Expected as a celebration of independent developers, Steam Next Fest showed the next trend: generative artificial intelligence was used in more than 500 games at the event.
According to TechRaptor, 504 demos, about 17% of all festival games, used AI. Valve requires transparency: developers are required to indicate where technologies were used. AI was used for marketing, concept art, music, sounds, localizations, code, scripts, and dialogues.
The most popular game with AI was Cloudheim. The creators of Noodle Cat Games emphasized that AI was used only for internal communication and team support, without replacing people. Steam states: "No one was replaced by AI - this applies to artists, engineers, voice actors and localization specialists."
The problem is exacerbated in large projects. Studio Embark admitted replacing actors with generative models in The Finals, and now this is repeated in Arc Raiders. The dialogues sound unnatural, which indicates synthetic voices.
Hot discussions are underway on Reddit. Players complain about the difficulty of finding high-quality indie games among the many projects with AI. Some consider the reasonable use of AI acceptable, for example, to fill small gaps, but the key problem remains the lack of a strong idea: without it, AI kills the "soul" of the game.
