Steam should combat shovelware whether it’s AI slop or human slop
7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024
Submitted 1 day ago by Pro@reddthat.com to games@lemmy.world
https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-of-genai-games-on-steam
Comments
qevlarr@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it’s no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated “artwork.” IMO it’s no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren’t just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn’t capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.
echodot@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
The way that valves AI tag works is kind of a problem.
There is no subtlety to it at all, if you use AI in any capacity during the development of the game you need to declare it via that tag yet all the tag then does is say “AI in this game”, but there’s a big difference between having the AI develop the entire story or produce all of the artwork, and having AI write boilerplate camera controls for a farming simulator.
exu@feditown.com 8 hours ago
I agree that having more degrees of usage would be useful, but erring on the side of caution and declaring any AI use as a first step is better than doing nothing.
echodot@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
Okay so there is this whole arguement going on about The Altars how apparently a tiny piece of background art has AI generated text in it. Personally I feel that’s absolutely fine, as otherwise it would have just been Lorem Ipsum, and really doesn’t need to be declared but technically, under the strictest interpretation of that tag, it should be declared even though you can’t even see it unless you zoom in.
I would very much like valved actually come up with a concrete policy rather than a vague one-line statement.
childOfMagenta@jlai.lu 9 hours ago
Does using copilot to code count as “made with AI” too?
qevlarr@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Of course, that’s why we need better guidelines. It’s like beauty ads that have to declare they used Photoshop. Every photo is edited if you don’t make it clear what you mean
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 day ago
How many of the ~6,818 titles now disclosing generative AI use were already on Steam in 2024?
I.E. are a lot of these just games that had already been released, updating their disclosure statements based on Valve’s new rules?
The article says 1/5 games released this year use it. I’m not sure if ~34,000 games have released on Steam in the last year
MrGabr@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
It is a little insane how many games release on any given day. On July 15, 2025, 150 “titles” (of which 78 are actual games, not demos or DLC) were added to the Steam store. I would guess that their data includes all titles, but even just 78 real games on what should be a slower-than-average random Tuesday could totally contribute to 34,000 games released in a year.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, that’s why I’d like some more insight.
The initial headline doesn’t exactly pass a sniff test… It’s possible, but unlikely.
If ~34,000 were added in the last year, that means over 30% of Steam’s library of ~114,000 was added in the last year…
If only 1/5 of those were AI, why was there such a massive increase over the last year?
Has Steam made it easier for cash grabs, or… it just doesn’t make a lot of sense without more information
gerowen@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Honestly, maybe I’m an old fart, but I refuse to knowingly buy games if they use AI instead of paying talented people to create works of art.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
What if talented artists use AI to enhance their original work?
gerowen@lemmy.world 51 minutes ago
If you’re AI upscaling a low resolution texture or something I can see that. But if I want a computer to rip off somebody else’s work and regurgitate a story based on some amalgamation of its questionably sourced training data, I can do that on my own for free.
lastweakness@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
An interesting use case for me in programming has been prototyping. Stuff I otherwise wouldn’t have the time to experiment with suddenly becomes something feasible. And then, based on what I learnt while having the AI build the prototype, I can build the actual thing I want to build. So far, it has worked out pretty nicely for me.
echodot@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
Well that’s the problem isn’t it it depends entirely on what the AI is being used for. The truth is we don’t know because Steam doesn’t tell us.
logicbomb@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I read a story recently about how a graphic designer realized they couldn’t compete anymore unless they used generative AI, because everybody else was. What they described wasn’t generating an image and then using that directly. They said that they used it during the time when they’re mocking up their idea.
They used to go out and take photographs to use as a basis for their sketches, especially for backgrounds. So it would be a real thing that they either found or set up, then take pictures. Then, the pictures would be used as a template for the art.
But with generative AI, all of that preliminary work can be done in seconds by feeding it a prompt.
When you think about it in these terms, it’s unlikely that many non-indie games going forward will be made without the use of any generative AI.
Similarly, it’s likely that it will be used extensively for quality checking text.
When you add in the crazy pressure that game developers are under, it’s likely that they’ll use generative AI much more extensively, even if their company forbids it. But the companies just want to make money. They’ll use it as much as they think they can get away with, because it’s cheaper.
jj4211@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
What I dread is a game lengthening dialog using AI. Some folks mistake quantity for quality, and make their games unbeatingly tedious. Just like games that lean heavily on procedurally generated content.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
I have an acquaintance who is a lead Dev at an Indie studio where he is developing and training an NPC behaviour engine with thousands of responses and actions. Think fallout or mass effect response wheel, where 2-4 dialogue choices have 2-4 outcomes, but instead you can tell the NPC anything and it will have a different response. Or it will do different things whether you hand it a book, give it book, throw a potion at it or cast a healing spell on it or hug it. It could also change tactics if you tried to snipe it vs if you went at it melee. All of these are trained and accounted for and made in a way where it can be built into any game using a certain engine. And this is just aimed at generic npcs, not companions.
