These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)
> There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.
I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.
So what people are really complaining about is the lack of an approval or curation process on Steam’s end. AI is exposing the problem by making it worse.
What Steam users want is a way to filter out crap but crap existed well before AI (trust me, I've spent a _lot_ of time scrolling through games on Steam both for "Fests" and just in general). And unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to filter "crap" out. There as good games that use AI, there are bad games that use AI, there are good games that don't use AI, there are bad games that don't use AI. I don't think "AI" is a good filter.
Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.
I don’t have solutions but tagging AI is definitely not easy. A lot of art is expressed via code: particle effects, menu layouts, iconography, animation keyframes. AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning. More recently, Opus 5.5 is clearly a model that started to develop visual taste and can draw images with code, as opposed to outputting images as tokens or via diffusion. And these capability gains are still accelerating.
There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.
> AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning.
It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
> If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
Here's an 11 year old video trying to educate people who think they "hate CGI" just how much CGI they've been watching, just without realizing it, because it was actually quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
Steam requires any use of AI art or code to be disclosed in the steam description. No vs yes is a simple toggle that can be added, similar to sexual content.
Perhaps, but the examples in that article all clearly look like they're using AI-generated art assets. You might as well call that style "slop" in the sense that it is very easy to spot. I don't know if it's possible to create a general AI filter for the actual code, but certainly labelling ones that had AI-made visual and audio assets, with minimal human craftsmanship involved, would be a good first step.
I'd say gen-AI art assets are definitely the deep end, and DLSS-Yassify is right behind it. I'd put code behind them because there's a second gradient within it from Copilot-on-a-short-lease to vibe coding.
I used to assume that low effort indies would be the major force for the game equivalent of gen-AI tiktok fruit slop, but when I saw DLSS 5 I realised it might come for AAA first.
It may not, by some philosophical definition, but most consumers (and I'd say most programmers too) place little importance on code as a human artistic expression. In the case of games the art assets are also a much more clear and direct signal that there was AI involved in the creation of the game. A game with handmade art but vibe coded game logic might not be as obvious.
AI or no AI is the wrong metric, of course. I imagine the way to solve this usefully probably goes through something that looks like Reddit. More "meta-moderation."
The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."
The video game market was already flooded before LLMs. Now, it's much much worse. I'm not sure that "AI" vs. "no AI" is really the right filter, but I do understand the need to filter out the chaff. There's too much content, and too little time. Even for something that you love, there's more out there than can possibly be managed or enjoyed. This problem will get worse.
I'm participating with my game in this Next Fest and I don't really think this is much of a problem. The amount of games presented doesn't seem significantly higher than last Next Fest. Games that are good get boosted after 2 days (first 2 days everyone gets featured randomly) so low quality AI slop won't get much of attention. And the way they check if a game is popular is wishlist count and player/install count as far as I understand. I don't think low quality slop will get much of boost, and if it does it probably is deserved unless the wishlist count/player count gets botted somehow, but I haven't really seen this happen but who knows. For most people I think it's best to wait until after the second day to see which demo's are worth checking out, there won't be much AI slop there.
They really want a "no dogshit" filter, I imagine. So a filter for actual effort and care.
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
--
As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
Every major gaming outlet and studio has at one time or another decided to try to play chicken with their customers. This never goes well. Historically Steam has been pretty skilled at not finding a hill to die on so one would assume they'll avoid the obvious blunder of ignoring users preferences here.
I think the number of submissions is fine. It's easy to filter by the type of game you're looking for. If you just want to doom scroll, yeah you're going to have a bad time.
IMO, We really should be centering these discussions around the lines that separate Remix versus Ripoff. I want to live in an age of less effortful remixes that push the culture forward, but we are mostly getting ripoffs that slopify the culture at the moment. Shun the ripoffs, praise and boost the remixes, same as it ever was.
Gamers and game journalists seem to be unaware that most software engineers are using AI now, likely including programmers who work at prestigious AAA games. But they only see the vibecoded slop, and assume that AI=slop, when in reality ~all games use AI coding now, both slop and non-slop.
Yeah, what people want is games that aren’t slop. Defining that is probably impossible. We’ve always had shovelware, but the volume now is unsustainable and only going to get worse.
The problem is that in the context of AI, "slop" has lost its definition.
It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.
But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.
One of the things that captivates many people who play games is imagining building their own.
It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.
At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.
As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.
You're forgetting one (I think people do this deliberately because they dislike AI, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt): those who are passionate about games and skillful, and can ship higher _quality_ at the same pace as before.
That’s why I caveated it with fully using AI. If they’re using AI as a tool within their workflow, it doesn’t fall into the same bin as the vibecoded games that are being referenced in the article.
I remember reading a lament by a journalist in a video game magazine like 25 years ago "why don't they invent tools that would make game making easier for people like us who don't know programming?"
Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.
You know it's an interesting question. If an amateur makes a terrible game and puts it on Steam, is that slop? If they use AI to make a better game, is that somehow worse?
