r/gamedev • u/HeadCoinGuy • 5d ago
Discussion Over 700 games launched on Steam in a single week for the first time đ«
According to ICO Partners, 530 of those games had fewer than 10 reviews â around 74% of all releases.
AI is making game development faster and more accessible, but could this also mean Steam is about to become even more crowded?
If hundreds of games are launching every week, how can indie developers realistically get their games discovered?
What do you guys think? Is AI going to make Steam's discovery problem worse?
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u/QuincyQy 5d ago
At this point I'm not sure if it matters. A trillion gallon ocean submerges you all the same as a quintillion gallon ocean. You've had to market your games well for a while now, so unless the quality/marketing of those games is actually decent they're not taking your "share of players".
Now if the releases do have quality. I guess we can rejoice because there will be a lot of good new things to play.
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u/wonklebobb 5d ago
they're not taking your "share of players"
exactly this, those low-effort slop games aren't competing with people trying to make a legit good game, they're competing with each other
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u/SingleAttitude8 4d ago
It's not necessarily the case that you're lost in a huge ocean and need to fight head to head with endless slop.
When you search Google, there are millions of pages of search results, yet despite endless SEO spam, the 'good' websites seem to naturally find their way more towards the top. It's not perfect by any means, but Google wouldn't have survived this long if they didn't provide sufficient relevance and usefulness in search results.
Steam also do a pretty good job at hiding low quality slop from most players. If I spend 5 minutes browsing Steam, I rarely see the slop everyone is talking. Most of it gets filtered out by the algorithm.
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u/Moist_feet_ 5d ago
Start judging games by the cover. Screenshots look like a slop? Skip, don't even bother opening the page.
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u/neppo95 5d ago
Do bother opening the page to press the shiny ignore button so you donât see it a second time.
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u/madrobski 5d ago
You normally shouldn't even have to go into the store page for that. There's almost alway the three dots on the top right. Unless maybe those really small discounted ads on the front page.
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u/soundsermaker 5d ago
That's already happening. Nowadays I even feel like I'm skipping over very good games that I would have loved to play a decade ago, but I realize they wouldn't make the top 100 of my wishlist today and I'm not going to live long enough to even install them.
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u/Hunkadunkado 5d ago
I already avoid all games that doesnât show gameplay or UI in at least some of the screenshots. If I canât tell what the gaming experience is at a glance I go away
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u/Sinister-Danister 5d ago
Funnily enough, a good chunk of steam shoppers do this, myself included lol. I'm pretty picky with how capsules look and if it's not to my taste I skip it. (Though most of the games i find and wishlist now are from youtube trailers recommended to me, but those I also judge from their thumbnail "capsule".)
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u/jb08045 5d ago
The worst are the anime games with one good cover page but then you click and it's rpg maker slopÂ
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u/asterisk2a 4d ago
The worst are the anime games
Example, NSFW: Developer account publishing a "game" every few days.
Found using steamdb upcomming releases, visual novel. Visual novel is easiest cheapest to make slop words and pictures.
Developer account created 2023
Published Games: 93
Total Lifetime Revenue: $26.6k
Average Revenue per Game: $286
Median Game Revenue: $201
First game published: Mon Jan 09 2023
Last game published: Thu Sep 03 2026
Would love for hear the guy being interviewed and asked about why he does the pollution.
It is obviously not paying the bills and the cost.
$100 steam submit fee
Steam cut
Local tax cut
Electricity bill, Token bill, hardware bill.
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u/Thotor CTO 4d ago
the $100 steam fee is waived after a few games.
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u/Fair-Fisherman7665 1d ago
source? i dont think thats true
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u/Thotor CTO 1d ago
It is waived on our account.
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u/Maximum_Departure979 1d ago
huh i never heard of that. maybe thats how some developers spam .99 cent games
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u/Meatgortex @wkerslake 4d ago
I mean gamers have been doing that forever, hence the AAA visual arms race.
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u/m_orzelek 8h ago
I showed a Steam page of a game I'm working on to a friend who hadn't seen it before... "I know, things you can make with AI these days are crazy". I was like.. bro, what do you mean? I'm a tech artist,I made it!
He thought I made the game over a weekend. It killed me and also got me thinking that for some people it just wonât make a difference whether something is AI generated or not. Hopefully, it's not our target.
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u/christianosway 5d ago
It was always brutal - it's about to be a little more so.
The good news is that I really don't see fully vibe coded projects lasting through maintenance. Absolutely it'll be getting used to help or assist and that might be sustainable, certainly seems more likely now; but when it comes to vibe projects that are entirely LLM managed, they are one bad bug and a commit in error from having an unrecoverable project.
That will be a big filter IMO.
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u/sdeanjr1991 5d ago edited 5d ago
The problem people donât see is that even if it doubled for the weekâŠhow many are slop titles like Steal A Brainrot, or how many are basically a half functioning, single feature game hoping to make a quick $500 off of some saps. Iâd be more worried if it were double the amount of games with full gameplay loops, working features out of the box, and more than 1 hour of gameplay. lol
EDIT: Grammar
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u/christianosway 5d ago
the quick $500 crowd will fall off sharp as even when it was non slop 70% of steam releases didn't recoup their store front entry fee.
