This is what people are mad about, taken from the front page of nextfest: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5106420/Leverage_Real_Est... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5155900/Ages_TD_Demo/?cur... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5200920/BATTLE_PARTS__POW... https://store.steampowered.com/app/4609270/Naval_Supremacy/?...
These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)
And there are a lot this year
I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.
I think the nuance is always there. The disagreement seems to be the semantics.
well played honestly
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...
39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.
While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.
Same as when I got annoyed that library I wanted to use turns out does not check any of the boxes it claims to check, because its pure untested slop. I would have no issues with it being AI if it worked because I used it to make my own versio of that library that in fact works as advertised.
So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.
> Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"
Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
I don't think it does more harm than good. Maybe I'm biased because it's been very good for me and the people around me.
> Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?
No. The argument being made in this thread is that people hate AI slop (people just hate slop), rather than AI in general. This poll was linked as evidence that people hate AI. My argument is that the poll is flawed and does nothing to counter the point being made in this thread about slop vs. AI.
As for Steam...ever since they opened up who can publish and how publishing works, there been _a lot_ of slop pre-AI. I'd rather have more interesting and more controvesial filters. People will get surprised how few recent games aren't going to be filtered by "No AI"
Most people hate what they (incorrectly) think AI is.
Yes, I agree. It took science to prove that life doesn't arise from rotting meat. But the fact that populations (even in developed countries) are rapidly getting less and less educated indicates that people are less and less likely to have the critical thinking skills to understand when their eyes are not adequate instruments of observation.
Also AI slop exists, certainly; people aren't wrong to hate AI slop, but you have to agree that slop isn't the entirety of AI.
That isn't true. AI is overwhelmingly used to create slop, not useful or interesting things. Therefore people hate AI in large part because it is synonymous with slop.
I have no reason to seek them out. The only reason I would ever encounter "Leverage Real Estate Simulator" is because people are "outraged" about it.
Who cares about steam entries for bad games? Who is it hurting?
Many shoppers browse nextfest to find cool new indie games. These are being crowded out by AI slop.
Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.
Before: 1e6 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 100, but the filter is only 90% accurate so 10 bad games get through.
Now: 1e7 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 1k, and even if the filter is now 95% accurate (or equally if the content is on average twice as likely to be in the "good" range) there's still 50 bad games.
Unfortunately the filtering is also AI, and the filter is at best(!) of a similar kind as will have been used to train the AI which made the slop, so this necessarily goes much worse, and is reasonably likely to pass all 9e6 new vibe-generated games.
If I had to guess, bad games to good games ratio has always been like 99 to 1.
Issue is there are more games nowadays obviously, so more slop, though I'd be surprised if the ratio has moved much.
Human made trash has always polluted Steam.
[citation needed]
There theoretically could be - and I don't have an issue with an otherwise competent dev/artist making use of AI tools - but I know no examples of good games that also deserve a "made with AI"/"uses AI" badge.
It’s not exactly what you meant, but I enjoyed this for several hours.
They could always take the bold step of listening to what their customers want, and eliminating use of AI. Then they wouldn't need to hide it.
Customers don't know what they want. Sorry but it's just true. They are anti-AI because of a multitude of reasons, only some of those reasons are based in reality. Most of them will give up their anti-AI stance once the dust settles and they will not reward the creators who "stuck to their guns".
It's the same way customers beg restaurants for healthy options then when the restaurant puts those items on the menu they don't sell. Right now mob mentality might sink a game that people think AI was involved in but give it a year and they won't care.
Thinking that not using AI will be a winning play (today) is just fighting the last war.
Paradox publicly admit use of AI in various places, yet their games are good.
Do people expect Steam to proctor the entire development process?
Issue here is not AI use, but very low amount of creative human effort that went into making some games.
There are three existing realistic solutions for this problem:
- raise SteamWorks deposit of $100 for launching a new game on Steam (to reflect lower cost of making games with coding agents)
- reviews by users and pro game critics
- users can request refunds under 2 hours of playtime
This already exists (or did)
> There are three existing realistic solutions
So does this!
Anyone who attempts to reframe this as "AI is not a contributing factor" needs to remember that in the past, the number of sloppy games were negligible due to a natural filter/barrier of entry where the indie author had to know how to code, or motivated enough pay someone who does.
AI lowers the barrier to entry - including for scammers.
There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.
It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
Yes. Of course you can explain all the nuance in your AI disclosure statement and consumers can decide if it matters to them.
>What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
Yes.
When it comes to software development, LLMs are present somewhere in the pipeline. Even if it’s a simple google search, you have AI overview. Even if I only use an LLM to debug or read code. Even if I only use an LLM to do web searches.