Not that I agree with your assessment, but why do we need a thoughtful and intelligent solution here? Seems to me people want a simple, easy solution and bans or required disclosure seems to fit quiet well here
Get rid of the thing that's causing problems is both thoughtful and intelligent when the alternative is either ignore the problem or some as of yet undefined activity that is entirely outside the current scope of business. Steam isn't obligated to accommodate AI-generated games or participate in whatever currently undefined process would be required to make them palatable. That's the studios' responsibility.
How would no-AI filter be implemented by Steam at all?
Do people expect Steam to proctor the entire development process?
Issue here is not AI use, but very low amount of creative human effort that went into making some games.
There are three existing realistic solutions for this problem:
- raise SteamWorks deposit of $100 for launching a new game on Steam (to reflect lower cost of making games with coding agents)
- reviews by users and pro game critics
- users can request refunds under 2 hours of playtime
> users can request refunds under 2 hours of playtime
This already exists (or did)
There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.
This is what people are mad about: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5106420/Leverage_Real_Est... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5155900/Ages_TD_Demo/?cur... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5200920/BATTLE_PARTS__POW... https://store.steampowered.com/app/4609270/Naval_Supremacy/?...
These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)
And there are a lot this year
> There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.
I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.
“Here” being HN - curse of an early comment, the “both sides” and “you can’t really tell” got downvotes fast
As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop. Slop has always existed in video games, it’s just faster to create now. So, so much faster.
So what people are really complaining about is the lack of an approval or curation process on Steam’s end. AI is exposing the problem by making it worse.
This is like seeing someone get mugged and saying clothes lack stab resistance. The mugger simply exposes the problem.
Valve is just as much of a victim.
What Steam users want is a way to filter out crap but crap existed well before AI (trust me, I've spent a _lot_ of time scrolling through games on Steam both for "Fests" and just in general). And unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to filter "crap" out. There as good games that use AI, there are bad games that use AI, there are good games that don't use AI, there are bad games that don't use AI. I don't think "AI" is a good filter.
Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.
The screenshots and description used to be a good filter - stock unity assets and poor copyediting meant low-effort game. This is no longer the case.
I don’t have solutions but tagging AI is definitely not easy. A lot of art is expressed via code: particle effects, menu layouts, iconography, animation keyframes. AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning. More recently, Opus 5.5 is clearly a model that started to develop visual taste and can draw images with code, as opposed to outputting images as tokens or via diffusion. And these capability gains are still accelerating.
There’s a wide spectrum of AI art between particle effects and a character drawn with brushstrokes via code or computer use and it’s hard to decide what should be labelled and how the labels can be enforced.
> AI having written any of the code would get so many games tagged as AI that the label would lose all meaning.
It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
> If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
Here's an 11 year old video trying to educate people who think they "hate CGI" just how much CGI they've been watching, just without realizing it, because it was actually quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
Steam requires any use of AI art or code to be disclosed in the steam description. No vs yes is a simple toggle that can be added, similar to sexual content.
Perhaps, but the examples in that article all clearly look like they're using AI-generated art assets. You might as well call that style "slop" in the sense that it is very easy to spot. I don't know if it's possible to create a general AI filter for the actual code, but certainly labelling ones that had AI-made visual and audio assets, with minimal human craftsmanship involved, would be a good first step.
Isn't it a gradient? I'd probably rank it like this.
AI Used in back-office administration, internal documentation & presentations
AI Used in research
AI Used for generating placeholders
AI Used for Upscaling (DLSS)
AI Used for translations of UI.
AI Used in the final product (assets incl. textures, 3D, sound and voice)
AI Used in final product (code)
To say nothing of the other disciplines of AI like machine vision or voice recognition or dynamically building a story tree or character response.
I'd say gen-AI art assets are definitely the deep end, and DLSS-Yassify is right behind it. I'd put code behind them because there's a second gradient within it from Copilot-on-a-short-lease to vibe coding.
I used to assume that low effort indies would be the major force for the game equivalent of gen-AI tiktok fruit slop, but when I saw DLSS 5 I realised it might come for AAA first.
Why does art have some different value compared to code?
It may not, by some philosophical definition, but most consumers (and I'd say most programmers too) place little importance on code as a human artistic expression. In the case of games the art assets are also a much more clear and direct signal that there was AI involved in the creation of the game. A game with handmade art but vibe coded game logic might not be as obvious.
Art is more artistic, it’s more of an expression of human ideas.
I don’t want AI either but I find AI art more offensive
AI or no AI is the wrong metric, of course. I imagine the way to solve this usefully probably goes through something that looks like Reddit. More "meta-moderation."
The problem is "a number of submissions we weren't prepared for," not "AI."
The video game market was already flooded before LLMs. Now, it's much much worse. I'm not sure that "AI" vs. "no AI" is really the right filter, but I do understand the need to filter out the chaff. There's too much content, and too little time. Even for something that you love, there's more out there than can possibly be managed or enjoyed. This problem will get worse.