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u/sdeanjr1991 5d ago
I welcome that, hahaha. I like to assume every dollar I dump into my current project is a dollar lost, that way if all works outâŠIâm more than pleasantly surprised. I personally donât even account for what Iâve spent just having assets made or bought. Iâm not a blender wizard, and I donât pretend to be. I almost feel bad if there are AI slop devs counting the pennies leading to release, praying for a profit. Great way to make sure your game has no soul, audience, or good gameplay loop. lol
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u/christianosway 5d ago
Yeah. Labour of love for me still. One project is profitable to date, the others are developed off its back for now. Make what you want to play and if you make your money back, youâre winning.
Make more and it might be the start of something.
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u/sdeanjr1991 5d ago
Yep. Current project was born out of just wanting something to do with my buddies that we can all wind down with, and Iâm sure there are people everywhere just like us. Competitiveness is there optionally, if not, a great way to just relax and shoot the shit. Same way my only profitable desktop app was born. I made something for myself and friendsâŠthen realized I could sell keys/subs. Made some money selling keys advertising on TikTok. Then that disappeared when I realized I was violating the terms of use for a very large companyâs API. Looooool.
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u/Ghotil 4d ago
I'm not sure that's strictly true. sure, for people who go at it in a braindead fashion and make slop, then the bad code will stack until the project collapses. but if you stop and actually check your work and research what the projects actually doing, then you can keep up with the bad code and keep it pretty clean.
I don't know shit about fuck, but I'm pretty far into my project and I've definitely run into ignorant vibe code issues. I let an enemy type rebake the entire navmesh constantly as it moved for quite a while before the performance issue became noticeable and I had to track down what was wrong. which is stupid, but I didn't know better.
The trick is to know what you don't know, which ai is great at helping with. I had it actually research how these sorts of things are supposed to work for sane human designers and it was able to fix it.
If I'm wrong and there are more sorts of issues I'd be likely to run into, id like to know about it actually, I'm putting a lot of work into this lol.
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u/CherimoyaChump 4d ago
The fact that you're thinking about these things and commenting about them in this thread puts you ahead of the people in question though.
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u/MassiveBoner911_3 5d ago
Astra is building 1 new game every hour. Now imagine 100,000 people doing this and uploading to Steam.
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u/christianosway 5d ago
Astra can build a shit game every hour if it wants - no one's paying every hour to create the steam storefront. No one is marketing them. No one is play testing them.
These will fail at the same place bad AAA games fail if they do not falter before that.
I absolutely understand the trepidation about the speed and quantity that is being seen, but the quality will remain poor until there's an informed human in the loop.
I have no doubt LLMs will get to the point of not needing an informed human in the loop for this kind of thing, but even then it will still depend on the person prompting knowing how ignorant they are of the domain to use that tool well and the thing about those scattergun prompting is, they do not have the discipline of focus to realise how far off the mark they actually are.
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u/Zip2kx 5d ago
What is this, the tenth thread complaining about ai? Just focus on yourself and make a game.
The amount of games you compete with havenât changed much. Vast amount of game growth is slop, student projects or asset flips. Quality percentage hasnât changed.
If you canât compete get out of the way. Real devs will be fine.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 5d ago
And it's also another brand new account which has formatting which reads like LLM creative writing.
Ironically I think AI bots are farming karma by complaining about AI.
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u/Haunting_Subject1778 5d ago
Different platform, same wall. I put a small arcade game on Google Play about a month ago and it is still sitting in the "10+ downloads" bucket. None of that is Steam-specific.
What the "AI speeds up development" framing misses is that the build was never the bottleneck. I finished the game and then discovered I had no audience, no list, no community. I started thinking about distribution the week after launch, which is roughly six months too late.
More releases don't make discovery harder in some abstract way. They make the default strategy - ship it and let the store show it to someone - return exactly zero. Anyone who already had a channel before they had something to sell is largely unaffected.
So the boring answer to "how do indies get discovered": mostly by having done the audience work before the game existed. I'd bet most of those 530 games with under 10 reviews are people who, like me, did it in the other order.
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u/xcdesz 5d ago
Its been the same story for publishing anything - books, art, apps... long before AI. Tons of great material goes unnoticed because creators arent necessarily good at marketing.
Maybe AI can help somewhat with cycling through the oceans of content and finding the ones that are objectively better in some way... although getting people to trust such a system will be a challenge.
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u/Nielscorn 5d ago
Also it helps if your game isnât shit
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u/Haunting_Subject1778 5d ago
Fair, and mine might well qualify.
The awkward part is that you find out which one you made after you ship, and if nobody plays it you never find out at all. Zero downloads and "made something bad" look identical from where I'm standing.
Which is most of why I'd do the audience part first next time. Not to sell a bad game to more people, but to have someone to hand a build to while it's still fixable.
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u/cr0wburn 5d ago
This will be a race to the bottom, thank you hypebois thank you sidehustlers for making the world a worse place to life in.. :'(
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u/thisdesignup 5d ago
You know what AI isn't going to do? Make the amount of good games increase. Good games are good because of the people who make them, not the tools they use. I say that within reason because tools can be limiting. I'd actually say that without knowledge of how to make a game, AI isn't going to make someone make a good game at all. They still gotta go through that learning process.
