Over the years, I’ve enjoyed checking out the Steam Next Fests. These regularly scheduled and Valve-sanctioned events encourage developers working on independent games to create a demo and share it as part of a larger promotion. However, the most recent and currently ongoing Steam Next Fest is a nightmare with thousands and thousands of demos, many of which are filled with AI garbage. At this point, the vibes are completely crap, and it only makes me more worried about the future than excited.
In theory, Steam Next Fest should be a big event for developers. A large amount of new free demos for upcoming games attracts many players looking for the next cool thing. And Valve is promoting it with its own big storefront and menus, allowing people to quickly download and play dozens of demos and hopefully create a wishlist and eventually buy some of them, putting money in Valve’s pockets as well as developers’ and publishers’ coffers. Plus, fans can play plenty of free demos, and game reviewers and content creators get a batch of interesting new games to cover while getting a glimpse of the future. It looks awesome!
But this time, Steam Next Fest offers almost 7,100 free demos. And that’s just way too many free demos for Next Fest to be usable or useful as it once was for so many people.
It wasn’t always like this. In the past, the number of Next Fest demos was smaller. As reported Discovery of the gameat the last Next Fest in June, there were around 4,300 demos. As of October 2024, there have been approximately 2,700 demos. And as of October 2023, there are around 900 demos. Back then it was easier to find cool games and bring good things to the surface. As the numbers grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out in the pack or find anything in the flood of games. Now that Steam Next Fest has reached over 7,000 demos, it’s become an absolute nightmare to navigate.
These many demos alone would make Next Fest miserable. However, the other big problem with this recent Next Fest is that a lot of the demos are AI clones or shit, or were quickly thrown together via ambiance coding. This was a problem last year, and it’s only gotten worse.
I browsed Steam Next Fest a bit today and repeatedly came across games that looked like they were launched by Claude in a matter of hours. Many games simply openly admit in their AI disclosures that large portions of their codebase and assets were entirely AI-generated. Browsing Steam Next Fest right now is jumping into an ocean of trash and AI garbage. It’s depressing and has killed all my enthusiasm for the Next Fest.
I don’t seem to be alone in this reaction. In general, the atmosphere around Next Fest this year is particularly rotten and miserable. My timeline is filled with developers, writers, and fans who simply seem defeated by the flood of Next Fest demos and AI filth. What was once a happy Steam event that got people talking excitedly about upcoming games is now yet another example of how everything is corrupted and ruined by genAI tools and models.
Steam Next Fest is facing huge backlash over the rise of low-end, low-effort games.
The October event has 8,011 demos, almost twice as many as June. Developers say the flood of low-quality “AI slop” is making it harder for real indie games to be worth playing.
Last June,… pic.twitter.com/DgfugANUFY
– Pirat_Nation 🔴 (@Pirat_Nation) October 20, 2026
It also makes me really sad that Valve doesn’t seem interested in curation of any kind and instead relies on its users to tag games and its own algorithms to learn what people like and hopefully protect them from filth. Valve’s hold on PC gaming continues to make me nervous, as the company seems completely uninterested in lifting a finger to actually improve Next Fest or stem the amount of garbage that fills Steam every day now. And one of its only real competitors, Epic, fully embraces AI and vibe-coding, making it a less than stellar replacement.
Earlier this month, we reached a depressing milestone: more games have already been added to Steam this year than in all of 2025, a trend that shows no signs of stopping. And now that AI coding tools have become even more capable of creating “games” and mods at record speed, leading to a massive influx of ambient-coded software in recent weeks, I suspect future Next Fests will be even bigger and even worse. The future is dark, friends.
Gn tech
