Steam’s tri-yearly Subsequent Fest, a week-long “celebration” that includes a whole bunch of recent demos from triple-A and indie publishers alike, isn’t fairly hitting the identical because it used to for the group, because of the ever-growing inflow of “slop” and “video games that use generative AI and flip belongings.”
Whereas this has been a problem for the final handful of Subsequent Fests, Steam customers on Reddit are reporting that this time round, they’ve had sufficient, and are opting to kind by the brand new video games by reputation. For the indie devs banking on the free publicity that Subsequent Fest gives, this looks as if an awfully counterproductive use of the occasion as an entire.
There are a zillion demos on this Steam Subsequent Fest, and I’ll be very actual…I do not really feel very compelled to take a look at demos with AI artwork capsules
— Bucky | Palworld (@Bucky_cm) February 24, 2026
In fact, the difficulty right here has been exacerbated by the misuse of Valve’s AI disclosure part on Steam. Whereas builders on the Steam storefront are required to confess to the usage of AI-generated belongings of their video games, a fast look on the newest, non-featured titles within the Subsequent Fest line-up options quite a lot of suspiciously AI-generated-looking titles, none of which embrace any kind of AI-disclosure tag on their Steam storefront pages.
As one person explains, they consider that is occurring as a result of builders are seemingly by no means punished for mendacity about generative AI use. “There is no such thing as a actual penalty up to now for not disclosing. Provided that you blatantly used like LLM textual content technology at run time would Valve care and that’s only for authorized causes. For belongings and so on it’s very a lot a belief system by Valve, they principally did it to close folks up.”
So what’s the answer? In line with a number of commenters, the one solution to fight the rising tide of AI-generated video games on Steam is to kind by reputation and critiques. Nevertheless, the irony of sorting by reputation throughout Subsequent Fest, an occasion designed to freely promote indie demos, hasn’t been misplaced on the group. “These previous few fests I’ve simply needed to kind by reputation. However I really feel like that defeats the aim of those occasions if all I’m doing is ‘discovering’ the stuff that I might’ve heard about anyway. It’s simply too exhausting to filter by.”
On the flipside to the difficulty at hand, there’s an equally horrible drawback plaguing a big swathe of indie devs participating in Subsequent Fest: false-positive AI-generated accusations. Within the lead-up to the occasion, dozens of builders on subreddits corresponding to r/IndieDev and r/gamedev have reported being incorrectly accused of utilizing AI to make their video games. Regardless of the repair is, it’s clear that the onus right here is on Valve, as a result of this new wave of false-positive reporting proves that it’s getting tougher and tougher for the widespread man to precisely spot AI-gen’d belongings.
