In February, we reported that Steam users were frustrated by the growing use of AI-generated artwork at Steam Next Fest. A few months later, it was confirmed that almost 20 percent of games in June's Steam Next Fest used some form of generative AI in their creation.
October's event has now rolled around, and we've crunched the numbers again, finding that more than one in three spotlighted games have used generative AI at some point during development.
This year's Steam Next Fest spotlights 7,145 new and upcoming games, according to SteamDB. Using a range of filters that exclude games holding Steam's backend AI tag, that number drops significantly to 4,549. That means 2,595 games, or over 36 percent of titles shown, during this event feature some element of generative AI.
In June's event, that number was just over 19 percent, meaning that in just a four-month period, the number of games has increased by 16 percent.
Gamers are pushing back, and many of the top games on the event's charts are AI-free, but this reflects a worrying trend as generative AI development grows. This is only worsened by the likes of Tim Sweeney and Epic Games pushing the...