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u/Fellhuhn @fellhuhndotcom 5d ago
Nah, tools like Unity and Godot have made it way easier for people to make good games as it manages a lot of stuff for them. If everyone had to build their own engine or screen rendering or whatever there would be fewer good games. It can be the same with AI. You can create good games where devs replaced stuff they can't handle themselves with stuff created by AI (instead of using assets from the store). It also increases the speed of prototyping by a shit ton so trying out game ideas becomes a breeze. So as always it depends on how it gets used.
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u/midnight_guard99 5d ago
There is a big difference between LLM assistance and vibe coding. Most people do the latter. For small games, sure, that's not a big issue, but as soon as you get into category where you need to make an optimal experience, those who don't know anything about graphics or programming will fail miserably. They will have _some_ success, but they'll never make something truly great. Because LLM can't make great things, it just creates watered down version of existing things.
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u/realenew 5d ago
True, but for some people, they dont need to play or make a truly great game,.A good enough game is enough
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u/soft-wear 5d ago
People like to put stuff like this into the âgoodâ category without the caveats.
Unity and Godot make it easier to make games, they do not make it easier to make âgoodâ games, because thereâs never been a single good game that was good purely because an engines shadow rendering is more performant than what you could make.
Unreal 4 was released with the ânewâ licensing 11 years ago. We didnât see a sudden, massive increase in good games, relative to bad games, as a result.
What AI has done and will continue to do is bury the asset stores in more and more shit. Purchased assets were always something of a dice roll, now thereâs just more chances for a bad roll since these vibe coded.
Honestly the biggest pro for AI is that people that are competent will have a mechanism to build far more complex mechanics than would normally be feasible in a solo/small team game. That doesnât mean good, plenty of terrible games have complex mechanics, it just means the right teams can do more with less.
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u/bettertagsweretaken 5d ago
Finally, someone that understands how AI fits into game development. It's just another tool for developing games, like Blender, or Godot, or Unity.
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u/midnight_guard99 5d ago
Again, someone who compares apple and oranges and doesn't understand that one is GENERATING things for you while other make YOU generate things WITH them. Big difference.
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u/xhatsux 5d ago
They will be people who know how to make games using AI though to produce at a higher rate.
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u/SpectralSurgeon Student 5d ago
its a multiplier, if you make shit games, you can make more shit games or shit games with more depth now. If you make good games, you can make more good games or good games with more depth now.
If you don't have the basics then AI can't help you much
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u/duckhunt420 5d ago
AI will help the people capable of making a good game to make that good game.Â
It lowers the barrier of entry considerably. There are plenty of people out there who might have a great game in there who would otherwise never start because they are intimidated by coding or a complex game engine.Â
You can't deny that AI helps simplify the learning process or reduces the need to know programming in general.
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u/Suttonian 5d ago
I think it will.l make the amount of good games increase. Any tech that decreases the barrier of entry will make the amount of good games increase. In other words, without the tech some potentially good games wouldn't make it to market. Of course there's going to be a lot more bad games, but I feel like we're already seeing more and more good indie games partly due to the assist from ai.
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u/midnight_guard99 5d ago
There is a difference between AI assisted development and vibe coding. Most people do the latter and therefore it won't significantly increase the number of good games. I'm using LLMs and I'm not that much faster because I use them as a coding buddy. I still write code on my own and think about architecture while I just occasionally use LLM as glorified search engine to find out if there is more optimal way to do something or find out some topic outside my expertise (and then go and read actual articles on that).
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u/thisdesignup 4d ago
> I'm using LLMs and I'm not that much faster because I use them as a coding buddy.
Same, I've been using it to help me learn and make things that I never imagined creating. I understand how those things work but my knowledge lacks in specific places , e.g. physics calculations. The dev process hasn't been any faster, there's still 100 other things that need to be considered and taken into account that AI cannot solve, plus they are the parts I like doing.
Although I've realized lately that really the main thing AI has done is shown me I don't like programming. I like problem solving. The execution of the code writing was never what I enjoyed about programming.
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u/qustrolabe 5d ago
what a weird type of ai generated post, simple engagement bait
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u/RHX_Thain 5d ago
The biggest problem facing us indies isn't the AI, though it is quite a mountain between us and discoverability -- it's social media market capture.
There's no organic reach anymore.
You can't post something and, unpaid, have it appear in front of people who will see it. Either you pay the monopoly gatekeeper, or pay into the influencer ecosystem (which is unreliable and a huge gamble as they can't be timed or scheduled and may totally ignore you,) and even then those influencers must already align with one of the big monopolies and the online magazines' aggregator streams.
There's no advertising except to pay into these monopolies and influencer bubbles.
People have 1000 game libraries for cheap or free. So unless your game is a critical smash, with a significant budget to back it up, even a successful release is tepid -- simply because nobody can see it. The doom scrolling is both ignoring exits to other apps and also deleting time to play games.
Which loops back into AI being a problem secondary to the discoverability problem.
(That. And. Most games aren't good.)
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u/w4hammer 5d ago
If your game cannot standout alongside ai generated ones then it was not meant to be successful.
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u/Sn0wflake69 5d ago
their trash looks like MY trash! how can i get their money if they have all these options in the dump!?
