scrolls lore?
There was a question about Daedric Princes in a trivia game I went to recently. They gave four of them and you had to match what they were the prince of. I felt confident about two but only got one right. Of course I got Shegorath right.
What was the one you messed up? I’m gonna guess either mephala or meridia since they are kinda weird, either that or the answer was Magnus who is technically a daedra though not usually lumped in with the rest.
I thought Sanguine or whatever was the murder one but I remembered wrong. They gave the four categories and we had to match them. I thought Malacath might be based on Malakith from War Hammer and that seemed pretty hedonistic but it was a 50/50. (Well, I thought it was a 50/50 lol.) The last was Mephala who I thought might be lies. And if you know the lore well you probably already knew Mephala was the fourth they mentioned lol.
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.
Open-source training texts intended for pairing with your intended style of output have been around for far longer than OpenAI has been grifting data from the entire Internet and collected book works. It came across like that’s what they’re using, not some shit off HuffingFarce that was built off of AO3 and Harry Potter.
That’s a pretty big jump in a very short amount of time.
I think it’s mostly garbage shovelware
I wonder if games with UGC report they have AI content. (Games that allow for outside assets and code)
If I see some AI Slop thumbnail for your shit ass ripoff game then you can bet your ass I’ll never play it let alone ever pay money for it.
Oooohhh Grooosssssss! It’s gonna fucking overtake the real content so fast, now. jfc, how do we even sort them out if the “creators” don’t follow the disclosure rules?
Read reviews. Examine promotional materials. Discuss with friends.
So at the end of the day we all have to go digging through muck. Horrible.
It doesn’t take very long to look at ratings. If it’s crap it’ll have crap ratings.
A lot of great games get middling reviews, but I’m expected to parse whether or not something contains slop by a glance?
You need to train your ability to spot AI.
AI art has a very distinctive style. Weird shadows, impossible architecture, and having a blatantly incorrect number of fingers are dead giveaways.
AI text tends to talk at you rather than with you. It has difficulty remembering context, so it tends to forget what you said 10 lines ago.
How about we figure out a better way to detect and sort it so I don’t have to waste time making judgements?
You’re assuming that the detector can be trusted. The detector could be someone who is being paid to mislead you on purpose.
If AI presence really matters to you, you need to trust your own two eyes for this sort of thing. Offloading that work to someone else is a considerable risk.
And to be honest, detecting AI is pretty fast once you’re able to spot it. I can spot the typical variants of AI art in just a few seconds.
I’m not assuming anything, I’m saying we should make something happen.
The halting problem makes that somewhat impossible to make. Detectors have a notable weakness with detecting themselves.
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.
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
with 1000 supporters you need them to shell a monthly €10 to be viable. That’s unrealistic. I’m not going to support every individual creator to that extent.
Artists need to make a stable hundred and twenty thousand euros a year to be viable?
But my apologies, my framing of this idea was underdeveloped. You as a listener are not supporting every artist you listen to via like patreon or something.
Essentially, from the perspective of the band itself, you just need to reach a critical mass of fans that will buy your albums, come to your shows, want to pick up a t shirt, etc. And that number is much lower than you would think. Not for becoming a millionaire with a mansion mind you, but to make your project self sustaining
That « just » carries a lot… and 10k a month brut is far from making anyone a millionaire. They have expenses, taxes… that’s a confortable-ish living wage.
Your assertions carry nothing
It’s kind of interesting that you say elevator music is soulless, not real art, etc. There are some genres of music that are based on elevator music, hold music, weather channel music, “Muzak” in general. It’s just as real as anything else, and people do seek it out.
I think there’s room for someone to recognize there’s an utterly generic facet to an otherwise creative work. If you for example know you just want a generic night skybox, I don’t think there’s going to be more quality by doing it directly.
However that sentiment carried forward to the assets will rapidly degrade the experience similar to using stock assets.
There’s a balance for sure, again tho I would caution against “knowing” things about your work beforehand. I consider that to be a trap. Skyboxes in particular you can do amazing stylish things very quickly by blowing up unexpected textures and adding a few grounding elements, but we don’t need to drill too deeply into any particular element. Doors don’t open for you if you never try the handle
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’m not a fan of AI; I’m indifferent to it. What your capabilities are will vary based on which tools you’re using, and that can result in a very different scope of game. The part where it’s collaborating with another artist doesn’t matter to me if I can’t tell the difference, as long as the intellectual property rights of how the AI was trained are handled properly. I won’t be able to tell the difference in something like My Summer Car, because the prop artwork hanging in the room isn’t why I would be playing that game. If it has a tangible effect on the quality of the game, and I can tell the product is sub par because of the use of gen AI, that’s when it was the wrong tool for the job, or that it should have been cut. I personally wouldn’t care about how those scientists in Jurassic World look (there’s more important, attention-grabbing stuff in that game), but seemingly, plenty of people do. The reason I brought up small teams in particular is not just because of cost savings but because you’re less likely to have a specialist who excels at or enjoys every single part that makes up a video game.
that can result in a very different scope of game.
That’s exactly the point. Sometimes you shouldn’t even try to do certain things. The 15 minutes you spend shimming your AI assets into the game are ironically stealing your time from the 15 minutes of thoughtful consideration that would have resulted in a manageable project. Again my friend; your first thought for the project is not the point when you have finished the important thinking for your project.
