Half of New Games on Steam Are Now Made With AI. How Does This Reflect the Gaming Industry?

Steam, the digital marketplace for PC games from game studio Valve, has hit a major milestone, sparking pushback from parts of the gaming community: Approximately 50% of new Steam games in October were made with the help of AI. 

This underscores a growing trend in gaming, where more games are made with some form of AI assistance — specifically, generative AI, which developers have used to generate code, art assets, voice lines and more. Developers are adopting the technology in increasing numbers.

The numbers come from a Reddit user who goes by Ploz, and who used Steam’s publicly available data to see how many newly released games relied on AI in some capacity. This was possible because of Valve’s AI disclosure policy for newly released games, which requires developers to state whether they used AI in making their game. The disclosure is part of the storefront’s publicly accessible records, allowing anyone to view it.

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A Valve representative did not respond to a request for comment.

The data is a snapshot of the tidal wave of AI-made games flooding storefronts, most prominently Steam. But crucially, Valve has chosen not to limit this flood, washing its hands of the problem and leaving gamers to fend for themselves in finding quality games. Developers had already been struggling to get their games noticed, and Valve’s limited curation seems completely unprepared for the firehose of AI-made games churned out on an increasing scale.

Valve implemented the AI disclosure policy in January 2024 to increase developer transparency. At the time, only 1.4% of newly released games used AI. This increased to 13.4% by the end of 2024, then to 24% by the end of 2025. It now sits at 49.9%. 

There are some caveats. The AI disclosure is only required for games that use AI to create player-facing content, such as artwork, sound, character dialogue and localization. The 49.9% figure is specific to these types of games and doesn’t account for developers who use AI for behind-the-scenes tasks such as coding and bug fixes. A Google Cloud survey conducted in August 2025 showed that 87% of developers use AI for backend work, which doesn’t require disclosure on Steam.

What are developers using all this AI for?

According to Ploz, the most common use of AI in game development is for artwork, which was mentioned in 63% of disclosures. Text and translations gobbled up 30%, while music (21%), code (16%) and voices (7%) rounded out the list. Many developers had more than one of those areas named in their disclosure, and about a quarter of developers said they were using AI for their Steam store pages and marketing. 

About 3% of developers used AI directly as a game mechanic. One such example is a driving simulator called Teach My Little Sister How to Drive. Developers use AI in the game to interpret a player’s voice commands and generate the sister’s responses. To keep a playable demo of the game available to the public, the development team, Easy Fox, is paying $1,000 every day just to cover these AI operating costs — an expense so high that it was forced to take out a loan simply to keep the demo running.

For development, there are loads of options. The Unity 6 engine came out in October 2024 and includes AI code assistance, AI asset generation and third-party integration with Claude Code, Gemini and Grok. Anthropic’s Claude is a fairly popular option among smaller developers, since it supports the ability to vibe code whole games, with ChatGPT, Gemini and GitHub Copilot as other options.

Are most of these games slop?

Many of the games being released with the AI disclosure on Steam can be classified as slop — a derogatory term gamers have applied liberally to titles that heavily lean on generative AI for development and look derivative of other popular games. According to Ploz, most AI-enabled games are small: Around 47% of new games with fewer than 10 reviews have an AI disclosure. Among developers who released more than 10 games in a year, 68% of those games included the disclosure. 

Games with AI disclosures received fewer positive reviews on average than those without. And among all newly released games with more than 1,000 reviews, only 17% include an AI disclosure. That means gamers are still gravitating toward games without an AI disclosure and pushing back against games that use the technology.

Developers seem aware of this. CNET reached out to two dozen well-known developers, including Epic Games, EA, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, PlayStation Studios and many others. All of them declined to comment.

Bigger studios may be using AI in their development, but it’s hard to tell the scale. There’s no such thing as an AI audit yet, and the industry seems to be relying on voluntary disclosure for now. Steam’s disclosure policy has outed smaller developers who are either worried about violating the policy and being taken off the digital storefront, or aren’t worried about the negative effects of disclosure.

How did it get this far?

A lot of dominoes had to fall for this to happen. The availability of AI tools and the increasing ease of use are definite contributors. Subreddits like r/AIGameDev have plenty of examples of people putting together games with just a few days or weeks of vibe coding, which is a lot shorter than the standard video game development cycle, which can stretch over years depending on the scale, production level and graphics quality. This practice has exploded over the last couple of years, resulting in a lot of games getting launched that are made mostly or entirely with AI. 

Many of these games end up on Steam, which doesn’t have a policy limiting AI-developed games.

“Digital storefronts like Steam have already struggled to moderate low-effort and poor-quality games, as well as copycats stealing other games’ ideas,” said CNET Managing Editor David Lumb.

Valve openly admits its role in this, stating that the problem definitely exists but that the company doesn’t “want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”

It takes a similar stance on AI cloning, with Valve’s Tom Giardino telling developers that “you must continue to grow your game by adding features, personality and creativity that stem from your own perspective as a developer.”

These policies essentially allow any AI-developed game or clone to reach the Valve storefront without pushback, which certainly contributes to the flood of newly released games with some form of player-facing AI involvement in their development. 

Rival store Epic Games has a similar stance, allowing basically any game that wants to be there. The company declined to comment further about this, but CEO Tom Sweeney is an avid supporter of AI in video game development, stating that it was “perfectly logical” for developers to rely on AI to handle the mundane grunt work that takes up most of a developer’s time.

While Steam and Epic Games tend to take a more lax attitude toward AI slop, other storefronts like Itch.io are not. Itch.io has a whole policy against AI slop and the company has willingly, and at times gleefully, deleted terabytes of AI slop from its storefront. It also requires developers to disclose if they used AI but takes a much more consumer-friendly approach by letting users filter those out of search results if they don’t want to see them.

Is anything being done about AI slop games?

Some measures are being taken to address the proliferation of AI slop, but none will entirely stop the problem. Cloning has been a problem for many years. Mobile gamers of a certain vintage may remember the flock of Flappy Bird clones that appeared on app stores after the original game went down, and those weren’t even made with AI. 

AI makes cloning much easier and faster, and some AI companies are addressing it. Anthropic recently changed Claude Opus 5.5 to prevent it from generating copies of existing games. Anthropic engineering leader Addy Osmani posted on X that using Claude to copy games infringes on intellectual property rights and violates Anthropic’s policy. 

However, during CNET’s testing, we found we could still make games resembling popular titles, so cloning remains possible with a little creativity. 

“This has come up over and over on the subreddit r/GameDev, and there’s no real solution if Steam and other digital storefronts don’t stem the flood of low-quality AI games drowning out the labors of love that entertain and innovate,” Lumb said. 

Many developers openly oppose AI and refuse to use it in their own work. However, as the Steam stats show, that crowd’s output appears to be getting smaller and smaller every year amid the unending stream of AI games.