Featured image: official Steam Next Fest artwork by Valve via the Steam Next Fest page
Valve has finally said out loud what developers and players have been grumbling about for months: Steam has an AI slop and cloning problem, and the company knows it. The catch is that Valve also says it will not start telling developers which tools they may or may not use. That leaves indie developers with an honest acknowledgment, a few reassurances about discovery, and not much else.
The comments came at the Steam Indie Connect event in Busan, South Korea, on October 27, just a day after the biggest Steam Next Fest ever wrapped up. Here is what Valve actually said, what the numbers behind the panic look like, and why the answer is more complicated than “ban AI games.”
The short version
- Who spoke: Valve’s Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson, at Steam Indie Connect on October 27
- The admission: “We are fully aware of the situation,” with “a significant number of people” working on it
- The line Valve will not cross: “We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use”
- The scary part: At least one developer reported an extortion email saying their game would be cloned with AI unless they paid
- New policy announced: None
What Valve actually said
According to PC Gamer, which was following a report from Inven Global, the panel was a mix of sympathy and shrugging. Developers are nervous about sharing concepts and demos because of clone fears, and Next Fest is being buried under demos that were clearly rushed out in bulk.
Giardino pointed out that cloning is not new. Games were being copied long before generative AI, just much more slowly. His advice was to build a strong community around your game and keep improving it: “Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective.”
That is fair advice, but it is also the kind of advice that lands badly with a solo developer who just watched a copycat appear in a week.
The extortion email that made this personal
The most alarming detail from the event is the extortion angle. A developer described getting a message along the lines of “If you don’t pay, we’ll clone your game with AI and release it first.” A TweakTown report earlier in the month described a similar email demanding $200 in Steam items within 24 hours. Valve reportedly told affected developers to report these cases to Steam and to contact law enforcement.
What Valve did not explain is how it handles a game that has already copied someone else’s work. That is the practical question developers want answered, and so far there is no public process.
Next Fest by the numbers
The October 2026 Next Fest ran from October 19 to 26 and was the trigger for much of the anger. The exact demo count depends on who you ask. Data cited by How To Market A Game puts it at 7,240 participating games, up 65.2% from June’s 4,382. Other outlets reported 8,000 or more demos, so treat any single total as approximate.
Games taking part in Steam Next Fest
October 2026 nearly doubled the pace of earlier editions. Source: GameDiscoverCo and How To Market A Game.
Not all of that growth is slop. The same analysis argues that more developers are simply discovering that Next Fest is free and worth entering. Still, it notes that Next Fest demos now equal roughly half of all Steam releases in a year, up from about a third in 2024. Here is the comparison.
| Year | Next Fest demos (all editions) | Steam releases | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 5,936 | 17,669 | 33.6% |
| 2025 | 7,945 | 20,801 | 38.2% |
| 2026 (projected releases) | 15,158 | 29,300 | 51.7% |
PC Gamer adds its own SteamDB-based figure: nearly 23,000 games had been released on Steam in 2026 before the end of October. Most of them, it says, are forgettable regardless of how they were made. For large publishers that barely matters. For the next Balatro or Vampire Survivors, it is a visibility problem.
How much of it is actually AI?
This is where the headlines get ahead of the data. Estimates of the AI share differ a lot because they measure different things. GamesRadar’s figure, as relayed by OpenCritic, is almost one in five demos disclosing AI use. A separate analysis from Capital & Compute puts AI-disclosed games at 34.6% of the field. Both only count developers who disclosed it, so the real number is unknown.
There is one reassuring detail. That same analysis found only 2 of the 25 most-played demos were AI-disclosed, which suggests players are not exactly flocking to the flood. I could not verify that figure against a primary source, so take it as a signal rather than a fact.
Why Valve will not just ban it
Valve’s position has a logic to it. “AI” covers everything from a generated texture to a fully automated game, and drawing a line is hard. Steam already asks developers to disclose AI use, and players are asking for clearer labels, but a tool-based ban would be messy to enforce and would catch many legitimate studios. Valve’s stated priority is discovery instead.
Wilkinson explained how Next Fest works. For the first two days, users see games almost randomly, to give every developer a fair shot. After that, Steam starts personalizing recommendations. “We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed,” he said. In other words, the system that helps a genuine unknown indie also helps the spammers.
This is the same tension we saw when Sega pulled Total War: Shogun 2 Complete Edition over AI art, and it is part of a wider industry shift that includes Epic going “AI first” on its Marvel and Star Wars shooter. AI in games is no longer a fringe debate. It is a platform policy question. Roblox, for example, recently boasted about 70,000 games published in five months, crediting AI-powered development.
What developers and players can do right now
| If you are… | Practical step |
|---|---|
| An indie developer | Build a community early (Discord, wishlists, devlogs) and keep shipping updates, as Valve suggests |
| Getting extortion emails | Do not pay. Keep the emails, report them to Valve and contact law enforcement |
| A player | Check the AI disclosure on store pages, read recent reviews and wishlist games from developers you trust |
| Worried about hunting through Steam | Follow curators and developers rather than relying on the front page alone |
Steam is also quietly improving things for players who care about completionism, as we covered in our look at Steam’s new achievement sets beta, but nothing comparable exists yet for filtering out slop.
What to watch next
- A real policy change: Valve said people are thinking about solutions, but nothing concrete has been announced.
- Next Fest tweaks: Any change to the two-day randomized exposure window would be the clearest sign Valve is acting.
- Clone reporting: A public process for reporting already-released clones.
- The February 2027 Next Fest: If participation keeps climbing, the problem gets harder to ignore.
My take
Valve is right that “which tools” is the wrong thing to regulate, and wrong to hope that community-building alone fixes a flood this size. The honest reading of this panel is that Valve has noticed the smoke and has not yet found the fire extinguisher. Until it does, the best defense for players and developers alike is paying attention to who made a game and whether they keep showing up for it.
Sources: PC Gamer, Inven Global, How To Market A Game, TweakTown, OpenCritic, Steam Next Fest.
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