So if this is what disclosure of the use of generative AI means, I’m not against it. I think there is nuance to what can be done with it. Using final art assets? It’s theft. Writing? Theft. NPC behaviour? Definitely not.
shoo@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Strange to not qualify the last one as theft. If it’s out putting code, it’s from the same kind of training set. If it’s out putting character responses, they’re from that same literary training data.
kayohtie@pawb.social 11 hours ago
Open-source training texts intended for pairing with your intended style of output have been around for far longer than OpenAI has been grifting data from the entire Internet and collected book works. It came across like that’s what they’re using, not some shit off HuffingFarce that was built off of AO3 and Harry Potter.
WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I’m working on a game. I’ll be using AI for anything it’s good for. If some people don’t want to play because of that, fine, but AI used properly is a productivity multiplier that cannot be ignored.
ksigley@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Slop.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Slop
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
why not pay some unknown artist on fivrr for some work.
well, that’s probably a bad idea. they’re probably also using AI.
jj4211@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Feel like “anytime it’s good for” could be subjective.
There are likely folks who think they can just vibe code up an unreal tutorial and say AI was good at “all of it”.
if some boilerplate mechanics are AI code completions, or you had it generate a skybox for you, ok. If it’s generating a significant chunk of your “foreground” assets, then I’m likely to find out as disinteresting as the titles that have leaned hard on stock assets.
Gork@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
That thumbnail’s got some hand body horror going on.
Dolphinfreetuna@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I would charge extra to do her manicure.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The conversation around gen AI seems to go to putting people out of work or replacing tons of human effort, and I’m sure some companies are led by people with those naive dreams, but that My Summer Car example is exactly where my head goes when I think what the future of the technology is. It’s artwork that ought to be there, because the scene demands that there’s art on the walls, but what that artwork is basically doesn’t matter, so if gen AI can get the job done cheaply, it’s probably the right tool for the job. However, I’d have thought that the scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution were another prime use case for it too, but people rioted over that one. Even if it’s a good tool for the job, if it’s poison in the marketplace, it’s no longer a good tool to use.
Carnelian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I find this outlook to be pretty sad. The idea of chunks of your art “not mattering” and just being there as filler.
One of the joys of creating artwork is that during the process of creation you are actively figuring out what is important. Perhaps you start out creating a simple texture just to have something on the walls, and in the process you realize there’s an equally simple yet creative way for you to tell a little story with that wall. Something most players will never notice but a year from release gets thrown in “small details you missed” compilations.
It may be that the idea you came up with for that wall goes on to influence the main story, and spur on a totally different and more interesting game than you initially imagined.
A lot of non-artists have this concept of art, where it forms completely in your head in a single burst, and then you just have endure the tedious labor of constructing it. I think that’s why people are so easily persuaded by the ‘promise’ of AI. They think it’s just making the boring parts easy. But in reality it’s making the creative parts boring
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Elevator music is a surprisingly profitable commercial niche. For that matter, there are always going to be soulless, insipid, overused imitations of real art that gets turned into staggering commercial success precisely because it’s bland and meaningless. “Live, love, laugh” for example.
Not everything has to have meaning and significance, but we also have the right to judge it when it should.
The problem with AI is that a lot of artists literally rely at least to some extent on the money that flows from that soulless commercial drivel, either with their eyes fully open to the situation, or by convincing themselves that it does have meaning to somebody, or just themselves if nobody else. They need to pay the bills and put food on the table and a huge source of that comes from commercial art work which has a high bar for visual impact and a very low bar for ideas or meaning.
If AI replaces the meaningless filler content of the art world, how do artists survive if that’s their bread and butter? It’s never going to directly replace real human art, but if it removes their meal ticket, the outcome will still be the same. Soon there will be almost no real human artists left, as they’ll start to become prohibitively expensive, which will drive more people to AI in a self-reinforcing feedback loop until only a handful of “masters” and a bunch of literal starving artists trying to become them without ever earning a penny. The economics of the situation are pretty dire and it’s increasingly hard to picture a future for human art that doesn’t look bleak.
I’m planning to do my part to make sure exclusively human-made art is always the choice I’m going to make and pay for, but there are bigger forces at play here than you or me and I don’t think they’re going to push things in a happy direction. The enshittification of art will happen, is already happening, and we’re just along for the ride.
jj4211@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I think there’s room for someone to recognize there’s an utterly generic facet to an otherwise creative work. If you for example know you just want a generic night skybox, I don’t think there’s going to be more quality by doing it directly.
However that sentiment carried forward to the assets will rapidly degrade the experience similar to using stock assets.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think when you’ve got a small enough team making something as multifaceted as a video game, there will be parts of it you find boring and relatively unimportant. If you can make it cheaper, you get that much closer to the possibility of breaking even. Parts of this can scale up to larger projects, but in the end, this is a matter of choosing your battles. There’s an adage that’s something like, “Your game is never done; you just stop working on it,” and the sooner you can stop working on it while still delivering a product that people are interested in, the more sustainable the whole endeavor becomes. Chunks of it will be filler or less important than other chunks, always. It’s why there’s a Unity and Unreal asset store; and why you can hear the same sound library used in Devil May Cry, Soul Calibur, and Dark Souls menus. Those parts of the game were less important to be specifically crafted for these games, and they chose other battles to care more about.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A few angles on this:
You’re right that nothing is unimportant and I certainly enjoy it when I discover that attention to detail, but part of what makes that special is knowing that they put in extra effort into that. Acknowledging it as something that takes effort, we have to recognize the trade offs associated with that effort. Devs, especially indie ones, don’t have unlimited time and resources. So they have to prioritize. Choose your battles. What are the MOST important things that need to be in the game? What is required? Then after that if you have resources left and can control yourself from doing too much scope creep, then you can spend time on the lower priority things. If you can’t do this you might never release the game.
