I remember going to the Radio Shack in the early 80s and seeing dozens of different Atari carts, priced at like $4.99 (which was a lot more then, ofc, but it still felt cheap), pretty much all of which were garbage.

It pulled down the price that good games could charge and killed the industry for a bit. I feel like peer communication is for now easier, so games like BG3 can still command a price premium given their quality, but the slop cannon is not a good thing for the industry generally or Valve in particular.

I've thought for a while they should put the AI disclaimers at the top of the pages instead of at the end of the game's description and you have to click 'See More'

For now, for players browsing the thousands of Next Fest demos, finding genuine, hand-crafted games has become an exhausting chore. On the other hand, indie devs are afraid of AI-generated copycat games and some go as far as pulling out of Steam Next Fest to avoid getting their game stolen.

Any small game developer would have to be a fool to use Next Fest as is. This is awful.

even flash games from the early 00s had soul in them

Stringent labeling rules are a must. Not just on Steam but on everything "si" slop based.

If you’re proud of your use of LLMs, you’d want to promote it. The only legitimate reason to conceal it is you consider it problematic.

LLMs are a competency solvent and credibility chipper. It’s bad enough if you can afford sacrificing some slack, but a lobotomy it’s catastrophic if you haven’t.

Are games required to disclose? There are some aggressively AI looking games with no mention in their description. I genuinely ask since a filter would do nothing if it’s not enforced.

Slop games have always been a problem on Steam. I can't remember who it was since it was forever ago, but I used to watch a YouTuber who would "review" the shovel-ware that would show up on Steam. That being said, LLMs sure make putting out slop so much easier. The skill floor for creating garbage is even lower than it was before, which is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.

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

This kind of slop isn't exclusive to AI, it just made the cost of making one less

Just look at the publisher Playway, they were already doing barely functional slop way before

I have yet to see the actual numbers about this, I'm pretty sure it's worse than what my gut feeling (and anecdotal observation) tells me: I download a TON of demos during Next Fest, it's my favourite events of the year, so I tend to browse through hundreds of demos sorted by charts.

• February had around 3000 demos and 717 of those has declared using generative AI (keep in mind there's also a bunch that did NOT declare using it, a lot of Steam capsules artwork are generated by AI despite no disclaimer for example)
• June had 4411 demos (27% more) and 553 of those (12%) has declared using generative AI (27% less) (that can mean either less demos using generative ai OR more demos hiding the fact they're using generative ai)
• October (current edition) has 6509 registered demos, that's a huge jump (57% more)