what I want with AI games: Free conversations with NPCs who react to your actions.
what I don’t want, endless slop
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?
I wonder if games with UGC report they have AI content. (Games that allow for outside assets and code)
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.
Steam should combat shovelware whether it’s AI slop or human slop
The way that valves AI tag works is kind of a problem.
There is no subtlety to it at all, if you use AI in any capacity during the development of the game you need to declare it via that tag yet all the tag then does is say “AI in this game”, but there’s a big difference between having the AI develop the entire story or produce all of the artwork, and having AI write boilerplate camera controls for a farming simulator.
I agree that having more degrees of usage would be useful, but erring on the side of caution and declaring any AI use as a first step is better than doing nothing.
Okay so there is this whole arguement going on about The Altars how apparently a tiny piece of background art has AI generated text in it. Personally I feel that’s absolutely fine, as otherwise it would have just been Lorem Ipsum, and really doesn’t need to be declared but technically, under the strictest interpretation of that tag, it should be declared even though you can’t even see it unless you zoom in.
I would very much like valved actually come up with a concrete policy rather than a vague one-line statement.
With how many games are released on Steam, how can AI be quantified and enforced?
E.g. Does using Intellisense need to be declared?
Does using copilot to code count as “made with AI” too?
Of course, that’s why we need better guidelines. It’s like beauty ads that have to declare they used Photoshop. Every photo is edited if you don’t make it clear what you mean
Why should something not be disclosed just because its common?
It builds indifference to the disclaimer when it’s too general. The California cancer label is a good example.
But its not too general. Steam allows you to give a description of the use of AI
I didn’t say that. It should be more specific to have any meaning to the consumer.
But it has meaning to some consumers. Not everyone can tell that an image has been majorly edited or created using a program created to replicate pictures
You mean the idea that if wasn’t created completely by people? It matters to you that some unpaid intern wasn’t forced to work overtime writing the most boring bullshit scaffolding code?
That kind of behavior should be disclosed too
Because it becomes meaningless noise instead of useful information.
Even if it is ignored by a lot of people, its better than not knowing at all
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a disclosure, but an uncertain threshold that might be as low as “a developer accepted a copilot completion suggestion one time” isn’t useful. You just end up with a prop65 situation where it’s slapped on everything and basically meaningless.
Steam allows you to describe the use of AI
Also, if you know you are making a game for steam, why not just ignore the copilot suggestion? I dont think it will increase the time to make a game by that much time
Because I don’t think anybody actually cares that much if you use small pieces of AI code. What people don’t want is everything being AI produced.
Right now though the AI tag is been applied to both scenarios with no distinction.
But there is a difference
Steam allows you to describe how you used AI
Yeah, I suspect the AI tag should apply to even more games then.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Well that’s the problem isn’t it it depends entirely on what the AI is being used for. The truth is we don’t know because Steam doesn’t tell us.
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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.
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
That thumbnail’s got some hand body horror going on.
I would charge extra to do her manicure.
Using generative AI to replace toil and not the creative human process is fine imo. Even doing something like generating visual things, to me, is OK if it’s driven by real creative intent and doesn’t result in something that looks low quality. But it’s not very simple to get output that you can tweak in fine ways to get predictable changes based on specific creative intent - human language is not descriptive enough to really capture that. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is accurate. You’re also shooting yourself in the foot when you end up with a ton of assets or systems that you don’t have fine control over because you can’t do something simple like tweak a layer of an image because what you got at the end of the day was just a raster output from a black box.
There’s a simple solution to the case of AI use in game development. It should be in the background, not the foreground, and it should replace grunt work, not professional work.
What exactly does this mean?
If you use an LLM to help with the code does that count? Or is this just about writing and art assets?
I’m also wondering if using AI to make concept art / placeholder text and then replacing it later counts?
Yes
