Cole Bryant: Okay hi, good to see your face — I'm going to start with a number and I need you to really hear it. Eight thousand two hundred.
Zara Reyes: Steam Next Fest demos.
Cole Bryant: More than double the prior year. October 19th, it launches. Kotaku has a piece up basically the next day — the 20th — calling it a massive disaster. And buried in all of that is this detail that I cannot stop thinking about: Valve already made devs disclose AI content. The data exists. They just — won't let players use it.
Zara Reyes: Wait, so the filter doesn't exist or Valve is sitting on it?
Cole Bryant: Sitting on it! ScalesGhost — this Reddit user — posted a whole formal proposal: take the existing AI disclosure tag, make it a Discovery Queue filter, done. And as of October 20th Valve has made zero announcement. Nothing. It's not that the tech isn't there, it's that nobody's turning it on.
Zara Reyes: No but — that's a strategy, not an oversight. Because if you're Valve and submission volume is part of how the storefront looks healthy—
Cole Bryant: You don't want a filter that tanks submissions. Yeah. That's the scam.
Zara Reyes: And the tell is Alliance Arts pulling Drunken Goddess Reflux into a closed playtest. That's not vibe-based frustration — that's a publisher making a hard call because they don't trust the event anymore.
Cole Bryant: But wait — before we crown this a full disaster, I want to know who actually counted one-in-three. Like, Famiboards said it. Is that a Valve audit or is that someone on a forum doing vibes math?
Zara Reyes: That's exactly my brake-pump. Famiboards coverage, community estimate — not a Valve audit. And EmmaBooney on Reddit saying AI content 'has ruined the current Steam Next Fest' — real frustration, but that's one person's feed. That's not a sample.
Cole Bryant: Right, but aesoprowwy is hoping low engagement on AI-heavy projects naturally pressures Valve — which only works if the market is actually filtering. Are players voting with their clicks already?
Zara Reyes: Maybe. But the Hacker News crowd made a fair point: asset flips were already torching discovery before anyone knew what a diffusion model was. This problem is not new.
Cole Bryant: No way. So Shogo-MAD complaining about older Next Fests being better — that tracks?
Zara Reyes: It tracks. The farmer's market was already getting crowded. But AI is the printer that makes booths infinite overnight — that's the actual shift. It was always straining. AI just broke the load-bearing wall.
Cole Bryant: Okay that — dude, that actually lands. Because 8,200 demos, even if one-in-three is a rough estimate, that's still potentially like 2,700 AI submissions at a single event designed to surface indie gems. The math doesn't need to be exact to be alarming.
Zara Reyes: And Red Spiral Studios — solo dev, no AI art, no AI code, making Beneath Paris — that game just disappears in that noise. Not because it's bad. Because the booth count is infinite and half the produce is plastic.
Cole Bryant: So the stat might be fuzzy but the behavior change is real. Developers literally leaving.
Zara Reyes: And that behavior change is the part that actually vindicates your read — because Alliance Arts and WHO YOU didn't just complain on Reddit. They made a business decision. They pulled Drunken Goddess Reflux from the public demo entirely. Closed playtest. No browsing strangers, no exposure window — specifically because they're scared of AI copycats reverse-engineering their build.
Cole Bryant: That's not a vibe. That's a dev going dark.
Zara Reyes: It's a publisher doing a risk calculation and deciding the event isn't safe. And when the logic flips from 'show early, build community' to 'hide until launch' — that's structural. That's not frustration, that's the economic model breaking.
Cole Bryant: Okay and then picture Red Spiral Studios on the other side of this. Solo dev. Beneath Paris — hand-drawn, no AI, no shortcuts — wait, I mean they did everything right by any measure of craft. They show up to Next Fest. And they're invisible. Not because the game is bad, but because there's no signal left to carry them.
Zara Reyes: And the 8,100 views on that Threads post — @tneql, 421 reactions — that tells you this conversation jumped the Reddit fence. This isn't a forum grievance anymore.
Cole Bryant: Push Square writing about the PlayStation Store needing the same filter if this campaign wins? Bro. The blast radius is the whole storefront ecosystem.
Zara Reyes: Which — lowkey that's the part that makes Valve's silence so loud. They have the disclosure data. They're just not flipping the switch. And whether that's negligence or protecting submission volume, the outcome for Red Spiral Studios is identical: their game doesn't get found.
Cole Bryant: So your read is the harm is already here, not coming.
Zara Reyes: It's here. And — okay, we should actually get into whether a filter even fixes this cleanly, because there's a real argument that a binary tag creates a whole different problem, and that conversation gets messier than it looks.
Cole Bryant: Right, but — okay, the filter being messy doesn't make doing nothing better. LincolnMargison posted on X that a binary AI tag would just push devs to hide their AI use. Which, I mean — that's not a crazy point.
Zara Reyes: It's not crazy. But dishonest disclosure already exists. Right now. With zero filter.
Cole Bryant: That's the counter-punch, yeah.
Zara Reyes: So LincolnMargison's argument is basically — don't build the lock because people will pick it. But the door is already open. A filter at least rewards the devs who do disclose honestly.
Cole Bryant: Okay and — wait, this is where WildMedia5467 actually saves the argument, because the proposal isn't one binary tag. It's granular. Art separately, dialogue separately, music separately. That's — actually that's way harder to game dishonestly than just checking a box that says 'no AI.'
Zara Reyes: Which Valve already has the infrastructure to do. The disclosure data is sitting there broken out by asset type.
Cole Bryant: So the gap isn't technical. It's just — Valve built the disclosure mandate for legal cover, not for players. That's the actual scandal here.
Zara Reyes: That's the calibrated take. Not 'filters are perfect,' not 'filters are dangerous' — it's that Valve constructed infrastructure, collected the data as of October 20th, and made a choice to give zero of it to the people browsing 8,200 demos.
Cole Bryant: And silence that convenient, when your revenue model scales with submission volume — that's not neutrality. That's a position.
Zara Reyes: And that's the part I'm still not over — 'No AI' is about to become the indie equivalent of single origin coffee. A premium signal in a commodity market. And Valve is the store that won't put it on the label.
Cole Bryant: Mine's Alliance Arts pulling Drunken Goddess Reflux into a closed playtest. That's the one. Because that's not anger, that's a publisher doing the math and deciding the event itself is a liability.
Zara Reyes: Okay but whether it's negligence or — wait, actually it doesn't matter. Strategy, slowness, whatever Valve's doing internally as of October 20th, 2026? The outcome for Red Spiral Studios is identical. Beneath Paris doesn't get found. Full stop.
Cole Bryant: Dude. I half-concede the mustache-twirling. Maybe they're just slow. But slow with 8,200 demos in the water is — that's not fine.
Zara Reyes: To Red Spiral. And to every solo dev who showed up honest.
