Valve says Steam Next Fest’s early discovery system can put low-quality demos in front of players, but it does not want to dictate whether developers use generative AI. At Steam Indie Connect in Busan, South Korea, Valve Business Team members Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson discussed the trade-off. Inven Global’s event coverage also includes one developer’s account of an extortion threat: “If you don’t pay, we’ll clone your game with AI and release it first.”
Giardino said game cloning predates generative AI, though AI has sped up the problem. His advice was to build a community around a game and keep adding features, personality, and creative choices rooted in the developer’s own perspective. Relying on one easily copied mechanic leaves less room for a game’s identity to grow.
Steam Next Fest begins with near-random game exposure for the first 2 days, then starts personalizing recommendations. Wilkinson said the randomized opening is meant to give developers a fair chance at visibility and make the system harder to game. Valve recognizes the trade-off: some low-quality demos reach players during that period. The company is considering improvements, with smarter, more dynamic discovery as its starting point rather than limits on developer access or tool choice.
The festival’s growth makes a single measure of success difficult. Giardino said Valve once had to persuade developers to join when an event had only 50 or 100 games. Studios also set different goals: one might value 1,000 wishlists, while another might look for 50,000.
Steam’s wider release pool offers another measure of the discovery challenge. SteamDB’s release chart lists 22,743 games for 2026 so far, compared with 21,224 in 2025. The chart groups releases by review-count bands, so its figures describe the size of the release pool, not how many games use AI or how many are low quality.
October’s Next Fest catalog figures are a separate snapshot, with 8,011 demo matches in the press preview and 7,017 demos in the public catalog. Those counts describe different catalog views, not how many games used AI or copied another project.
Steam also requires developers to disclose AI use in their games. Valve’s position separates that transparency requirement from a broader ban on the tools developers choose to use.
How should Steam make Next Fest’s opening days fair to developers without leaving players to sort through low-quality demos? Follow the discussion around Steam’s discovery changes and AI disclosures on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.
