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Half of New Games on Steam Are Now Made With AI. How Does This Reflect the Gaming Industry?

Evidence type
News report
Sources
1 sourceJournalism
Published
3 min read
Truvace record
TRV-2026-2469cite or check it

Most of those games are unpopular, with 10 or fewer reviews from gamers. Steam, the digital marketplace for PC games from game studio Valve, has hit a major milestone, sparking pushback from parts of the gaming community: Approximately 50% of new Steam games in October were made with the help of AI. This underscores a gro

Half of New Games on Steam Are Now Made With AI. How Does This Reflect the Gaming Industry?

The problem

A Reddit analysis of Steam disclosures found 49.9% of new games disclosed AI use in October, up from 1.4% in January 2024, while Valve sets no limit and games with AI disclosures drew fewer positive reviews on average.

In brief

A Reddit user known as Ploz analysed Steam's public AI disclosures and found that 49.9% of new games released in October disclosed AI use for player-facing content. The share was 1.4% when Valve introduced its disclosure policy in January 2024, 13.4% by the end of 2024 and 24% by the end of 2025.

Most AI-disclosed games are small. About 47% of new games with fewer than 10 reviews carry a disclosure, against 17% of games with more than 1,000 reviews. Developers who released more than 10 games in a year included the disclosure in 68% of them, and AI-disclosed games drew fewer positive reviews on average.

Valve says it does not want to be a gatekeeper on which tools developers use, and Epic's store is similarly permissive, while Itch.io lets users filter out AI games. The count covers only disclosed player-facing content, so it misses coding use, and bigger studios' use is hard to gauge.

Main points

  1. Ploz's analysis of Steam's public disclosures put AI use at 49.9% of new October games, up from 1.4% in January 2024.
  2. Artwork was the most common use, named in 63% of disclosures; text and translation 30%, music 21%, code 16% and voices 7%.
  3. About a quarter of developers said they used AI for store pages and marketing.
  4. About 3% of developers used AI directly as a game mechanic, including the driving game Teach My Little Sister How to Drive.
  5. The developer Easy Fox pays $1,000 a day in AI operating costs to keep the demo running and took out a loan to do so.
  6. Anthropic changed Claude Opus 5.5 to stop it generating copies of existing games, but CNET's testing found games resembling popular titles could still be made.
  7. Itch.io deletes AI slop and lets users filter AI games out of search results; Steam and Epic do not limit AI-made games.

The full story

The data rests on Valve's disclosure policy, introduced in January 2024, which requires developers to state whether AI was used for player-facing content such as artwork, sound, character dialogue and localization. Because the records are public, Ploz could count how many new releases carried a disclosure. The 49.9% figure excludes behind-the-scenes uses such as coding and bug fixes; a Google Cloud survey from August 2025 found 87% of developers use AI for backend work.

Ploz's breakdown shows how the AI is used: artwork in 63% of disclosures, text and translations 30%, music 21%, code 16% and voices 7%. Many developers listed more than one area. Tools named include Anthropic's Claude, with ChatGPT, Gemini and GitHub Copilot as other options, and Unity 6, released in October 2024, which includes AI code and asset tools.

On the market side, CNET says cheap, fast AI development, with games built in days or weeks of vibe coding, has swelled releases that drown out other games. Valve says it does not want to tell developers which tools to use, and Epic's CEO called AI handling of grunt work perfectly logical. CNET asked two dozen well-known developers and publishers for comment and all declined.

Talk it overFour questions for a class, a team or the dinner table

  1. Who carries this cost, and what would have to change to prevent it?

    The problem A Reddit analysis of Steam disclosures found 49.9% of new games disclosed AI use in October, up from 1.4% in January 2024, while Valve sets no limit and games with AI disclosures drew fewer positive reviews on average.

  2. How do we know? What can this kind of evidence show, and what can’t it?

    The evidence This rests on a news report, from CNET.

  3. What does it leave open? What else would you want to know before acting on it?

    The record’s own caveat The 49.9% figure covers only games disclosing AI in player-facing content, so it omits coding uses, and there is no AI audit, leaving the industry reliant on voluntary disclosure and making larger studios' use hard to gauge.

  4. Have you seen AI used this way where you study, work or live? Did it go the same way?

The questions are the same on every record. The details under them are taken from this record as written.

Sources

1 on file
  1. CNETcnet.com
    Journalism2026-11-10

The debate

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