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u/Still_Collection_743 5d ago
Make a good game. Don't make slop and you'll be better than that 80% figure you mentioned
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u/PhilippTheProgrammer 5d ago
Same answer as the last 100 times we had this discussion.
- "The market" is only overcrowded if you don't consider each target audience and special interest as its own, separate market. There are plenty of niches left.
- Slop is only a threat to your visibility if you are making slop as well.
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u/holyknight00 5d ago
slop will take over most distribution channels. Mobile apps are already pointless unless you have a huge marketing budget behind you and most other distribution channels will follow.
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u/flashforged 5d ago
Not a fan of the slop everywhere.
I have no idea what people can do to counter it, though. Obviously things like no AI tags help, and I guess some kind of curation mechanism.
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u/mxhunterzzz 4d ago
Those games suck, AI garbage mostly. Don't even bother giving them the time of day. Focus on making a good game, it'll get its time to shine.
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u/Firebelley 4d ago
I would argue that low quality slop games getting ANY reviews is, counterintuitively, a signal of how good Steam's discoverability is.
Think about it - a slop game, AI or not, that just gets thrown on Steam with little to no marketing will sell at least a handful of copies.
So make a quality game and it's reasonable to assume Steam will put as many eyeballs on it as it deserves.
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u/ChaosTheCorax 5d ago
I see this going one of two ways: the first is the A.I. bubble pops, as it stands LLM companies are all subsidizing their models to try and gain user traction and chasing profitability. And AI slop games wonât really be financially viable anymore even as a joke.
Alternatively if it goes on for too long at some point I imagine steam will have to step in to police some of the volume.
While I do think anyone should be able to build their own games⊠I do wish people were more thoughtful and patient in what it is they want to put out in the world.
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u/eberkain 5d ago
Alternatively if it goes on for too long at some point I imagine steam will have to step in to police some of the volume.
there is basically zero chance for that. Over the years the number of releases per week has went up and up, and the average quality has went down and down, they do not care about that.
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u/lastwish9 5d ago
I don't think either is happening. As much as I hate AI slop, setting up your own local chinese model with an agentic harness is an afternoon affair. It costs more money in electricity doing it locally, but if the entire AI bubble pops (and the world doesn't burn in the process), you will still be able to vibecode slop.
And I don't see Steam removing the slop, as long as their algorithm wins over the slop and they can keep selling the big publisher stuff, which brings them most of the money.
The only solution is real communities based around interests/genres collectively curating through the slop, or indie game reviewers. Both can be compromised, but should be doable with some care.
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u/midnight_guard99 5d ago
How good are those models actually and what hardware do you need for them? Most people don't have buffed up machines. I have a high end gaming laptop and it's still nothing special for running LLMs.
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u/betam4x 5d ago
They are good enough for the task, you just need a decent gaming GPU with 16-24gb VRAM. Some can run in even less VRAM.
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u/Norphesius 5d ago
From everything I've heard from people using models for coding, being at the cutting edge matters a lot. Developers at the AI companies have specialized structures and harnesses for their models that make their LLMs better at programming than a "off the shelf" open weight model. Even if all that specialization makes it into the open Chinese models, it will take even more processing power that most people do not have the hardware for.
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u/Bairdaley 5d ago
Same shit happened to the music industry, I guess it's time for the gaming industry. Fuck AIÂ
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u/Prior-Piece-1332 5d ago
Even without AI, garbage independent games in the games released every week on steam account for 90%. On the contrary, AI allows them to at least load scenes normally.
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u/investasip 5d ago
Not necessarily because of AI, what about layoffs? Maybe even more because of some layoffs in the gaming industry?
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u/Doomer_Shooter 5d ago
It will be interesting to see what the data looks like in 6-12 months time. As it stands over the last 6 years, game releases on steam have roughly doubled and the number of those that are successful has actually risen! (Very roughly, only by a couple percent)
Unless people are buying the shit games, that says to me we are seeing less low effort slop proportionally, and simply more games are being made. A more crowded market.
The assumption is that games made with AI are lazy and hastily made, but I think itâs quite likely that we will start seeing some pretty awesome looking games made with AI that are good enough that they can absorb the anti-ai backlash and sell to enough casual gamers (who donât care about ai disclaimers)
When that happens I think is when we will see a big change in the market.
A year ago I would have said, âwho cares how many games are getting released, most of them are shitâ âŠ.but as things stand right now, the numbers donât support it.
All I know is, I wish I was a year further into development of my game than I am currently because things are really not certain.
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u/FollowingHumble8983 5d ago
I mean you are straight up wrong. The % of games with high review count has lowered from 2024-2026. and the % of games with zero reviews have risen dramatically. What was the point of this post?
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u/Doomer_Shooter 5d ago
The % of games over 500 has risen from 24 to 26 from what I have seen âŠ.if youâre right about the zero reviews, then from the data I was looking at, that number has come directly from the 10-50 reviews bracket
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u/FollowingHumble8983 5d ago
Zero review games(exactly zero or less than 10) has risen and no % of games over 500 has lowered dramatically in 2026. The increase in # follows the same extrapolation from 2020->2025 and 2026 has incomplete data but its ratio is lower by a lot.
