Hi, have you had your fill of bad video game news this week? I hope not, because I just picked up a plate of fresh, sizzling garbage: a study by former Habbo Hotel developer Sulka Haro suggests half of the games available on Steam by 2028 will incorporate AI-generated content.
Haro analyzed approximately 53,600 Steam games launched across a three-year period, from July, 2023 to July, 2026, he shares in the study posted on his Substack. According to the developer, once Steam introduced the AI-disclosure feature in 2024, a steady increase of games on Steam began admitting to AI-generated content. "If the current trajectory holds," Haro writes gravely, "AI-disclosed games cross ~50% of all Steam releases somewhere in 2027–2028."
Haro says that nearly 31% of Steam games currently share their AI usage – that's "roughly one in three new Steam games," he remarks. "A real adoption ramp built on top of a baseline that started at literal zero," since there was no Steam page field for developers to punch in details of their AI usage before 2024.
It seems that part of Haro's anticipation of more, so many more AI-assisted games on Steam comes from his discovery that the people he calls first-time, "AI developers" usually squeeze out crud like a frog giving birth. "AI lowers the barrier not just to make a game but to make several," says Haro, "which also feeds the shovelware tail (the 5+ bar is 3× higher for AI devs)."
At the same time, Haro clarifies that "80% of the 37,000 distinct publishers [on Steam] have never shipped a single AI game, and of those that have, 89% shipped exactly one." So the slop factory is operating at a modest, rather than exponential, pace.
Though, anecdotally, I can see that its wheels are quickly churning. Earlier this week, Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella predicted that game discovery will only get worse on storefronts like Steam as AI vibe coding makes it easy for people to clone legitimate games, including indie hits like Peak. So as we walk faster toward Haro's prediction of 50% AI-made games on Steam by 2028, I bet we can expect to get hit with more scams and lazy ripoffs, too. Oh, well. I hope all that slop tastes good.
P.S. It doesn't. Earlier this summer, we found out why so many game developers don't want to use generative AI.
