If you're in the mood to try new games, the Steam Next Fest is here now. There's just one catch - there are a lot of demos this year, way more than when this event happened in June, and a lot of them involve a heavy amount of AI assets.
Steam Next Fest is Valve's twice-annual digital preview event, where developers put up demos of their games in hopes you'll check them out and add a few to your wish list. Since it started in summer 2021, the number of early builds you can access has increased dramatically, from hundreds to thousands.
That's what you want, because it proves that people enjoy the concept and that it's serving its intended purpose. But AI ripoffs are now ruining the fun for everyone. There are 7,017 demos publicly listed for this Steam Next Fest, a little under twice what we saw in June, and current trends dictate a lot of them are just vibe-coded clones of existing projects.
The Needle In a Haystack debacle mere weeks ago demonstrates the issues: devs make a game centered on a particular conceit, and then numerous copycats show up, all clearly using AI-generated assets and put together extremely quickly to cash in on a trend. One developer, Alliance Arts, decided to back out of Next Fest because of fears Drunken Goddess Reflux would be copied in a similar fashion.
It feels like we're watching the dead internet theory in motion, where digital stores are just slush pits of generative AI releases copying each other ad nauseum. This is unhelped by perspectives like that of Brandon Stirrup, a business development manager at Microsoft, who believes he can vibe code a game that could eventually be marketable in mere hours.
Even browsing through just now, I found several games from developers that appear to have been listed only recently, and whose assets, whether the cover art or in-game, certainly look like they've been AI-generated. I would rather not have to wonder if what I'm about to play is generative slop, but for now, it seems like we all have to. Be careful out there, but do have a look through the fest if you have the patience.
