The triannual Steam Next Fest celebration is here once again, and this time it’s a bunch of bunk. What has become an early Christmas three times a year for games journalists and video game tinkerers has already become a video game Northern Barrage as players avoid the minefield that is AI slop.
The October 2026 Steam Next Fest celebration should be a celebration of PC gaming and art. Instead, it’s a celebration of the vapidity of AI slop with over 8,000 games dolloped out onto the service into the conveyer belt of your discovery feed.
When Steam Next Fest launched just four years ago, the service was designed to highlight smaller games by talented indie and AA studios. That year, before the era of vibe-coding and image generation, the service boasted 1,000 demos. In October 2026, the celebration boasts double the number of games from this year’s June event, and a lot of them are proper wazzocks.
Vibe coding has already resulted in rapid and poor-quality AI recompilation projects and broken mods, and now it’s infesting Steam’s demo event at a ravaging rate. AI is the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek: The Next Generation, consuming organic material, in this term content, without a care in the world.
Scrolling through the list of demos within the colossal list of Steam Next Fest titles, you’re hit with a barrage of low-quality titles with AI generated keyart and poor gameplay that is more reminiscent of Steam Greenlight or Desura than it is of Next Fest. Of course, there’s always some low-quality games in Next Fest, but this year takes the cake.
It doesn’t help that the arrival of rapid AI-generated clone games has actively turned developers away from releasing demos during the event. Drunken Goddess Reflux, a “shot glass Russian roulette” drinking game where you have a drinking contest with an anime demon lady was set to launch a demo in Steam’s event. However, they have now opted for a closed playtest to avoid AI clones from stealing the game’s code and assets.
“We had planned to release the demo publicly with some restrictions on posting and streaming gameplay videos. However, we concluded that we can’t properly manage those restrictions with our current team,” the developer said.“We’re concerned that the demo’s content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before our launch.”
The sheer quantity of slop festering within Steam Next Fest is simply too much to parse. When the event had 4,000 games earlier this year, the tank was already starting to burst, but now it’s reached critical mass. What should have become a smorgasbord of unique, interesting games to chew through has become the dinner from Resident Evil 7 with AI bros attempting to shovel as much rancid slop down your gob as possible.
Steam has already struggled with a bar of quality for years now, but with AI, the floodgates are well and truly crowbarred open. Every day on Steam is essentially becoming a day on the Android App Store with clones of clones and low-quality garbage scampering around the games that are actually worth your money and, more importantly, worth your limited time on this Earth.
The crushing reality is that the format of Next Fest is simply unable to survive when so much of it feels genuinely anti-art. There is so much of it, sandwiching genuine art that’s taken years to craft between soulless, cheap management games and other gunk. It’s now work to go through a list of games… what a sadness.
