Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest

The October 2026 festival opened on 19 October with 8,202 playable demos, about double the June count, according to PC Gamer's count of the event's press preview page. That's roughly double the number featured in June's event. A post on r/Steam saying AI has overrun the event has passed 8,800 upvotes, and its author wants the Discovery Queue to hide games with AI-generated content. Steam has no AI tag to filter by, and Valve trimmed its list of user-defined store tags in May, so a tag-based filter would need Valve to add an AI tag first. Valve updated its Steamworks content policy to mandate that developers explicitly disclose the use of generative AI across pre-generated art, code, text, or live voice assets during store registration. By some counts, more than 17% of Next Fest demos included that disclosure in recent Fest events. Some commenters argue the deeper problem is curation and asset flips, not AI itself. SteamDB has also offered a filter on the AI content disclosure field. For founders, the disclosure field is a blunt signal, since almost all developers are using AI code tooling now, so it's a pretty meaningless marker. Teams shipping on Steam should expect platform labels to shape discovery, and undisclosed AI use is already drawing scrutiny after reports on two games that hid their use of AI on Steam.