There would legitimately be no software left that’s AI-free.
Look, many domains can do just fine without LLMs and LLMs don’t enhance them too much. Software is the exception. Every software engineer, everywhere on Earth, is using LLMs to some extent in their workflow. The only exceptions are where it’s literally illegal to do so.
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
> it carries no meaning about the quality of the games
It doesn't have to, Steam already has reviews.
You presume in favor of the existence of non-slop.
Again, I'm saying this would end up not impacting any developers' finances, because nearly no players would take the AI tag seriously.
Consumers absolutely hate AI companies. Consumers hate their leaders, distrust their workers; why shouldn't consumers be allowed to know which companies are eating at the LLM trough and which ones aren't?
The only reasons I see here is that it's bad for those gaming companies, which just leaves me to retort: who cares?
Consumers have a right to know which types of businesses they are supporting. If the business doesn't like it, they are free to do something else.
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
Sure, we at HN are holier than the rest and we know how to “bend the powers of AI for good”, but what Steam players see is a sea of mass produced AI slop games which barely work at all.
And yes, there is that one guy with good storytelling skills using AI to fill the knowledge gap in other areas make a game with some interesting ideas, but even him is getting overshadowed by the sea of slop. (Still a point could be made here of why. Why do everything alone? Why not take a chance with an aspiring VA recording lines from their phone? Pretty sure some people would work for free to get their first chance to get featured in anything)
We know it makes absolutely no sense to slap a binary “AI” sticker in a game just because one dev asked Claude to help them fix some scripting bug or whatever but maybe, just maybe, the best solution in that case would be outright lying. We know who that tag is for, something something read the spirit of the law, not what was literally written.
Right now I am glad I am not a Valve employee because they will have to figure out some scaleable solution for the (lack of) QA problem they have been ignoring for a long time now.
The uploader? Easy to lie about. The playerbase? Will be false positives. Steam moderators? Maybe, seems like a ton of work though.
Besides, I'd say majority of software projects nowadays have at least some AI tooling involved in the development process, we tagging 99% percent of games?
AI Used in back-office administration, internal documentation & presentations
AI Used in research
AI Used for generating placeholders
AI Used for Upscaling (DLSS)
AI Used for translations of UI.
AI Used in the final product (assets incl. textures, 3D, sound and voice)
AI Used in final product (code)
To say nothing of the other disciplines of AI like machine vision or voice recognition or dynamically building a story tree or character response.
I used to assume that low effort indies would be the major force for the game equivalent of gen-AI tiktok fruit slop, but when I saw DLSS 5 I realised it might come for AAA first.
Most playing a video game know nothing of programming let alone the specific architecture or development process, so I am not sure how you would expect them to express feelings about the code.
Narrarive or script is still in the same artistic consideration though, so say if the game was a sort of meta exploration of the code, this might expose the same sort of "value" over code.
But I don't think non-slop art is separable from the process to make it. I do however think gen-AI is blurring the qualities that distinguish non-slop by proxy, and we'll end up trying to find meaning in non-existent design/art decisions. I've already stopped trying to discover new digital artists for this reason. One day I might drop out of gaming beyond casual play with friends at this rate.
You can have AI create the rules for you, or you can have the AI create the code that implements the rules. It's not different for art. You can have the AI create concepts for your, or you can direct the AI towards a specific vision.
There’s no right vs wrong, for art the details Are the fun part.
I’m enough of a sucker to think that there’s art in code as well (not just the game design but implementation too) but clearly less and it’s not nearly as visible.
I don’t want AI either but I find AI art more offensive
Too reductive.
I choose to dislike the taste of cilantro, but that choice is wired into many people and doesn’t present as a choice at all: it is instinctual.
And machine screws are a lot less art that art is, obviously, so I don’t think that comparison helps your case. Screws are the code equivalent in the analogy.
The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."
Introducing a better review system where you could rate how fun, asthetically pleasing and whatnot a game is would likely help with sorting out the sloppy mass produced media. I think steam could take one step further and build a classification system based on required-to-submit 1 hour long of in-game footage. The effort needed for sloppy games is far lower than recording 1 hour of gameplay in 90% of the slop and I believe that would at least somewhat make people reconsider knowing that they can't hide behind a fancy trailer or cool visuals.
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
--
As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
Ten years ago, you could already code one tower defense or "farming simulator" or bejeweled-alike game, and then reskin it 6 different ways for cheap and release the "new versions". The only new thing is the quantity of slop, but slop games certainly existed before AI.
So long as user reviews are adequately filtered to be real players, some slight tweaks to the Steam search algorithm should do a good job at handling it.
