Steam’s tri-yearly Next Fest, a week-long “celebration” featuring hundreds of new demos from triple-A and indie publishers alike, isn’t quite hitting the same as it used to for the community, due to the ever-growing influx of “slop” and “games that use generative AI and flip assets.”
While this has been an issue for the last handful of Next Fests, Steam users on Reddit are reporting that this time around, they’ve had enough, and are opting to sort through the new games by popularity. For the indie devs banking on the free publicity that Next Fest provides, this seems like an awfully counterproductive use of the event as a whole.
There are a zillion demos in this Steam Next Fest, and I’m going to be very real…I don’t feel very compelled to check out demos with AI art capsules
— Bucky | Palworld (@Bucky_cm) February 24, 2026
Of course, the issue here has been exacerbated by the misuse of Valve’s AI disclosure section on Steam. While developers on the Steam storefront are required to admit to the use of AI-generated assets in their games, a quick glance at the latest, non-featured titles in the Next Fest line-up features more than a few suspiciously AI-generated-looking titles, none of which include any sort of AI-disclosure tag on their Steam storefront pages.
As one user explains, they believe this is happening because developers are seemingly never punished for lying about generative AI use. “There is no real penalty so far for not disclosing. Only if you blatantly used like LLM text generation at run time would Valve care and that’s just for legal reasons. For assets etc it’s very much a trust system by Valve, they mostly did it to shut people up.”
So what’s the solution? According to several commenters, the only way to combat the rising tide of AI-generated games on Steam is to sort by popularity and reviews. However, the irony of sorting by popularity during Next Fest, an event designed to freely advertise indie demos, hasn’t been lost on the community. “These last few fests I’ve just had to sort by popularity. But I feel like that defeats the purpose of these events if all I’m doing is ‘finding’ the stuff that I would’ve heard about anyway. It’s just too exhausting to filter through.”
On the flipside to the issue at hand, there’s an equally terrible problem plaguing a large swathe of indie devs taking part in Next Fest: false-positive AI-generated accusations. In the lead-up to the event, dozens of developers on subreddits such as r/IndieDev and r/gamedev have reported being incorrectly accused of using AI to make their games. Whatever the fix is, it’s clear that the onus here is on Valve, because this new wave of false-positive reporting proves that it’s getting harder and harder for the common man to accurately spot AI-gen’d assets.
