Nearly half of new Steam games now disclose AI: the numbers behind the Next Fest backlash

How many Steam games use AI? In Steam Next Fest October 2026, 2,642 of the 7,265 games taking part (36.4%) carried Valve's generative AI disclosure, according to SteamDB on 21 October 2026. That is up from about one in five at June's festival. It has players asking Valve for something Steam still doesn't offer: a way to hide them.

Next Fest, edition by edition

Next Fest October 2026 ran from 19 to 26 October. These are the counts of games in each festival and how many carried the AI disclosure, from SteamDB's event pages:

Next Fest	Games in the event	With an AI disclosure	Share	Counted by
February 2026	6,728	996	14.8%	Notebookcheck, from SteamDB
June 2026	8,700	1,704	19.6%	Eurogamer via Engadget, from SteamDB
October 2026	7,265	2,642	36.4%	GamesChart, from SteamDB (21 Oct)

The share more than doubled across 2026. Event counts move during a festival as games join and leave, so outlets counting on different days report slightly different totals; PC Gamer counted over 8,000 demos on Steam's own press page.

It's not just Next Fest

The festival reflects what is happening to Steam as a whole. Using SteamDB's release statistics we counted how many games came out each month, and how many of them carried the disclosure:

Month	Games released	With an AI disclosure	Share
January 2024	1,237	17	1.4%
October 2024	1,801	249	13.8%
October 2025	2,035	498	24.5%
October 2026	3,661	1,821	49.7%

That's a 3.7× rise in AI-disclosed releases in a year, while all releases grew 1.8×. October 2026 finished just under half, at 49.7%, the highest share of any full month so far, up from 45.8% in September. In all, 16,777 released Steam games now carry the disclosure (SteamDB, 3 November 2026). Every month since January 2024 is in our Steam AI disclosure dataset.

Valve narrowed the form in January 2026: developers now disclose AI content that ships with the game and is seen by players, plus AI used in marketing, but not AI tools used only behind the scenes, such as coding assistants. So the 2026 rise happened under a narrower rule, and every count here is a floor.

What players are asking for

The loudest thread on r/Games during the festival, over 6,000 upvotes, is about demands for an AI filter. RespawnFirst's report on the backlash describes players on Reddit, X and Discord asking for a global "no AI" filter on Steam. In the Reddit thread, the most upvoted reply worries about "people cloning games 1-1 with AI".

That fear had examples during the festival. PC Gamer reports that one publisher dropped its planned Steam demo in favour of closed play sessions, for fear that AI clones could copy the game quickly, and that another developer filed a copyright notice with Valve over alleged copying.

The biggest request came on r/Steam, where a post asking Valve for an option to hide AI games reached 29,722 upvotes and 2,608 comments.

What Valve said

Valve answered at its Steam Indie Connect event in Busan on 27 October. Tom Giardino said: "We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use." Marc Wilkinson said Valve is "fully aware of the situation", that "the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed", and that "a significant number of people" at Valve are working on the problem.

On X, Pirat_Nation's post of Valve's "gatekeepers" quote was liked more than 16,000 times. Valve gave no date for a filter, and Steam's store still has no setting to hide AI-disclosed games. Some developers reported emails threatening to release AI clones of their games unless they paid. Giardino said he hadn't seen those examples, and that they were a matter for the police rather than a store.

The next festival, Next Fest February 2027, is listed by SteamDB for 22 February to 1 March 2027.

What the industry is saying

• Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Smash Bros., told a Japanese interviewer that as AI pushes the number of releases higher, "most of them will become 'unprofitable titles'" (as translated by My Nintendo News).
• Epic Games has told staff on its Disney project there will be "no more hand-written code", according to a director's email reported by Bloomberg. Epic told Engadget it is "embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers".
• Developers are wary. In GDC's 2026 State of the Game Industry survey, 52% said generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, up from 30% a year earlier.
• So are players. In GameDiscoverCo's July survey of Steam users, about 31% said they view a game with any AI disclosure negatively, and only 17% believed developers fully disclose their AI use.

How to check a game yourself, or hide AI games

Steam has no built-in filter, but these work today:

Method	Where	Hides AI games?
Read the AI Generated Content Disclosure	Steam store page, under About This Game	No, it labels them
Exclude the AI tag on SteamDB	steamdb.info, add &tagid=-1368160 to a search	Yes, in SteamDB searches
Ignore a game	The game's Steam store page	Only that game

1. On the Steam store page, look under About This Game for the "AI Generated Content Disclosure" section, where the developer describes what was made with AI. Some disclosures cover only marketing art. Others cover the whole game.
2. On SteamDB, the "AI Content Disclosed" tag lists every disclosed game. To hide them, add &tagid=-1368160 (with the minus sign) to the end of a SteamDB search or sale page address. Without the minus, tagid=1368160 does the opposite and shows only AI-disclosed games.
3. Ignore games you don't want. Choose Ignore on a store page and Steam stops recommending that game to you.
4. Watch for clones. If a game looks like one you know, check the developer and publisher names against the original's store page before you buy.

All of these rely on what developers disclose, so a game with no disclosure either doesn't use generative AI or hasn't declared it.

For developers

Disclosing AI isn't the same as making slop, and plenty of developers use AI only for code, which Valve doesn't ask them to disclose. If you're working that way, our breakdown of the AI-assisted game coding setups that work covers the tools and what goes wrong, and the survey data on AI coding tools shows what other developers use. Indie developers can also list their games on GamesChart through the developer gateway.

How we checked

We read the Next Fest October 2026 event page on SteamDB on 21 October 2026, and the release statistics on 3 November 2026, with and without the "AI Content Disclosed" tag. SteamDB applies that tag when Steam's disclosure statement is on a game's store page. Shares are worked out from those counts. The February and June festival counts are as reported by Notebookcheck and Engadget, also from SteamDB. The October row is SteamDB's count from 21 October, partway through the festival: SteamDB took the event page down when Next Fest ended on 26 October, so no end-of-festival count is available from it.