- Primary Subject: Steam Next Fest
- Key Update: Steam Next Fest 2026 features thousands of demos, but the growing number of AI disclosures has become difficult to ignore while browsing.
- Status: Ongoing Event
- Last Verified: June 20, 2026
- Quick Answer: Steam Next Fest remains one of the best places to discover upcoming games, but the sheer number of AI disclosures attached to participating demos made them impossible to ignore.
Steam Next Fest is back, bringing thousands of demos to Steam for a week-long showcase of upcoming games.
It remains one of the best opportunities for smaller developers to get noticed, and one of the easiest ways to lose an entire evening without meaning to.
This time, AI kept getting in the way of the experience.
Am I Looking For Games Or Looking For Disclosures?
Part of Steam Next Fest's appeal is how easy it is to fall down a rabbit hole.
Every year there are dozens of demos that appear out of nowhere and somehow end up sitting on your wishlist by the end of the evening.
More often than expected, there's an AI disclosure waiting near the bottom.
Valve introduced these disclosures to tell players when generative AI was used during development, whether for artwork, text, audio, marketing assets, or other content.
Fair play to Valve for adding them. People should know what they're looking at. But there were more of them than I expected.
Recent estimates suggest that nearly 1,700 of the more than 8,600 games participating in this Steam Next Fest disclose some form of generative AI usage.
Those figures rely on self-reporting, so nobody can say with certainty how comprehensive they are. Even so, it became difficult to browse for long without running into one.
A game catches your attention, you open the store page, and there it is again. Valve deserves credit for introducing the disclosure system.
A few years ago, players often had no visibility into whether AI-generated content had been used at all. The current system is undeniably better than that.
Still, it isn’t exactly front and centre. The disclosure sits near the bottom of the page beneath trailers, screenshots, descriptions, review excerpts, feature lists, and everything else competing for attention.
If you're deliberately searching for it, you'll find it. If you're bouncing between dozens of demos in a single evening, it's surprisingly easy to miss. Steam already gives players plenty of ways to shape what shows up in front of them.
Genres, tags, controller support, accessibility features, multiplayer options, hardware requirements. An AI filter feels fairly tame by comparison.
At the very least, it would save me a few trips to the bottom of every store page. Then again, I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head around how normal this has become.
I’d much rather spend Steam Next Fest thinking about the games than wondering how much of them came from a prompt. Part of me misses being able to dive into a demo without thinking about any of this at all.
Steam Next Fest is at its best when curiosity takes over and you simply follow whatever catches your eye. The growing flood of AI disclosures made that surprisingly difficult this year.
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