Of course, what is more or less important is subjective and context dependent. Subtle, intentional details might be more important in a game with a lot of environmental storytelling like Dark Souls, or a puzzle game where you want to be careful about how you direct the player’s attention, but is probably much less important in say, an action rpg where you’re just running through hoards of random enemies slamming particle effects.
Another thought I had related to the point about inspiration happening through the process: I don’t really do art anymore, (no real reason I stopped, might be fun again if I ever have the motivation/focus for it) but in high school I took 3 years of graphics design classes for art class. I’d finish whatever my assigned project was and then I just spent a bunch of time messing around in photoshop with random gradients, filters, and other effects. I wouldn’t call it super deliberate at least in the early stages, but at some point I’d end up with some abstract art that I liked and maybe tweaked a bit from there based on the things I saw from randomly trying stuff. I still use some of those for desktop backgrounds. I don’t think I could have ended up with any of that without some of the random stuff photoshop did. I could imagine someone using an ai image generation for similar kinds of inspiration. Although I can see how it’s also a lot easier for them to just stop there and not think about it again.
Hubi@feddit.org 1 day ago
I imagine a lot of indie games can’t really afford to pay or commission artists but still want to have a product that looks presentable. I know someone who does mostly programming but is now considering making being a solo dev on a game because generative AI enables him to do it alone.
There definitely exists a spectrum between shovelware, large studios being too cheap to pay actual artists and indie devs having little to no other options.
Dojan@pawb.social 1 day ago
I mean so long as they don’t try to profit off of it I guess.
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I thought about doing this, but my plan would be to attach a thumbnail on every piece of AI art declaring “Placeholder AI work”. Then release the game for free that way to gauge interest.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Using generative AI to replace toil and not the creative human process is fine imo. Even doing something like generating visual things, to me, is OK if it’s driven by real creative intent and doesn’t result in something that looks low quality. But it’s not very simple to get output that you can tweak in fine ways to get predictable changes based on specific creative intent - human language is not descriptive enough to really capture that. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is accurate. You’re also shooting yourself in the foot when you end up with a ton of assets or systems that you don’t have fine control over because you can’t do something simple like tweak a layer of an image because what you got at the end of the day was just a raster output from a black box.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it’s no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated “artwork.” IMO it’s no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren’t just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn’t capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Procedural generation of content in games is by no means a new thing. Even if the end state isn’t completely procedurally generated, odds are a version of the asset was initially and a human touched it up as necessary. When you’re talking about large asset sets (open world and/or large maps, tons of textures, lots of weapons, etc) odds are they weren’t all 100% hand made. Could you imagine making the topology map and placing things like trees in something like RDR2?
That’s not to say all this automation is necessary a good thing. It almost feels like we’re slowly chugging through a second industrial revolution, but this time for white collar workers. I know that I tell myself that I would rather spend my time solving problems vs doing “menial” work and have written a ton of automation to remove menial work from my job. I do wonder if problem solving will become at least somewhat menial in the future.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 17 hours ago
Is procedural generation part of what they must disclose as being AI generated, tho? The assets used are still made by hand, even if all the tree and rock (and whatever else) assets were placed procedurally.
ReCursing@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Good. Let’s normalise it so the rest of us can actually fucking use it!
madjo@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Let’s not. Generative AI is bad for environment, it’s also using stolen assets.
WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Every artist that ever saw another person’s art is “using stolen assets” then. Why is training a meat neural network more valid?
ReCursing@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
No it isn’t, the lack of renewables feeding into the energy grid is the problem, not AI - direct your ire in the right direction. Also no it doesn’t unless you completely redefine theft to me not theft - nothing is taken, no-one is denied access to existing things, and no copies are made
oplkill@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
but what about self trained on paid data(with allowed authors) and used on local pc?
don@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
What’s stopping you from buying games from the nearly 8k that use that stupid AI shit? There’s gotta be some slop in there that suits your tastes.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
There’s a simple solution to the case of AI use in game development. It should be in the background, not the foreground, and it should replace grunt work, not professional work.
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s a pretty big jump in a very short amount of time.
ssroxnak@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think it’s mostly garbage shovelware
vala@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
What exactly does this mean?
If you use an LLM to help with the code does that count? Or is this just about writing and art assets?
I’m also wondering if using AI to make concept art / placeholder text and then replacing it later counts?
Evotech@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Yes
paraphrand@lemmy.world 33 minutes ago
I wonder if games with UGC report they have AI content. (Games that allow for outside assets and code)