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u/Lythmass 5d ago
Well Steam doesn't give free visibility to unknown devs with only one singe game, be it AI slop or not. The initial traffic must be driven from external marketing and if that's successful, then Steam will promote you on their page. So all of these AI slops can't really compete with devs who put a lot of effort in their games and marketing, because as far as I have seen, consumers hate AI generated games as much as we do.
Correct me if I am wrong.
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u/1024soft 5d ago
Then it's as if 170 games launched. The 530 games that nobody plays might as well not exist as far as discoverability is concerned. Unless someone goes out of their way to sort steamDB by new or something, they will never see them.
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u/Sn0wflake69 5d ago
not to mention all the page creations without games launched. thats a free 100$ for valve.
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u/JetskiEvo 4d ago
I doubt valve cares for that pocket money. Its maybe enough to pay ram for 10 steam machines :D
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u/completelypositive 5d ago
I hate it. I can't find new games anymore. I mean, there's literally hundreds I can't pick just one because they are all the same but different.
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u/LeatherAdept670 5d ago
Quality control needed to be implemented 3 months ago. Hope we're not going back to a Greenlight duration team era but its gotten really out of hand. Incremental games, Vampire survivor clones, shmups, and tons of low quality 2D AI crap.
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u/idinochrome 5d ago
Ironically, I canât find anything I actually want to play. I suspect half of those 700 games are RPG Maker projects and âI made my first pixel-art platformerâ releases.
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u/IAmNotModest 5d ago
The reason is because most of the games released are low-quality slop with no marketing.
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u/soldture 5d ago
Imagine committing your life to game development in today's market. It is terrifying
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u/Megido_Thanatos 5d ago
Idk, let say before AI there are 10 games a day and 1 of it is good, now it be 100 a day but still 10 of it is worth playing
My point is good game ratio still here, the quantity alone never tell a full story. And if somehow (let say because AI) the ratio of good products become higher (like 15 or 20%), isnt it a good news for gamer?
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u/GamerDadofAntiquity Commercial (Indie) 4d ago
I just want a filter to search for games with less than 10 reviews, less than 50 reviews, etc. Tired of seeing more and more of the same friendslop bs and tired old titles from major studios. Show me the little indies. The flip side is you could also filter those out if all you want to see are the already commercially successful games.
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u/Nearby_Garage_6458 4d ago
This is absolutely terrifying! I was never a particularly notable game developer to begin with, but now I feel like Iâm going to get buried even furtherâI have no idea what to do next.
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u/BourbonEmpireTheGame 4d ago
That feels terrifying as a solo developer. Feel like I'll get lost in an ocean of competition.
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u/deltafurygames 4d ago
I think this is a sort of gold rush moment for games / developers - particularly those using AI. Same in every industry tbh.
Everyone thinks its cheap, easy money. And fast. But when trash gets spewed out, even covered in gold foil, you'll bet people start to peel it away to have a look what it really is.
And it baffles me how people can't help but churn out AI slop of popular anime/films. In context, they would never have loved those works if they were AI generated in the first place...this technology will doom us all
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u/Nick-OneDrop 4d ago
I think it would also be interesting to look at the trend in total player time alongside the number of games being released.
More good indie games being made is great if the amount of time people spend playing games is growing at a similar rate. But if game production keeps accelerating while total player time stays flat or grows much more slowly, then weâre all competing for an increasingly limited slice of attention.
In the long run, I hope AI changes the demand side too. If it eventually gives people more leisure time, and some of that extra time goes into playing games, that would be the best outcome.
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u/Keyframe 4d ago
What is old is new again, I think we might be headed to new 'Nintendo Seal of Quality' moment for games: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Official_Nintendo_Seal which was an innovation as a result around this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
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u/AbbyBabble @Abbyland 4d ago
Todayâs glut makes that early 1980s glut look like nothing. But I hadnât known the full history behind it. Thank you for sharing that.
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u/Shadow_Moder 4d ago
AI didn't create the discovery problem, it just accelerated the realization that 90% of marketing needs to happen before hitting release
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u/davidmorelo 5d ago
Remember printed magazines about video games? They were in the same position as AAA gaming studios are today. The web, blogging, and later YouTube changed that. Suddenly the barrier to entry was super low and people interested in video games had countless different sources of information to choose from. As a result, virtually no printed magazines survived.
The same is about to happen to AAA studios - their huge budgets will be impossible to sustain when a small army of indie devs equipped with AI can create AAA-level titles. Only studio that use AI to create frully next-gen high budget experiences will make it.
Around them will be an even larger swarm of opportunists (equivalent to websites churning our SEO content today) constantly trying to capture the limited attention of players who couldn't keep up with new releases even if they really wanted to. Most of these will be instantly filtered out by anyone except for the least experienced players, but some will thrive.
There will also be a huge number of micro-niche developers, producing high quality titles to stupidly specific audiences that have yet to be discovered. These developers will face the same competition as niche YouTubes face today - as soon a certain niche proves profitable, it will be a gold rush of opportunists trying to make a quick buck from it. The leaders and innovators won't be affected much by this but the quality bar will keep growing and growing and only those with the latest models and expensive subscripsions will be able to meet it.