Anyway we can keep going back and forth about your narrative framing of the technology all day, but you say you don’t really care, so why try to justify anything beyond that? If the devs don’t care about the phenomena I’m describing, and neither do their players, then of course it’s a match made in heaven. Please feel free to enjoy your pastimes without any concern for these conversations. People who think like me will occasionally meet you with scrutiny (we obviously think you should care very deeply about the art you choose to fill your life with) but I suspect in time our groups will naturally just see less and less of each other
You’re certainly free to lovingly craft every byte of a game but that doesn’t automatically make it a better product. You’re describing a creative outlet, not something that needs to appeal to some random customer in the 10s they skim your store page.
Regardless of how important it is to your creative vision, there are some boxes you need to check. Visual texture on an otherwise forgettable wall is that exact case. If you need some background wall art your options are:
- Spend X units of time putting something together. Most likely a poor use of time unless you’re already proficient
- Fundamentally simplify your art style to keep X manageable (your game ends up in the pixel art bin, sales plummet)
- Sacrifice other parts of development to free up X time (content, mechanics and other features suffer)
- Pay somebody else (literally never in the budget for an indie game)
- Gen AI gives something passable in a few minutes
Or everyone could take your advice: if you don’t have the time or money to approach your dream game, don’t even try! In my opinion, more people making their art is a good thing, even if it doesn’t pass everyone’s purity test.
If you’re (rightly) worried about the livelihood of the displaced background artist that’s fine, but complain about the economic system and not the tool.
Yeah similar to above my friend, you are simply incorrectly framing the issue rather than exploring reality as it is.
You are merely saying the words “you will either use GenAI or your project will fail, there is NO WAY to economically address any of the problems that crop up during game dev without using it”. This betrays fundamental misunderstanding of what creativity is
It is also ahistorical. What you and seemingly all proponents of the technology seem to forget is the meteoric success of the industry and indie games in particular prior to the AI nonsense.
Finally, I am not even slightly interested in addressing your ridiculous perversions of my previous points. Anyone can easily understand what I’m saying and it’s very telling that you feel the need to misrepresent me so extremely. You may continue arguing with yourself if you wish, I trust that any reader worth reaching will easily be able to distinguish between my words and the strawmen you are compelled to present
Well, AI is largely a solution in search of a problem at this point in time, but I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles, because I don’t think I have it in me to play more than one of those. Fortunately, better tools and options can exist so that there’s not some arbitrary reason to choose to do less when you could have done more. The actual value of gen AI right now is propped up by investments and not actual profitability, so we’ll see where its value falls in the marketplace once gravity pulls it back down. I expect the better option will still often be just the asset store when the dust settles. And this isn’t some total disregard for what art we fill our lives with. There’s art that people care very deeply about in My Summer Car, just not the framed pictures hanging on the wall.
I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles
You and I both are limited in what we are capable of appreciating. The limiting factor is our taste. My hope for everyone is that we always continue to see the value in developing our taste, because the art we engage with affects who we become
That’s exactly the point. Sometimes you shouldn’t even try to do certain things.
This is some luddite logic. If man were meant to fly God would have gave us wings.
Ridiculous and obvious mischaracterization of the point. I’m not gonna waste my time arguing with the random ideas you invent
Icarus flew too close to the sun, you know.
It does empower little guys. It empowers everybody, for good or ill. That’s a what a tool is. I can hammer a nail, I can hammer a nail that shouldn’t be there, or I can hammer a person in the face. Is any of that the hammer’s fault?
Gen AI is not a hammer, it is an auto-construction machine that removes you from the process of building. It doesn’t empower people, it sidesteps them.
A few angles on this:
You’re right that nothing is unimportant and I certainly enjoy it when I discover that attention to detail, but part of what makes that special is knowing that they put in extra effort into that. Acknowledging it as something that takes effort, we have to recognize the trade offs associated with that effort. Devs, especially indie ones, don’t have unlimited time and resources. So they have to prioritize. Choose your battles. What are the MOST important things that need to be in the game? What is required? Then after that if you have resources left and can control yourself from doing too much scope creep, then you can spend time on the lower priority things. If you can’t do this you might never release the game.
Of course, what is more or less important is subjective and context dependent. Subtle, intentional details might be more important in a game with a lot of environmental storytelling like Dark Souls, or a puzzle game where you want to be careful about how you direct the player’s attention, but is probably much less important in say, an action rpg where you’re just running through hoards of random enemies slamming particle effects.
Another thought I had related to the point about inspiration happening through the process: I don’t really do art anymore, (no real reason I stopped, might be fun again if I ever have the motivation/focus for it) but in high school I took 3 years of graphics design classes for art class. I’d finish whatever my assigned project was and then I just spent a bunch of time messing around in photoshop with random gradients, filters, and other effects. I wouldn’t call it super deliberate at least in the early stages, but at some point I’d end up with some abstract art that I liked and maybe tweaked a bit from there based on the things I saw from randomly trying stuff. I still use some of those for desktop backgrounds. I don’t think I could have ended up with any of that without some of the random stuff photoshop did. I could imagine someone using an ai image generation for similar kinds of inspiration. Although I can see how it’s also a lot easier for them to just stop there and not think about it again.
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 thought about doing this, but my plan would be to attach a thumbnail on every piece of AI art declaring “Placeholder AI work”. Then release the game for free that way to gauge interest.
I mean so long as they don’t try to profit off of it I guess. Albeit it still enables all the corporations that are shilling this kind of bullshit so personally I’d not be very interested in their slopware.
