News 1 in 5 Steam games released in 2025 use generative AI, up nearly 700% year-on-year — 7,818 titles disclose genAI asset usage, 7% of the entire Stea...

[Admin]

New research indicates that there are now over 7,800 Steam titles that disclose the use of generative AI on the platform, a huge increase from 2024.

1 in 5 Steam games released in 2025 use generative AI, up nearly 700% year-on-year — 7,818 titles disclose genAI asset usage, 7% of the entire Stea... : Read more

 

[Johnpombrio]

Rick Beato on his YouTube channel generated an AI song with just a couple lines of instructions. I found the song to have clever lyrics and good instrumentation. I LIKED it. I expect to see more and more AI generated songs as the LLM stolen from artists gets stronger very quickly.
The same goes here with games. My dream is to have AI generate game mechanics and opponents that play just a tad worse than I do, giving me a challenge with have to manually tweak the settings. As for the rest, it is inevitable that AI will innovate rapidly, esp considering it is being used to now fight a drone war. War hyper accelerates technology like nothing else.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

There's a ton of places LLMs can be used to great effect on games, such as background NPCs, wildlife, weather, environment, randomized dungeons or building layouts, more intelligent enemy NPCs who react to your strategies, and loads more, all of which not even the most well funded of studios would and have spent much developer time on, leaving humans to work on the important things. LLMs are just a tool like any other, except they have the potential to make every game, from a single developer phone game to a multi million dollar AAA game, better.

 

[USAFRet]

except they have the potential to make every game, from a single developer phone game to a multi million dollar AAA game, better.

And, as time goes on, they have the potential to make every game the same ol same ol.....

Originality is the key.
Angry Birds was unique
Quake was unique
GTA was unique

A good storyline trumps flashy graphics.

 

[thestryker]

AI is just another shortcut and in the end this comes at the expense of creativity. In an industry where copying is the name of the game there's no chance this doesn't just make that aspect much worse.

 

[Phaaze88]

A handful of gems are buried under all that slop, and most people are only going to skim the top...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Aqr_tuQa24

AI is just another shortcut and in the end this comes at the expense of creativity. In an industry where copying is the name of the game there's no chance this doesn't just make that aspect much worse.

All just to save the companies money - savings don't get passed on to the customer, of course.

 

[salgado18]

AI is not the problem, bad games and cheap clones are. AI is an amazing tool to speed up development and lower production costs, and/or offer unique experiences.

But I think Steam needs to segment at least marketing material from the rest.

 

[TheSecondPower]

All games copy and paste some resources. Surely not every tree in Breath of the Wild is unique. In the old Flight Simulator X game, you can fly anywhere in the world, but if you fly over farmland it looks like a giant grid of identical squares; Microsoft copied and pasted the same terrain many times to make most of the planet's surface. I'm sure newer Flight Simulator games (or Flight) try to be more clever, but I don't see why generative AI would be passed up in these cases.

 

[S58_is_the_goat]

Ah yes, steam and it's plethora of "fill in the blank" simulators...

 

[ThatMouse]

Generative AI also means code, like "make this procedure better" or "what's the correct syntax" or help me debug this error. Everyone sees AI as a bad thing for some reason, but it helps you develop faster and be more creative.

 

[Jabberwocky79]

I would like to think that the majority of the games using AI (currently) are the grassroots indie titles that are being developed by one or two people in their bedrooms. As an entrepreneur, I appreciate that starting small means you have to wear a lot of hats to grow your business, and that means there's a lot of stuff you need to do that you aren't particularly good at. So, for them, using AI to pick up the slack makes a lot of sense, and I don't fault them for it.

My beef about this comes with the idea of AAA studios using it to cull their personnel. And the fact that AI learned how to do all of this stuff from copying real creators. But, Pandora's box is already open, and it's not getting shut... it makes sense that if there's a superior tool available that will make you more efficient, you use it, plain and simple. I hate AI, and yet I use it every single day for my workflow.

 

[palladin9479]

Generative AI also means code, like "make this procedure better" or "what's the correct syntax" or help me debug this error. Everyone sees AI as a bad thing for some reason, but it helps you develop faster and be more creative.

Because AI doesn't develop anything, it doesn't code anything, it's not intelligent, it's not sentient, and the people need to stop anthropomorphizing an algorithm. All it's doing is ingesting verb statements to derive a set of actions, then finding which pre-trained data fits each of those actions.

