Half of New Steam Games Now Disclose AI Use, and Valve Won't Stop It

Roughly 49.9% of games released on Steam in October carried a disclosure that generative AI was used in their creation — up from 1.4% in January 2024. The figure comes not from Valve but from a Reddit user, Ploz, who mined Steam's publicly available disclosure records. A Valve representative did not respond to a request for comment.

The number matters because it quantifies, for the first time at scale, how quickly generative AI has moved from experiment to default in PC game development. It also exposes the fault line between two storefront philosophies: Valve's hands-off tolerance and the active curation of rivals like Itch.io.

What is behind the 49.9% figure?

Valve implemented its AI disclosure policy in January 2024 to increase developer transparency. Under the policy, developers must state whether they used AI to make their game, and the disclosure becomes part of the storefront's publicly accessible records — which is what allowed Ploz to count.

The trajectory is steep. Only 1.4% of newly released games used AI when the policy launched. That climbed to 13.4% by the end of 2024, then to 24% by the end of 2025, and now sits at 49.9%.

There is a significant caveat, and it pushes the real number higher rather than lower. Disclosure is only required for games that use AI to create player-facing content — artwork, sound, character dialogue and localization. Developers who use AI for behind-the-scenes work such as coding and bug fixes do not have to disclose anything. A Google Cloud survey conducted in August 2025 found that 87% of developers use AI for backend work. In plain words: half of new Steam games admit AI in what players see, and an even larger share likely use it where players cannot.

What are developers using AI for?

According to Ploz's analysis, the most common disclosed use is artwork, mentioned in 63% of disclosures. Many developers listed more than one category. The breakdown:

• Artwork: 63%
• Text and translations: 30%
• Music: 21%
• Code: 16%
• Voices: 7%

About a quarter of developers said they use AI for their Steam store pages and marketing. Roughly 3% use AI directly as a game mechanic.

One of those games illustrates the economics of AI-as-mechanic. Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, a driving simulator from the team Easy Fox, uses AI to interpret a player's voice commands and generate the sister's responses. Keeping the public demo playable costs the developers $1,000 per day in AI operating expenses — a bill so high the team took out a loan to keep the demo running.

The tooling side keeps expanding. The Unity 6 engine, released in October 2024, ships with AI code assistance, AI asset generation and third-party integration with Claude Code, Gemini and Grok. Anthropic's Claude is popular among smaller developers because it supports "vibe coding" (building software from natural-language prompts rather than hand-written code) of entire games, with ChatGPT, Gemini and GitHub Copilot as competing options.

Are most of these games slop?

Many of them are what gamers call "slop" — a derogatory term applied liberally to titles that lean heavily on generative AI and look derivative of other popular games. The data supports the impression.

Around 47% of new games with fewer than 10 reviews carry an AI disclosure. Among developers who released more than 10 games in a year — a strong signal of high-volume, low-effort production — 68% of those games included the disclosure. Games with AI disclosures received fewer positive reviews on average than those without. Among all newly released games with more than 1,000 reviews, only 17% include an AI disclosure.

That last figure is the market speaking: players still gravitate toward games without AI disclosures and push back against those that use the technology. Developers seem aware of the reputational cost. CNET reached out to two dozen well-known developers, including Epic Games, EA, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and PlayStation Studios. All of them declined to comment.

Larger studios may well be using AI, but nobody can verify the scale. There is no such thing as an AI audit yet, and the industry relies on voluntary disclosure. Steam's policy has effectively outed smaller developers who either fear removal from the storefront for violating the rules or are not worried about the negative reaction.

Why did it get this far?

Several conditions converged. AI tools became widely available and dramatically easier to use. Subreddits like r/AIGameDev contain numerous examples of people assembling games in days or weeks through vibe coding — a fraction of the standard development cycle, which can stretch over years depending on scale, production level and graphics quality.

Most of those games land on Steam, which has no policy limiting AI-developed games. Valve openly acknowledges the problem while declining to police it. The company says it doesn't "want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

Valve takes a similar stance on AI cloning, where a model is used to copy an existing game. Valve's Tom Giardino told developers: "you must continue to grow your game by adding features, personality and creativity that stem from your own perspective as a developer." In practice, the policy allows any AI-developed game or clone to reach the storefront unchallenged.

"Digital storefronts like Steam have already struggled to moderate low-effort and poor-quality games, as well as copycats stealing other games' ideas," said CNET Managing Editor David Lumb.

Epic Games takes a comparably lax approach, allowing essentially any game that wants to be listed. The company declined to comment further, but CEO Tim Sweeney is an open supporter of AI in game development, calling it "perfectly logical" for developers to hand the mundane grunt work that consumes most of their time over to AI.

Itch.io runs the opposite playbook. The storefront has an explicit policy against AI slop, has willingly — and at times gleefully — deleted terabytes of AI-generated content, requires AI disclosure, and lets users filter AI-made games out of search results entirely.

Is anything being done about AI slop?

Some measures exist. None will solve the problem on their own.

Cloning predates AI. Mobile gamers of a certain vintage will remember the flood of Flappy Bird clones that filled app stores after the original went down — none of them AI-made. What AI changes is speed and cost: cloning is now much easier and much faster.

Some AI companies are responding. Anthropic recently changed Claude Opus 5.5 to prevent it from generating copies of existing games. Anthropic engineering leader Addy Osmani posted on X that using Claude to copy games infringes intellectual property rights and violates Anthropic's policy. During CNET's testing, however, it remained possible to create games resembling popular titles with a little creativity — so the restriction is porous.

"This has come up over and over on the subreddit r/GameDev, and there's no real solution if Steam and other digital storefronts don't stem the flood of low-quality AI games drowning out the labors of love that entertain and innovate," Lumb said.

Many developers still openly oppose AI and refuse to use it. But the Steam statistics show their share of new releases shrinking every year. Unless Valve changes its non-gatekeeping stance, the next milestone — a majority of new Steam games carrying an AI disclosure — is a matter of months, not years.