Recently, players lashed out at Valve with criticism, as the Steam Next Fest 2026 demo festival was flooded with games created using artificial intelligence. Often, such projects cannot boast good quality, and the “AI art” featured in the games is completely unremarkable.
Some users are calling on Valve to take radical measures, such as imposing a total ban on the release of AI games. Valve has heard the criticism, but has no intention of banning AI games. During the Indie Connect event in South Korea, company representatives Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson outlined their position on the issue of AI games.
One of the developers at the meeting pointed out the abundance of such games at the latest Steam Next Fest and asked whether Valve plans to do anything about it.
Marc Wilkinson explained that at the festival during the first two days, games are shown in random order. After that, personalized recommendations are activated, offering projects that a particular player is likely to enjoy. Marc noted that many articles about the vast amount of low-quality games were written solely based on data from the first two days of the festival.
Valve intends to continue developing recommendation mechanisms so that they better take into account user interests.
Currently, some enthusiasts are developing special browser extensions that highlight games created using artificial intelligence on Steam. The problem is that such projects label as “AI slop” any game where AI was used in any way (mentioned in the store description) — without assessing actual quality.