Steam Next Fest is supposed to be the best week of the year for indie game fans. Eight thousand-plus demos, a wishlist waiting to explode, and the genuine thrill of stumbling across something special before anyone else has heard of it. This week, though, the conversation has shifted from excitement to frustration.
Out of the 8,600 demos currently live during this June's Next Fest, close to 1,700 of them disclose the use of AI in their development. That is nearly one in five. The disclosure itself exists, technically, but it lives as a small footnote buried at the bottom of the store page, well below the description, screenshots, and tags. If you are not actively hunting for it, you will miss it entirely.
Twitch streamer Jeff Fabre put it bluntly on X: "The amount of AI on Steam Next Fest this time around is ridiculous." He added that it took him a full minute just to locate the disclosure, noting he was scanning the right-hand side of the page where keywords and tags normally sit. His fix request was straightforward: move the label above the description, or at minimum place it alongside the tags where browsers naturally look first.
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What Valve could actually do here
The community is not just venting, it is proposing concrete solutions. The most requested change is a proper filter, similar to how Steam already handles adult content. A toggle that hides AI-assisted titles from Next Fest browsing entirely would let players curate their own experience without having to click into every promising store page and scroll to the bottom to check.
Beyond filters, players have floated the idea of a visible badge on cover art or capsule images, so the signal lands before a single click. Others have asked for a manual hide button, letting individual users flag and remove specific titles from their feed. The common thread across all these suggestions is the same: the burden of discovery should not sit entirely on the player.
The nuance here is real. Not all AI use is equal. A game that used AI to assist with code scaffolding is a different conversation from one that generated its entire art direction or replaced voice actors with synthetic audio. Arc Raiders and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are recent examples of titles where AI use became a public talking point, and both cases involved very different kinds of involvement. Granular disclosure categories, rather than a single blanket label, would give players far more useful information.
The bigger problem Next Fest is sitting inside
Shovelware has been a persistent headache on Steam for years. Scam listings, asset flips, and low-effort cash grabs have cluttered the platform long before AI tools made bulk content generation faster and cheaper. AI is the newest and most scalable version of that problem, and Next Fest, with its sheer volume, amplifies it.
Here's the thing: the indie developers who put genuine work into their games are the ones losing the most. Next Fest exists to surface them. When players have to treat every interesting demo as a suspect until proven otherwise, the event's core purpose takes a hit. The 1,700 AI-assisted demos are not just a disclosure problem, they are changing the texture of how people browse.
Valve has shown it can move on platform-wide policy when pressure builds. Whether AI labeling gets the same treatment will likely depend on how loudly this particular wave keeps rolling. For now, the ask from players is reasonable: make the information visible, make it filterable, and make it specific enough to actually be useful.
If you want to stay sharp on what is worth your time across gaming right now, our gaming guides hub keeps things updated as new releases land. And if you are curious how AI disclosure conversations connect to specific game experiences, the Starfield Free Lanes update guide covers one of the more complex recent releases in detail. For players navigating dense systems in any RPG, the Starfield persuasion system guide is worth bookmarking too.
The pressure on Valve is not going away. Next Fest runs this week, and the conversation around AI transparency on Steam is only getting louder.
