Almost half of October’s new Steam games disclosed AI. In January 2024, 1.7% of games did

Of the games released on Steam in October, 49.9% tell players that their developer used generative AI for something they will see or hear, most often the artwork. In January 2024, when Valve began requiring that notice, 1.7% of new games carried it. The figures come from PCGame.com, an independent games site that checked Valve’s own AI flag on each of the roughly 63,600 games released since then and posted the series on r/Steam on November 1.

So far this year, according to PCGame.com’s statistics page, 10,312 of the 25,708 games released on Steam through November 2 carry the flag, or 40.1%, against 24.0% of 2025 releases and 13.2% of 2024 releases. October 2025 stood at 26.4%, so the monthly share nearly doubled in a year.

Flagged games make up 40% of this year’s releases but drew 12% of the Steam reviews those releases received, and reviews are the usual stand-in for sales, the site notes. Among games with at least 50 reviews, flagged ones average 77% positive reviews, against 83% for games without the flag.

What the flag covers

Developers answer a content survey before release, and its Steamworks documentation says the AI section is “concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players.” “Efficiency gains” from AI tools built into development software are “not the focus.” PCGame.com says this wording has applied since January 2026.

With a simple program, PCGame.com sorted the 8,889 free-text statements filed for 2026 games, and one statement can name several uses. Art leads, in 63% of them, followed by text and translations (30%), the store page and marketing (26%), music and sound (21%), code (16%) and voices (7%). Only 3% describe AI generating content during play, and 8% say AI was used only for the Steam page and marketing.

Small games and first-time developers

The flag thins out as games get bigger. Of this year’s releases with fewer than 10 reviews, 47% carry it; of those with 1,000 reviews or more, 14% do. The 52 developers who put out 10 or more games in 2026 flagged 68% of them, against 37% for developers with a single release.

A separate census shows who is arriving. Sulka Haro, whom PC Gamer describes as co-founder of the Finnish studio behind the online game Pax Dei, counted 53,597 games released between July 2023 and July 2026. In the second part of his study, published July 13, he found that the number of developers debuting without AI held at roughly 950 a month for two years, while those debuting with an AI-flagged game rose from about 140 to about 440 a month. By his count, AI accounts for about 100% of the net growth in new Steam developers.

Outside Steam, Roblox says two games built almost entirely with AI reached its top 20. Three people made a two-hour AI anime film in three months of work, and the site that tracked fans’ projects to rebuild the source code of old console games says AI sped up the work so much that it is winding down.

A crowded Next Fest

The volume showed in October’s Steam Next Fest, the platform’s demo festival. Chris Zukowski, who writes the How To Market A Game blog for indie developers, counted 7,240 games on the live festival page, 65.2% more than the 4,382 in June 2026, and up from 887 in June 2023 according to GameDiscoverCo data he cites. Of the 7,240, 2,502 disclosed AI, or 34.6%.

The most-played demos rarely carried the flag. Ranked by peak concurrent players, 2 of the top 25 games disclosed AI (8%), 3 of the next 25 (12%) and 13 of the 50 after that (26%), against 2,427 of the 6,942 games below the top 100 (35%).

Valve answered developers on October 27 at Steam Indie Connect, an event it co-hosted in Korea, Inven Global reported in an English version it says was translated with AI assistance and then edited. Marc Wilkinson, of Valve’s Steam business team, explained that demos are shown almost at random for the festival’s first two days so that every game gets a chance, before personal recommendations take over. “We recognize that as a trade-off, some low-quality games get exposed,” he said. “We are fully aware of the situation, and many of our staff are deliberating on how to address this problem.” His colleague Tom Giardino said Valve does not “want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”

One indie publisher says the volume hurt its launch. 2 Left Thumbs wrote on X on November 2 that Steam had assured it a missed launch date would not affect its visibility, and blamed the delay on “the tidal wave of AI-slop that destroyed their review queue.” Its co-op game Wheel Make It, in which two players share control of one wheelchair, slipped from October 12 to November 1 and drew an early peak of 15 players at once despite more than 11,000 wishlists, Power Up Gaming reported. Valve has not linked the delay to AI submissions. The publisher’s own October 12 post says the first rejection came because reviewers could not work out how to access local co-op. A second rejection followed on October 21 over a resolution setting a controller could not reach, and once the game was approved on October 23, the team says it held the launch until November 1 to rebuild some momentum.

What the numbers leave out

Every figure rests on a flag that developers set themselves. Undisclosed AI is not counted, and Valve does not require developers to declare AI coding tools, Zukowski notes, so the share is a floor. A flag also “spans everything from one generated painting to fully generative gameplay,” as Haro puts it. PCGame.com, which offers players a filter to hide these games, could not read a statement for 1,423 flagged games, and Power Up Gaming points out that Valve itself has published no such figures.

The independent counts point the same way without matching. Haro’s census, which stops in July, puts AI-flagged games at 10.9% of 2024 releases and 19.9% of 2025 releases, PC Gamer reported, below PCGame.com’s 13.2% and 24.0%. Zukowski’s Next Fest figures date from October 21, after those two near-random opening days; Wilkinson said many articles about a flood of low-quality games were based on those two days alone. Zukowski also allows that top games may “have more to lose if they reveal AI use.”

Reviews are not sales, and the rating gap does not show that AI caused it. Among games with a published score, Haro found AI games averaging 77% positive against 81% for the rest, a gap he called consistent but “not a collapse.”

What it means

In July, Haro sketched a scenario, “not a forecast” in his words, in which AI-flagged games cross about half of all Steam releases somewhere in 2027 or 2028. October already reached that level for a single month, while the 2026 share stands at 40.1%.

The flags cluster in small games, and the same numbers serve both sides of the argument. Haro counts AI behind nearly all the growth in new developers. Flagged games still draw 12% of the reviews of this year’s releases and rate lower on average, and only 2 of the 25 most-played Next Fest demos disclosed AI. Haro adds that the two best-selling flagged games on Steam, Crimson Desert and ARC Raiders, were started before today’s AI tools were useful.

Valve says many of its staff are deliberating on how to address low-quality games, and Steam still offers no setting to hide flagged titles, according to PCGame.com. Haro expects that great games relying heavily on AI tools are already in development. PCGame.com updates its count daily, and the full-year 2026 share will show whether October’s level holds beyond one month.