Approximately half of all newly released games on Steam in October were created with the help of artificial intelligence, marking a major milestone for the digital marketplace and sparking pushback from parts of the gaming community. This trend highlights the growing adoption of generative AI by developers to produce code, art assets, voice lines, and other game elements.
Rise of AI in Game Releases
The statistics were uncovered by a Reddit user named Ploz, who analyzed Steam’s publicly available data to track how many newly launched games relied on AI. This tracking was made possible by Valve’s AI disclosure policy, introduced in January 2024 to increase developer transparency, which requires creators to state if they used AI in their games. A Valve representative did not respond to a request for comment from CNET.
When the policy first launched, only 1.4% of new games used AI. That figure climbed to 13.4% by the end of 2024, reached 24% by the end of 2025, and now stands at 49.9%. These figures specifically cover games using AI for player-facing content like artwork, sound, and dialogue, and do not include backend tasks like coding and bug fixes. A Google Cloud survey from August 2025 indicated that 87% of developers use AI for backend work.
How Developers Use AI
According to Ploz, artwork is the most common application of AI in game development, appearing in 63% of disclosures. Text and translations accounted for 30%, followed by music at 21%, code at 16%, and voices at 7%. About a quarter of developers also utilized AI for their Steam store pages and marketing materials.
Roughly 3% of developers integrated AI directly into game mechanics. For example, the driving simulator Teach My Little Sister How to Drive uses AI to interpret voice commands and generate the sister’s responses. The development team, Easy Fox, reportedly pays $1,000 daily to cover operating costs for a public demo, forcing them to take out a loan.
Development tools have expanded significantly, with the Unity 6 engine offering AI code assistance and asset generation. Anthropic’s Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and GitHub Copilot are widely used by smaller developers to build entire games rapidly.
Reception and Industry Impact
Many games featuring AI disclosures are categorized by gamers as “slop”—a derogatory term for derivative titles that heavily rely on generative AI. Data shows that 47% of new games with fewer than 10 reviews have an AI disclosure, while 68% of games from developers who released more than 10 titles in a year included one. Conversely, only 17% of newly released games with over 1,000 reviews included an AI disclosure, indicating that players still favor traditional games.
Major studios, including Epic Games, EA, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and PlayStation Studios, declined to comment when contacted by CNET, leaving the scale of AI use among large developers unclear. CNET Managing Editor David Lumb noted that digital storefronts have long struggled to moderate low-quality games and copycats.
Valve maintains a hands-off approach, with Tom Giardino telling developers they must grow their games through personal creativity, while stating the company refuses to act as gatekeepers for developer tools. Epic Games holds a similar stance, with CEO Tom Sweeney calling AI usage logical for handling mundane tasks. In contrast, Itch.io actively removes AI slop and allows users to filter AI content out of search results.
Some companies are taking steps to curb AI cloning, such as Anthropic updating Claude Opus 5.5 to prevent it from generating copies of existing games, though CNET testing showed similar titles can still be created with creative prompting.
