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.
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.