Zara Reyes: Hi, welcome back to my ongoing emotional crisis about platform curation.
Cole Bryant: Oh no. What happened.
Zara Reyes: Picture it: October 19th, Steam Next Fest opens, 8,011 demos. Someone boots it up, wants to find a game for the weekend — and more than one in three of those games is AI-disclosed. SteamDB's numbers: 36% this October, up from 20% in June. In four months.
Cole Bryant: Wait — 36%? That's not — bro, that's not a niche thing anymore, that's basically the main texture of the event.
Zara Reyes: Kotaku called it 'an ocean of AI garbage and slop.' Around October 20th, day two of the fest. 'A massive disaster and a grim look at the future.' Those are their words and I think they were being restrained.
Cole Bryant: Okay that is a sentence. 'Grim look at the future.'
Zara Reyes: And no but here's what's actually wild — Valve already built the disclosure mandate. Devs have to tag AI use. Valve has all of it in their backend. They will not give users a filter. No consumer-facing tool, no update to the Steam Discovery Queue, no public statement. They built the rule and they buried the lever.
Cole Bryant: So they did the transparency thing and then made it completely unusable on purpose?
Zara Reyes: Lowkey I think they did, yeah — but okay, pump the brakes for a second because I want to make sure we're not pinning this entirely on AI.
Cole Bryant: No — wait, think about it this way. Next Fest used to be like a farmers market. Two hundred stalls, you could browse everything in an afternoon. Now imagine eight thousand stalls appeared overnight and a third of them are selling the same three items in different packaging. That's not a market anymore, that's a logistics crisis.
Zara Reyes: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is: who built all eight thousand stalls?
Cole Bryant: No, Kotaku actually flagged this. More games were added to Steam in 2026 year-to-date than in all of 2025. All of 2025. They called it a 'depressing milestone.' And IGN connected that directly to Claude Opus 5.5 — like, specifically that model — as the thing that turbocharged decompilation and rapid game generation right before Next Fest submissions closed.
Zara Reyes: Claude Opus 5.5 specifically?
Cole Bryant: IGN named it. Not AI generically — that specific model, as like a proximate cause. Which is wild because it means even without the ethics conversation, even without the slop conversation, you'd still have a pure volume crisis. Eight thousand and eleven games in one week is already broken. AI just made the invisible crisis visible — it gave players something to point at.
Zara Reyes: No but that's a real distinction. Like Shogo-MAD's post — 'Steam Next Fest got absolutely ruined by AI' — that framing puts AI as the villain. Pirat_Nation amplified the same story. But the villain might actually just be volume and AI is the face people can recognize.
Cole Bryant: Which is — dude, that's actually a scarier version of the story? Because if volume is the real problem, a No AI filter doesn't fix anything. You still have — wait, actually I don't know the exact number of non-AI games but it's thousands — it's still completely undiscoverable.
Zara Reyes: And Valve hasn't said a word. The Steam Discovery Queue is sitting there, ScalesGhost wrote up the whole formal request, Valve has the disclosure data already — and nothing. That's not a platform that's stuck. That's a platform that's decided.
Cole Bryant: And that's — dude, that's the thing that gets me. ScalesGhost didn't just complain. He wrote a formal request, cited Valve's own policy back at them, said 'you already have this data, just let me use it in the Discovery Queue the way I can filter mature content.' That's not a rant. That's a user telling a company how to do their job with their own tools.
Zara Reyes: Using their own receipts against them.
Cole Bryant: Exactly — and Valve just, nothing. No announcement, no public statement. Meanwhile the Discovery Queue is sitting there and it literally cannot act on information Valve is already sitting on.
Zara Reyes: And then — no but this is the kicker — Valve actually made the solution harder. In May 2026 they cut down the number of user-defined tags on Steam. So adding an AI tag now isn't a toggle, it's a full deliberate product decision they'd have to own publicly.
Cole Bryant: Wait — they cut tags in May?
Zara Reyes: May 2026. Which means the workarounds players are using now — third-party browser plugins, curated lists on social media — those exist because Valve both has the data and actively narrowed the toolset. That's the partial win I'll give the hot take: the disclosure gap is real, it's structural, it was a choice.
Cole Bryant: Picture someone Saturday evening, she's got two hours, she opens Next Fest specifically to find something new — not a sequel, not a safe pick — and she's scrolling through synthetically-voiced pixel art for twenty minutes before she just gives up and boots Elden Ring again. That's ScalesGhost's whole post in one session. And the filter that would've helped her? Valve has every piece of it. They just won't wire it up.
Zara Reyes: The data's there. The policy's there. The request is there. And there's still nothing.
Cole Bryant: And — wait, even if Valve built the filter tomorrow, there's a whole other problem underneath that I don't think a No AI tag would even touch — we'll get there in a second and it kind of blows up the clean solution.
Zara Reyes: But that's the thing that breaks the clean solution — because the filter people are asking for isn't a quality filter. It's a tool filter. 'No AI' catches a dev who used Midjourney for one background tile the same way it catches a pure vibe-coder who assembled a game in forty-eight hours. Same tag. No distinction.
Cole Bryant: Dude, that's — yeah, that's the paradox. The tag is binary.
Zara Reyes: And the community debate is literally still unresolved on this. Half the commenters are saying the filter should target low-quality slop broadly — not AI per se. Which is actually the more honest diagnosis. But slop is subjective. You can't tag slop.
Cole Bryant: Wait, it gets worse. Gamemeca reported that some operators are using AI to reverse-engineer indie games. Like, clone the mechanics, flood the market with copies. That's not vibe-coding. That's IP theft at scale. And a No AI filter? Doesn't touch it. Those clones are still there.
Zara Reyes: The worst case isn't even caught by the thing everyone's rallying behind.
Cole Bryant: No — and meanwhile Push Square flagged that PlayStation Store and Nintendo eShop are basically watching this whole thing to see what Valve does. Like, if the campaign succeeds here, they'd have to answer the same question. Which means Valve's non-answer isn't just a Steam problem, it's — I mean, it sets the default for the whole industry.
Zara Reyes: But lowkey — the real signal to me is that players already left the building. Browser plugins, curated social lists, GamesRadar roundups of hand-picked demos. The workaround economy exists. That's not users being resourceful. That's Valve ceding the discovery layer.
Cole Bryant: To Discord servers and random curators who are now — wait, they're actually more trusted than Steam Next Fest right now? That's wild.
Zara Reyes: That's the verdict. The No AI filter is broken as a lever — it penalizes the wrong variable. But Valve doing nothing doesn't kill AI slop. It kills Next Fest as a discovery mechanism. The hand-curated lists win by default.
Cole Bryant: Okay my one detail I cannot let go — Valve, as of October 2026 reporting, has made zero public announcements. Nothing. They watched Kotaku call it a grim look at the future and just... sat there.
Zara Reyes: Mine is ScalesGhost citing Valve's own policy back at them and getting radio silence. That's the whole story in one Reddit thread.
Cole Bryant: And the actual winner — I mean, not Valve, not the filter campaign — it's whoever runs the hand-curated Discord server that a hundred people trust more than eight thousand demos. That's where discovery went. Valve exported the whole problem and someone's moderating it for free.
Zara Reyes: Valve not building the filter didn't make the problem disappear — it just made your friend's Discord the better product. That's actually wild.
Cole Bryant: Steam Next Fest: brought to you by whatever server your friend is in. Cheers to that.