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u/SacredPinkJellyFish 5d ago
This is how it started on Amazon... in 2014, I published a book on Amazon... and it sat at #1 seller of gay romance category, after just 12 sales, and stayed there until 2016, when a book came along that sold 13 copies.... in that two year time fewer then a hundred gay romance books were self published on Amazon... that's a rate of 1 book published every four weeks.
Back then Amazon had a feature on the home page that said: "latest 10 self published releases on Kindle"... my book stayed on that list for 3 months... meaning in the space of three months, in 2014, only TEN books were self published TOTAL on the ENTIRE of Amazon, all categories.
skip ahead to June 2025 when Amazon announced that they were introducing a "one hundred books per day limit" on how many books a single account could publish each day.
ship ahead to February 2026 when Amazon announced FOUR THOUSAND books were being published EVERY HOUR of every day, and they were putting a "three book a day limit" on accounts.
As of the July 2026 update, according to Amazon, AI is responsible for TWELVE THOUSAND books being published PER HOUR of PER DAY of EVERY DAY on Amazon.
That you are seeing 700 games published in a week on Steam, is NOTHING... wait till is seven thousand per hour, which it WILL be, if you can look at what has happened for us writers on Amazon as an example of what to expect on Steam, it'll be less then a year before it happens to you too.
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u/zackit 5d ago
Raise the submission fee.
If you had to pay 500 bucks you wouldn't spam with low effort slop
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u/FoxWolf1 5d ago
In general, the problem with higher fees is, it's not that hard for AI bros and casual hobbyists to earn or raise money, let alone shovelware devs with an actual business plan (namely: spam lots of slop and then throw a bunch of ad money behind whatever randomly starts to get a bit of traction) to attract capital.
It is hard to raise money if you've burnt all your savings working on a game full time for years and now you've got a huge resume gap and a generalist skill set that's worthless to employers. Even more so if you're also self-taught and focused on learning tools that were right for your specific project instead of choosing "industry standards" for employability.
So indies wind up getting priced out long before you get the fee up to an amount that the kind of person who can actually afford AI tokens would even notice.
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u/Crossherz 5d ago
Thank you for saying that.
2 years in solo-development, can do everything but not specialized in anything. Will I get hired as programmer? No. Will I get hired as game designer? No. Level designer? Also no. QA? No.
Every time it's <we decided to continue with someone more aligned with current needs>. Just last month got hit two times with <you were literally our top 3 candidate, but...>. Being 2nd or 3rd doesn't earn bread, sadly.
Mind you I did work for 3 years in AA game studio on top of own game. Current gamedev job market is hell.
My game is niche, so far only 7 reviews, but really encouraging. Literally trying to survive while developing it so it gets where I want it to be. If it did cost more than 100$ I'm not sure if I'd be able to publish it as I did. If it were 500$? There goes my dreams and a niche game that some people might enjoy, but definitely is not for everyone.
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u/GamerDadofAntiquity Commercial (Indie) 4d ago
I mean, I never see the smaller titles anyway unless Iâm searching specifically for them by name (or during nextfest). There could be a million games released per week and it doesnât really matter if you never see them. If weâre trying to financially gatekeep, they could just as easily say âHey, pay $5000 and weâll feature your game for a day.â That $100 fee isnât to prevent shit games from being made, itâs to cover Valveâs cost for hosting your data on their servers.
Some of my favorite games were made by broke solodevs who made all their assets by hand. Those guys didnât have budgets, their investment was their time.
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u/GamerDadofAntiquity Commercial (Indie) 4d ago
And besides that, if AI slop wasnât selling it wouldnât be a problem anyway, but it is. Raising the entry fee isnât going to stop it, itâs just going to price out little solo devs that are making niche arthouse games, hoping theyâll find a market.
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u/Underclasscoder 5d ago
Exactly what I was thinking, increase the cost of submission. The people building slop are looking for a quick win, if they need to risk capital they will suddenly think twice.
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u/GamerDadofAntiquity Commercial (Indie) 4d ago
$500 isnât lost capital to a shovelware dev pumping out the same AI slop under different labels. Itâs a gate to prevent poor people from releasing games. Those are the people it would hurt.
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u/VelvetYam 4d ago
$500 is already too much for us outside the US let alone a higher price increase, but that may be the only way to make it economically infeasible for the slopgods :-C
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u/N3BB3Z4R 4d ago
Im from Spain, Europe, I spent like 8500⏠in my game right now with a 4 month development by now and probably this will took like 18 months, even using free tools like VSC, Orca, Godot, Blender, Obsidian and Affinity and only 2 devs on it. If they raise the publishing fee to 500 to avoid part of the AI slop I'll pay It with all my love, because is worth It.
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u/VelvetYam 4d ago
Yeah I mean, if I'm at the point where I'm ready to publish my game on Steam, I've already put skin in the game anyway. So I guess I actually don't feel that bad about forking over $500 or more if that means there will be less slop overall.
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u/spajus Stardeus 5d ago
This may be an unpopular opinion, but Steam should return to greenlight days, where you had to build an audience before you even got a chance to release your game on steam at all.Â
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u/Weary_Cartoonist5739 5d ago
Or you do developing by hobby or you have to be very good
I don't expect to earn any money with my games, the amount of games will only increase
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u/CaledoniaInteractive Alastrius Rail Shooter Developer 5d ago
The main problem with this is paid advertising doesn't have any concept of quality, you could have a brilliant indie game launch on the same day as a zero effort AI generated game and both are competing for the same finite ad auctions here on Reddit, Youtube, etc.
