Weird Multiplayer Games Won Out Over Generative AI Slop In October’s Next Fest

As this October’s Steam Next Fest wrapped up, two sentiments about the demos on offer stood out — “Wow, there are lots of good games here this time” and “Oh no, there’s AI garbage all over the place.” After Steam’s implementation of generative AI disclosures for games on the platform, it’s become clear just how prevalent the controversial technology has become. At the same time, Steam’s own metrics for Next Fest show what most people are looking for in their demos, and generative AI doesn’t seem to be as popular among players as among developers.

After Next Fest closed, Steam shared the top 50 demos from the event, showing a somewhat surprising mix of titles as well as a few clear trends. At the same time, it suggests that players may be avoiding games made with generative AI altogether, or at least that the games made with it aren’t all that appealing to begin with.

At this year’s Next Fest, just over 500 demos included a generative AI disclosure, amounting to 17 percent of the demos at the event, according to a report from TechRaptor. That’s an awfully large portion of the Next Fest catalog made with AI, which validates the feeling that I and a lot of other people had while looking through the demos this year. Since Steam made its generative AI disclosures mandatory, the first thing I do when a game on the platform looks interesting is check to see if it has a disclosure. If it does, I don’t play it, period. My borderline paranoid practice of double-checking for generative AI paid off during Next Fest, as time and time again, I saw demos that I’d like to try, only to scroll down, see that its developer used generative AI, and move on.

It seems I’m not the only one with a similar no-tolerance policy for generative AI. Aside from hearing anecdotally about other players doing the same thing, Steam’s own data suggests that a significant number of people are dodging generative AI on sight, too. Of the top 50 most-played demos at this Next Fest, only three of them include generative AI disclosures: System War, Sudden Attack, and Cloudheim (the last of which is one of those demos I was initially interested in before I saw the disclosure and bailed out). That amounts to just six percent of the top demos using generative AI, compared to 17 percent of all demos in the event.

Steam’s discovery tools are far from perfect, and scouting Next Fest demos mostly means scrolling through a seemingly endless list of titles and downloading whatever catches your eye. That means the games using generative AI could have just been passed over by circumstance, but it’s also possible that players were intentionally leaving them off their lists, or that games using generative AI just don’t tend to look as interesting as those made entirely by humans. It’s also worth noting that while Steam requires a disclosure for use of generative AI, there’s no real way to enforce it, so it’s possible that even more games used AI assets and simply decided to hide that fact.

As for what games people actually did want to play, the top 50 list is sort of all over the place. Everything from beat ‘em up Marvel Cosmic Invasion to idle tower defense Desktop Defender make the list. There’s a clear bent toward action, and almost no visual novels or peaceful crafting games appear. One obvious trend is that people were hungry for multiplayer games during Next Fest, whether that’s from racing games (Ultimate Sheep Raccoon) or RPGs (Everwind). Perhaps thanks to the success of games like Peak, co-op games with a strong lean toward comedy are also represented in the top demos, with titles like Roadside Research (which turns players into aliens running a gas station) and Yapyap (in which you invade a wizard’s tower to cause chaos). When it comes to multiplayer games, it seems like players have a strong appetite for genre-bending, as with the typing battle royale Final Sentence.

Most of the time, a look at the most-played games on Steam can give the impression that only the most popular games can rise to the top, or players are only interested in games that resemble ones they already play. Next Fest’s focus on indie games means lesser-known, more original games are in much larger supply, and at least during the event, players are more excited for novel experiences than for established genres or generative AI slop.