Valve admits Steam Next Fest has an AI slop problem, but won't ban AI games

Valve has publicly acknowledged that Steam Next Fest has a problem with low-effort AI games and clones of indie titles. The comments came from Marc Wilkinson of the Steam team at Steam Indie Connect in Seoul on October 27. He said the company is fully aware of the situation and that a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve it.

What Valve did not do was announce any new rules. Judging by the tone, it has no plans to ban games made with generative AI.

How big is it?

The numbers explain why developers are frustrated. SteamDB's event tracker counted 7,164 demos in the October Next Fest, and at least 1,054 of them showed Steam's required AI disclosure, according to GamingOnLinux. Not every game with that label is bad, but the share shows how fast the volume has grown.

The festival's design makes it worse. For the first two days, demos are shown in random order, a system meant to give everyone an equal shot. Wilkinson admitted the trade-off: low-quality games get the same spotlight as projects that took years to make.

Clones and extortion

The most serious complaint involved AI-made clones. Small studios have reported extortion emails threatening to flood the store with copies of their game. Valve's advice was to contact law enforcement and report the cases to Valve. In its view, cloning is an old problem that AI has simply sped up.

Its stated plan is to improve store discovery rather than restrict who can publish. That fits Steam's long-standing preference for algorithmic curation over editorial gatekeeping.

My take: that philosophy worked while making a bad game still cost enough to limit volume. AI has wiped out that cost. An event like Next Fest, which only works if visibility is fair, needs at least a minimal filter. Leaving it all to the algorithm shifts the burden onto indie developers, the very people the festival is supposed to help.