Steam Next Fest is back on the PC’s largest gaming store, offering a vast selection of demos for upcoming games. And many of these, it turns out, have generative AI disclosures present.
SteamDB, a stat-tracking database, allows you to filter the full list of Steam Next Fest games using various tags. With this, we can see there are 8700 games participating in the Steam Next Fest event, and 1704 of those have the generative AI tag attached, as of the time of writing. That’s roughly 20 percent of the games taking part.
Steam as a storefront has been steadfast in requiring games to declare their use of generative AI during development, only altering it slightly to allow for AI-enabled “efficiency gains” to go undeclared. Even then, it stressed that the technology’s use must be declared to players.
This mandatory declaration for AI has forced some developers into hot water. Only recently, Sega had to clarify how generative AI was used in the new Crazy Taxi game. First, it was said that generative AI was used to create background assets. Then, at Summer Game Fest, this changed to only being used as a reference.
The technology remains controversial among gaming enthusiasts. It is at the heart of the current computer hardware price spike, as components used for consoles and gaming computers are in shorter supply. Still, that has not stopped big releases from using it, such as Crimson Desert, and from companies such as Arc Raiders developer Embark supporting it.