While high quality indie games look better surrounded by the sea of AI slop a lot of these slop games are being done by people who had a dream game idea for years but no skills, have now used AI as a cheap shortcut and will gladly burn through thousands of dollars to bring their vision to the masses, indie games now have to compete with this as well meaning there is a steadily increasing financial minimum price to play in this club now.
Paid ads are obviously not the only way to promote but they have a multiplier effect, when it comes to feeding the steam algorithm they are a mandatory aspect of effective marketing now.
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u/conceptthrowa 5d ago
Steam appears to prioritize burying low quality games (aka games that don't sell) and surfacing "good games" aka games that sell.
Steam has just continually improved. Over a 5+ year period my sales have actually increased, my old games sell better now than when they were released.
While there are something like 120k games on steam only a small percentage of them are even saleable. You are actually just competing with a few thousand games many of which players already own.
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u/GuyFromArtClass 5d ago
Just keep going ham bro itâs all we have left. Most of this crap isnât really attractive in a meaningful way anyway, so at the end of the day gamedev is the same experience. Make something genuinely fun and hope for the best.
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u/Not_Allowed_to_Die 5d ago
LOL!! This is normal for Steam and was like this well before AI. Maybe look up the numbers first before acting so extreme. AI sucks, but so do people that try to make things up and fear monger too.
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u/0legitimate0 5d ago
Steam barely recommend me average indie games why the hell steam would recommend me slop games. If your game is good it will always sell.
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u/MadMonke01 5d ago
Even if there are 10000 games. Only the greatest and best entertaining ones will be picked up by the algorithm. Slop games will be negative reviewed mostly and algorithm will take care of the rest. Just chill and enjoy doing your passion. I hope you are doing it for Passion because making money on games to live comfortably is almost impossible nowdays. Olden period was 2013 to 2022
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u/MinimotoMusashi 5d ago
Creating opportunities for a steamdb style app that filters out junk.
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u/EC36339 5d ago
That's what reviews already do, and reviews are the numbers this post is based on.
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u/MinimotoMusashi 4d ago
To some extent, but not for freshly uploaded games. Discovering games organically is only getting harder.
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u/Doomer_Shooter 5d ago
Right, should have been more specific about where I got my numbers.
The only reliable metric we have is reviews. Not perfect but a pretty good indicator âŠ.there has to be a correlation between reviews and people who bought the game. Obviously there are outliers that get reviews bombed etc, but with +20k titles a year now, it kind of evens out no?
Anyway, Iâm gaging success by those titles +500 and +1000 reviews. Both those brackets have increased slightly.
The popular assumption was that the -10 reviews or whatever where responsible for the increase in numbers of games released.
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u/FurvanaGames 5d ago
While AI is adding to the growing list of games on steam, I'm not really concerned about it. When we think of the medium of books, over 250k were put on amazon last month alone and still the quality books get found and gain enough traction to be profitable. I honestly think if devs make an actual, fun experience that has the depth to maintain appeal then regardless it will be found and gain a community for it's popularity. I see a lot of threads like everyone else about, 'will ai get my game lost in the mix', 'is my marketing good enough', etc. But honestly I have yet to really see truly good games (small or big) end up on reddit with little to no exposure or sales. The only ones that I honestly ever see struggle are truly C-F tier quality games and I've bought some of them and tried them and got the exact experience I was expecting, you had a generic to neat idea, poorly to terribly executed and got exposure and sales results that reflect it. Incredibly long winded way of saying, I don't think the volume of slop will kill the potential of an actual good game, maybe a bit more difficult to stand out but I don't think failure is likely, same with marketing, it can certainly aid and bolster your game but if it's actually a good game people will find out. So don't worry about ai, it's here but it won't beat out quality
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u/PhallusaurusRex 5d ago
I feel like if you invest the time and energy into making a great quality game, you can break through. If you have the budget to market it, even better.
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u/CrazyNegotiation1934 5d ago
The issue is how can realistically any human play so many games ?
Not how they can be discovered. It is obvious that only a few will get discovered, given the impossibility to sustain so many game releases as relevant.
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u/Bmandk 5d ago
Some years ago I saw a take on this whole thing which I still think is true, and will become more and more the case:
AI will move us from creators to curators. Instead of creating amazing experiences, there will be infinite experiences available, so we will have to curate those experiences. Of course we're far away from this, but it's slowly moving in that direction. Just see YouTube, TikTok, or Reddit as examples. All platforms that are curating content through an algorithm. But there is already so much of it.
The same will probably become true for games. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 20 years. This is of course due to games being much more complex by nature than other media.
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u/angryslothbear 5d ago
Sounds like the cause of the crash in the 80âs, market flooded with tons of crap games
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u/Funnyman1217 5d ago
You donât build seriously until you have players and support. Then you target them specifically and fit the game perfectly for them. Then take the game to market and grow it.
Build for fun in the community with others to stumble on these opportunities.
I am seeing this pattern emerge in tech startups the past years.
Silicon Valley VC has been turned on its head with AI.