No one will notice or care if Claude wrote boilerplate code for your game. Everyone will notice if you vibecoded the mechanics whole cloth. The people who don't want to play sloppy games, already are avoiding sloppy games just fine.
God forbid consumers exercise their rights in the matter.
This will cost with low ROI.
If Steam is indeed customer focused, they might but doubtful.
This is really a call for games journalism to step up and try to innovate. Human curators with taste, and a number of them with different mindsets who people can find one that meshes their own, is more important than ever.
People tend to do things unless explictely deterred or not allowed in the first place.
e.g. There is no u-turn sign (though in the area it is illegal) people will make u-turns regardless, unless cops are watching over them.
Same thing here. People will still post AI slops unless there are some watchers.
And as much as I appreciate Gabe, there are enormous financial incentives that make me uncomfortable giving yet more power and dominance to Valve. Especially as he gets older.
So this is a space where games journalism has a space to get back in and try to innovate solutions to a real and growing market problem.
So Valve will need to train on descriptions of games and perhaps demand more out of developers who want to sell games on their platform.
All notable app stores face this already or will face it soon. Maybe the apt GUI for your favourite debian derivative won't get too flooded...
simple tags and reviews from people with similar profiles as yours. netflix figured this out years ago with their by-mail recommendations.
I use claude in my games(Currently a hobby) I draw a character on paper, claude models the proportions symmetrically and then I go back in and slowly build up the model. I wouldn't have a problem with artists doing this at all, in fact I don't know of a good reason not to. However if they generated a picture, sent that to claude, took whatever claude generated and threw it into the game then its going to look like garbage and cause they didn't start by throwing new information into the system it must start from training data so it will look the same as all the other slop.
That first step of starting with a piece of paper or some human seed is huge, the more detailed that step the less I care about the rest of the process.
plenty of games made with AI that are fun.
This is just something I’m starting to ruminate on, so I recommend that you go watch the video. As a lifelong gamer and sometimes game developer, I want to live in a world where everybody and their mother can implement a game idea that they have. we just need better mechanisms to critique those games at a similar scale.
Damn. Yeah that sucks.
I'd say his actual problem was lack of visibility. You wanna be in a position where people say, "oh, this is a clone of That Guy's game."
The actual "product" becomes the game dev, and his brand, rather than the actual game.
Or more broadly... marketing is more important than game development. (Or at least as important.)
The productivity gains are just that immense, ESPECIALLY for the kind of "brainless plumbing" that a majority of AAA gamedev is
Sure, some solo projects might not use AI, but those are the exact people who i think should be using AI for game dev. Games are often best when a single person can execute their vision, and the productivity gains from AI enable a solo dev to actually execute on a larger vision.
My point is that, yes, artistic integrity actually exists and there are many game developers who reject this technology outright for obvious reasons. This should not come as a surprise.
Does that mean no AI assistance at all? How is that possible to detect for if someone uses it for code generation and compiles it to a binary?
Do they mean no AI artwork? Maybe easier to detect, but mostly based on vibes still.
Do they mean no AI features? But why, wouldn’t an adventure game where you can talk naturally to NPCs be kind of cool?
Madness.
How about a filter for “No souless shitty copycat games that are pure cash grabs”. I’m sure Jev can help detect these at scale.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/38624...
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsur...
In practice it's serviceable first-pass filter.
Of course it's a different dimension than "is this game worth the time and money?" But so are all the other datapoints meant to help consumers weigh a game purchase decision. They all have false positives and false negatives compared to actual enjoyment. Right now, people are voicing that the AI line is a relevant piece of selection criteria they believe they'd find useful would like to more easily automate.
No amount mental masturbation over false negatives will change that. It'll just make someone look defensive. Because the consumers that don't care to use AI as a selection criteria will just ignore that data point. Similar to how a content rating doesn't enter your head when you're not buying for a child.
It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.
But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.
What if your music mixer uses an open source library that depends on a math library produced by an author who has an AI image as an avatar on social media?
Anyone who demands purity in all things should have their values questioned. Just look at history for examples of the outcomes of people obsessed with purity.
It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.
At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.
- I have a passion for making games but not the skill, and this lets me achieve my dream
- I can crank out games in an hour, and as long as I get 100 purchases over its lifetime I’m making money
- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries
- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people
- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points
My heart's not really in it though. Would be a lot more convenient if it was though.
Someone who's played a lot of games and can keep iterating seems like not always a bad thing.
Well it seems we are here now.
Z=AI in this case, but lazy solutions are as old as time.
I am in multiple gaming community where they are heavy gamers. Rarely do I see them doing that.