Millions of people who don’t even feel back pain yet are about to feel real nostalgia for the first time like the rest of us gamers

People of the world. Hear my wisdom as an "old"

In the before times of home computing, anyone and their mother could make and try to sell video games, floppy disks and cassettes were plentiful. The barrier to entry was essentially non-existent. You could get fully fledged games in magazines. (In fact some magazines included the actual programme for you to type out yourself)

But it turns out when publishers just shovel slop onto the market it drowns out good quality Indy stuff and even some of the high production value games. This feels quite similar to before the great video game crash.

There's a reason Nintendo started putting their "Nintendo seal of quality" on their games. To try and reassure buyers that they didn't just shovel slop people mailed in. At one point you even had to send them a video tape with evidence the game could even be completed. Interestingly that seal is still found on their games.

We've almost returned to that state of low barrier to entry. Digital distribution means there is no real difficulty in physically producing and distributing the game. AI makes it so that anyone's half baked idea can be shoved on Steam.

Don't get me wrong there are many excellent games that would have struggled to make a name for themselves using steams old green light system.

Valve’s chokehold over PC gaming continues to make me nervous, as the company seems completely uninterested in lifting a finger to actually improve Next Fest or stem the amount of garbage that fills Steam every day now.

The author is correct, there is a lot of garbage on Steam these days. I wish I could go back to the way Steam was in the 2010s, when there were only a few dozens new games each week to chose but they were mostly good. Now you have to spend too much time sorting through the crap.

I think it is not fair to put all the blame on Steam for the current situation. The Steam store is merely a reflection on how the gaming market is in 2026.

Although I do think the picture is grin, I was looking through some of those slop games and it was very clear that they were getting no interactions and no players. Discussions were completely empty, no store reviews, and not a single sign of engagement, even for games that would have attracted quite a lot of people, like a farming/deck build game that I saw, that had a cute artstyle, but that zero obvious interests from the community.

What I have been doing is that I always scroll all the way down to the bottom of a store page to check their AI disclaimer, if they have any gen-ai shit, I am immediately out. I believe a lot of the community has been doing the same. So it's not entirely fair to say Steam has been doing nothing to address the situation, they have, you just need to check if there is any AI disclaimer yourself.

The only other thing I wish they would do, is to have an AI filter that can be turned on and hide all games with AI generation in their disclaimer, and maybe even allow you to distinguish between gen AI on coding and gen AI on art and things like that.

But I also don't want Steam to block AI games. To me, it is the consumer's choice if they want to play AI games or not, just having it be clearly shown what is AI or not, for me, it's enough.

Edit: my didaction fucked up at the end

All we needed was a filter.

I don't wanna see F2P bullshit either when I'm looking at a genre, AI use could be the same thing.

The solution is simple: Steam should use AI to filter out the shovelware. /s

I just looked and I don't see the AI flag in the filters. Maybe I'm blind, but zero chance I'm going to engage with it if I can't filter out AI.

I've found a handful of promising ones, but it's taking ten times the usual effort to sift through the slop.

steam should adopt stricter policies with ai-generated games. as it is, even the mandatory disclosure is often just not there. no one wants to play this slop, much less buy it, and it just devalues the whole store (and especially events like these)

i've seen many people straight up considering not buying any game released after 2023, and i can't blame them

I have seen a comment floating around that "the algorithm" on Next Fest kicks in later this week after it builds out enough datapoints. Right now it's a pretty raw and unfiltered list that eventually shakes out into what people are actually interested in.

Doesn't shock me that such an open platform like Steam is inundated with AI nonsense and Next Fest is a casualty.

I added a bunch of games worth checking to wishlist:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/2328390/WILLOW_RIDGE
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/3920900/Elixir_of_Moonglow
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/4324730/Find_Bunny_A_Little_Hidden_Journey
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/4959760/The_Heir_Steampunk_Escape_Room
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/4811840/Whispering_Green

I don't know why steam won't let us opt out of seeing AI games. (It's because they'd make less money presumably).

I know that might lead to less games disclosing AI use, but steam should permaban devs that don't disclose, issue refunds to purchasers, and be done with it. People should also be able to report games for AI and there should be a review process.

wanted to check it out but after 60% being obvious ai i noped out without buying anything

SteamDB has a filter for the AI Content Disclosed tag, which means we can exclude games with it. Now I know some lie, and others also use to state that they don't use AI, however it's the best we've got for now.

https://steamdb.info/sales/event/713414759190366804/?displayOnly=Demo&tagid=-1368160

Doesn't it still cost $100 or so to publish a game? Its not a huge amount but how is it not deterring more slop?!