I'm participating with my game in this Next Fest and I don't really think this is much of a problem. The amount of games presented doesn't seem significantly higher than last Next Fest. Games that are good get boosted after 2 days (first 2 days everyone gets featured randomly) so low quality AI slop won't get much of attention. And the way they check if a game is popular is wishlist count and player/install count as far as I understand. I don't think low quality slop will get much of boost, and if it does it probably is deserved unless the wishlist count/player count gets botted somehow, but I haven't really seen this happen but who knows. For most people I think it's best to wait until after the second day to see which demo's are worth checking out, there won't be much AI slop there.
People are proud to use AI but don’t want the AI label. Seems sus.
They really want a "no dogshit" filter, I imagine. So a filter for actual effort and care.
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
--
As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
"Trust (customers) but verify (games)" works but at the cost of Steam/Valve having to implement either human verifiers or AI verifiers.
This will cost with low ROI.
If Steam is indeed customer focused, they might but doubtful.
Every major gaming outlet and studio has at one time or another decided to try to play chicken with their customers. This never goes well. Historically Steam has been pretty skilled at not finding a hill to die on so one would assume they'll avoid the obvious blunder of ignoring users preferences here.
I think the number of submissions is fine. It's easy to filter by the type of game you're looking for. If you just want to doom scroll, yeah you're going to have a bad time.
Maybe they should just focus on "is it fun".
IMO, We really should be centering these discussions around the lines that separate Remix versus Ripoff. I want to live in an age of less effortful remixes that push the culture forward, but we are mostly getting ripoffs that slopify the culture at the moment. Shun the ripoffs, praise and boost the remixes, same as it ever was.
Are you talking about Minecraft in Dark Souls and that kind of thing?
maybe judge games by if they are fun or not
Gamers and game journalists seem to be unaware that most software engineers are using AI now, likely including programmers who work at prestigious AAA games. But they only see the vibecoded slop, and assume that AI=slop, when in reality ~all games use AI coding now, both slop and non-slop.
Someone called this a Dark Forest problem recently, where "everyone" is using AI, but nobody wants to admit they're using AI.
“No AI” is too simplistic.
Does that mean no AI assistance at all? How is that possible to detect for if someone uses it for code generation and compiles it to a binary?
Do they mean no AI artwork? Maybe easier to detect, but mostly based on vibes still.
Do they mean no AI features? But why, wouldn’t an adventure game where you can talk naturally to NPCs be kind of cool?
Madness.
How about a filter for “No souless shitty copycat games that are pure cash grabs”. I’m sure Jev can help detect these at scale.
Steam requires self reporting. You can see their rules described here.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/38624...
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsur...
Yeah, what people want is games that aren’t slop. Defining that is probably impossible. We’ve always had shovelware, but the volume now is unsustainable and only going to get worse.
The problem is that in the context of AI, "slop" has lost its definition.
It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.
But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.
One of the things that captivates many people who play games is imagining building their own.
It's understood that there's a massive new flood of games from new game creators that are using a higher level abstraction like AI to build games.
At a smaller level, it can sound like the differences between folks that used to build games using assembler only or a higher level programming language, which built to the point until there were higher and higher level tools.
There’s two kinds of people making games (fully) with AI:
- I have a passion for making games but not the skill, and this lets me achieve my dream
- I can crank out games in an hour, and as long as I get 100 purchases over its lifetime I’m making money
As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.
There are three kinds of people:
- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries
- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people
- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points
- those that tremble as if mad
You're forgetting one (I think people do this deliberately because they dislike AI, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt): those who are passionate about games and skillful, and can ship higher _quality_ at the same pace as before.
That’s why I caveated it with fully using AI. If they’re using AI as a tool within their workflow, it doesn’t fall into the same bin as the vibecoded games that are being referenced in the article.
I remember reading a lament by a journalist in a video game magazine like 25 years ago "why don't they invent tools that would make game making easier for people like us who don't know programming?"
Well it seems we are here now.
Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.
A lot of those games are attempts at cheap cash grabs more than "I can finally make my dream game".
You know it's an interesting question. If an amateur makes a terrible game and puts it on Steam, is that slop? If they use AI to make a better game, is that somehow worse?
Speaking of low effort, "ban Z" does not constitute a thoughtful and intelligent solution to "Z created a problem."
Z=AI in this case, but lazy solutions are as old as time.
Not that I agree with your assessment, but why do we need a thoughtful and intelligent solution here? Seems to me people want a simple, easy solution and bans or required disclosure seems to fit quiet well here
Isn't a user-selectable filter very different from a ban?
Not to the most aggressive of LLM-based-tooling boosters, no.
It was lazy to ban DDT or X-rays for determining shoe sizes or watches with radium paint.
Get rid of the thing that's causing problems is both thoughtful and intelligent when the alternative is either ignore the problem or some as of yet undefined activity that is entirely outside the current scope of business. Steam isn't obligated to accommodate AI-generated games or participate in whatever currently undefined process would be required to make them palatable. That's the studios' responsibility.
Nobody browses the Steam store at random we all use filters and recommendations.
Not initially but after I gained experience with the store, yes. SEems like AI coders are going for the lowest common denominators (new users)
AI's largest share of any market is users who don't have domain expertise, though.