I remember about 2 years ago, the Steam Next Fest was basically of more importance than Christmas for me. Not only did it used to remind me of a time when demo disks were common for PC and Console games back in the day, it also finally made developers take proper demos seriously. What advertising is more honest than to actually let the players experience a snippet of your game. It was awesome?
Fast forward to 2026. The last Steam Next Fest was absolutely overrun with AI slop. I’m not talking some “placeholder” assets. I’m talking AI generated art, AI generated description and some of them looked like they where the first attempt of a local model to one-shot what the “dev” had in mind. The current Next Fest is a little bit tamer. But the last one was literally 90% slop.
In my opinion Steam really needs to have a big fat disclaimer required if any AI assets are present in the current game or promotional material, something akin to the warning that abandoned Early Access games receive.
It’s everywhere on Steam because their whole system relies on community tags and voluntary developer disclosure, and Valve don’t seem to give a shit when developers are exposed as having lied.
I’ve mentioned it on Lemmy before but got downvoted because people don’t want to hear criticism of their beloved Valve, I guess.
Missing disclosures on the store page is not an reason for refund either which is pretty annoying.
Valve has built a system with no mechanism for accountability.
What do you want Valve to do when the developer has lied?
If a developer/publisher has made a lie of omission and violated the Steam terms of service in the process?
I’d at least expect them to honour refund requests, which they currently don’t for missing disclosures. And I’d take it a step further and suggest they need to take punitive action, up to and including pulling games from sale and blacklisting repeat offenders.
Should people be able to request refunds of Clair Obscur where an AI generated placeholder asset ended up in production? Or was Clair Obscur supposed to disclose AI use even though they believed the final product didn’t use any AI generated assets?
And then there’s also the question of who verifies if the asset is AI generated, AI generated but touched up by hand or actually made without AI. Because to even enforce the missing disclosure you need objective proof of AI generated asset and that’s far from easy to prove.
Do we know if users can tag games and it show up as filterable? Like “AI” or something?
Users can create and tag games and then exclude games based on that tag. There’s even an “artificial intelligence” tag but looking at the games tagged by it that means something else than what we’re discussing here.
But I think what the other person was pointing at is that developers are supposed to have AI generated content disclosure when they have any pre-generated AI content in their game or use AI to live-generate content. AI assisted tools (such a using AI to code the game) don’t need to be disclosed. You can find an example of AI disclosure on ARC raiders because they’ve used AI to generate voices. This is something developers are supposed to fill disclosure but a lot of the devs don’t even when their game does release with AI assets. And my question was that what is Valve supposed to do when the developer chooses to ignore that clause?
Ah I see. Ill have to try and see if I can get that working.
At a certain point, there is no trust based tools that will work when you have a bunch of automated systems like this. The community will have to prune and the system itself will have to allow us to have easy to work with tools to exclude low quality slop moving forward. Because right now…its not working.