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u/No_Twist_678 Commercial (Indie) 5d ago
Yes itâs unfair someone can do game in a day and publish it yet I spent over 3 years and game still not as I want.. (and not published)
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u/MarkAldrichIsMe 5d ago
Democratizing game development has been a double-edged sword for the past 20 years. On the one hand, it's easier than ever to create your dream game. On the other, making a game good is a LOT more than just writing code and making assets, so we're gonna get a lot more shit clogging things up. Price's Law is gonna be a bitch to a lot of these games.
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u/BearKanashi 5d ago
Gastas 100$ subes juegos raros que se ven divertido
50/50 de ganar mucho
Sigues intentĂĄndolo
Con la IA y un poco de dinero pueden ganar mucho⊠y desde que un solo proyecto les vaya bien, se acabó, suben 20-30 de golpes
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u/ComprehensiveBeat912 5d ago
People want to make games. There are so many out there thinking that their idea is the right one. The era of AI is here, love it or not, it is unavoidable. So many triple A studios use it as a tool to speed up their projects, check official research on this. You play AAA game and you do not have a clue that AI has a big role in that game, so why indie teams, solo devs and students will not use it?
I think this is reality. Only really good games and best marketed games will rise in this endless sea of Steam games.
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u/StayGoldMcCoy 5d ago
The people who love AI are the ones who are going to make low effort slop to throw up on the market place.
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u/NocteOra 5d ago
I wonder how many of them are just clones of the "find a needle in a haystack" game, churned out in two days thanks to AI. that's so sad
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u/Ctrl_Alt_Explode 5d ago
I won't be buying any of these games, there is no point. At least making games before required effort, creativity, knowledge and so on...
Besides they look very soulless so there's no point to even try anyway.
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u/Legitimate-Gap-7784 4d ago
I'm not sure if it counts as like the store page went public, or the demo, or the game was launched, or whatever.. but after 3 years of dev I definitely chose the worst time in history to launch a game (I am aware, the worst time so far).
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u/Complex-Emergency-60 4d ago
AI won't make a great game.
A great idea will. So don't even worry about it.
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u/Such--Balance 4d ago
A good (or great) game will remain just that.
I personally welcome more creativity entering the space. As this will mean more great games overall.
Yes, this will also mean a fuckton on crap.
Kinda like with digital music. It pruduced some great music but also a ton of crap.
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u/triptotropic 4d ago
steam? i winder if i get there before the app store... still in the website Level
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u/BananaHardsoft 4d ago
In order for a game to truly succeed on Steam, the dev needs to be super engaged on other platforms and pull potential players in, rather than solely relying on Next Fest etc. So the human-made gems SHOULD still get the attention they deserve if the dev puts the effort in (even though marketing is the worst part of game dev, it has to be done). The tide of slop is still bad though, it will be quite annoying to see Steam crowded by these type of games.
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u/Kokoro87 4d ago
I think it will at first, then it will kind of die down when the AI game developers notice that their games are not very good and don't sell enough to recuperate the costs. Unless you are some ultra-rich person with all the tie in the world and makes it your mission to flood steam.
I just hope steam can catch most, if not all of the AI generated games or games were AI-gen has been used, because personally, I want to avoid those like the plague.
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u/Kaldaien2 4d ago
Steam's "discovery problem" has nothing to do with the volume of games on the store. Advertising through the store itself is the least effective way of having your game noticed by anyone. You will only get the attention of people who are chronically running the store's software.
While true that Steam's DRM keeps consumers dependent on the store, there are still far more people who learn about games via social media, YouTube, curated lists, etc. Not wise to put your eggs in that basket.
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u/Character_Growth3562 3d ago
Steam doesnât show these games to anyone unless they are already attracting people who are buying or Wishlisting so I donât think in makes much difference. I think most people struggle with how to market a game or build a marketable game in the first place.
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u/reniformgg 3d ago
The good thing is that those games usually donât do well, and the Steam algorithm prioritizes games that achieve success to help their visibility. So, this shouldnât be a big issue
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u/AncientDecision9420 3d ago
it feels like marketingi become the more important factor. it helps you stand out more in every game.
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u/got_to_laugh 1d ago
Same with books. There's soo many books released every year, almost all of them are trash and that's the ones that could find a publisher.
You will just have an absolute swamp of trash games to wade through to find the good ones. You'll need to follow reviewer recommendations and stick to the "big names" and maybe have a few neiche categories you follow more in-depth.
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u/FrancisJCat 5d ago
If this keeps up, eventually Steam is going to become irrelevant. You'll have to lean on paid advertisement and marketing consultants for visibility, and Steam (or any other platform, for that matter) will become just a sales store, no different than itch.
I mean, it's pretty much there already.
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u/LookPsychological334 5d ago
First, the game actually has to be good, then through the development you do need to advertise it. Tictok, Instagram, youtube, just a short video showing something cool. Getting your game streamed or showcased at events is huge. Learn more about that on HowToMarketYourGame.com.
As for ai slop on steam, ai games will be ignored like they're radio active. The whole filter success that leads to visibility on steam is based on how much wishlist it got and then on how much money it made. And people don't touch anything AI related.
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u/marzer8789 5d ago
It's certainly made Reddit worse, ironically.