That code it "generated", yeah that's just some statements it got off someone's post on stack overflow, a subreddit post, some random public github repository or if your lucky a book that was readable somewhere on the internet. That last case is becoming vanishingly rare as AI-Bro's do not want to risk an appeals court ruling and so have been excising as much copyrighted material from newer models as they can.

At the end of the day it's just a better google search, that doesn't provide references to the source material it copied from. Though I think the CoPilot Enterprise team has been trying to properly attribute source material.

 

[palladin9479]

I would like to think that the majority of the games using AI (currently) are the grassroots indie titles that are being developed by one or two people in their bedrooms. As an entrepreneur, I appreciate that starting small means you have to wear a lot of hats to grow your business, and that means there's a lot of stuff you need to do that you aren't particularly good at. So, for them, using AI to pick up the slack makes a lot of sense, and I don't fault them for it.

My beef about this comes with the idea of AAA studios using it to cull their personnel. And the fact that AI learned how to do all of this stuff from copying real creators. But, Pandora's box is already open, and it's not getting shut... it makes sense that if there's a superior tool available that will make you more efficient, you use it, plain and simple. I hate AI, and yet I use it every single day for my workflow.

The legal situation will sort itself out and ultimately it's going to just be another version of Photoshop / Premier along with the various 3D modeling and content creation tools out there. Generative AI is incredibly powerful and time saving for content creators allowing one member of the assets team to do the work of four or five. At first this absolutely will have the effect of shrinking the assets team as resource creation is one of the most time intensive area of game development. Going forward companies will then develop internal tooling that maximizes this capability and the result will be truly massive and non-repetitive game worlds and it'll be just another skill those individuals will need to have.

Basically it's the exact same effect we see with every other efficiency tool ever created.

 

[Jabberwocky79]

Generative AI is incredibly powerful and time saving for content creators allowing one member of the assets team to do the work of four or five. .... Going forward companies will then develop internal tooling that maximizes this capability and the result will be truly massive and non-repetitive game worlds and it'll be just another skill those individuals will need to have.

Here's the problem I see with that scenario: Every one of those 5 individuals can develop the skills necessary to utilize AI, true, but with 1 person doing the work of 5, that still leaves 4 people unemployed.

Basically it's the exact same effect we see with every other efficiency tool ever created.

I respectfully disagree that it's the exact same effect, and here's why. When Photoshop was created, there may have been fine art painters that were dismayed by tools that could achieve the same effect visually. I don't actually know if that was the case, but the existence of Photoshop did not invalidate the existence of fine art. The personnel needed to paint a physical piece of art versus a digital piece of art was still 1 / 1. And whether an artist chose to paint digitally or physically, they were still required to create.

AI on the other hand, is replacing gobs of people who previously had to collaborate to produce the same result, and it's doing so by plagiarism. It is not creating - as you said previously, it is not sentient. It wouldn't have a flying flip of an idea how to create anything if it wasn't trained on the work of others. And sure, you can argue that humans copy as well - sure they do. But back in the day, you still had to have talent. You even needed talent to know how to get results in Photoshop. Now, talent has become obsolete.

 

[helper800]

Here's the problem I see with that scenario: Every one of those 5 individuals can develop the skills necessary to utilize AI, true, but with 1 person doing the work of 5, that still leaves 4 people unemployed.

I respectfully disagree that it's the exact same effect, and here's why. When Photoshop was created, there may have been fine art painters that were dismayed by tools that could achieve the same effect visually. I don't actually know if that was the case, but the existence of Photoshop did not invalidate the existence of fine art. The personnel needed to paint a physical piece of art versus a digital piece of art was still 1 / 1. And whether an artist chose to paint digitally or physically, they were still required to create.

AI on the other hand, is replacing gobs of people who previously had to collaborate to produce the same result, and it's doing so by plagiarism. It is not creating - as you said previously, it is not sentient. It wouldn't have a flying flip of an idea how to create anything if it wasn't trained on the work of others. And sure, you can argue that humans copy as well - sure they do. But back in the day, you still had to have talent. You even needed talent to know how to get results in Photoshop. Now, talent has become obsolete.

I agree with everything except your last few lines. AI models can only copy the output of talented individuals, so AI is, in effect, only as talented as the people it is trained on. AI improves because it's trained on increasingly talented individuals. Essentially, AI's capabilities are limited by its latest instruction set, which requires ever more talented individuals to refine it for specific tasks. The key is figuring out how to compensate these talented individuals for their work and contributions, and establishing consent for using their work to train AI models.