Nearly half of new Steam games disclosed AI use in October, up from 1.7 per cent in 2024
An analysis of about 63,600 Steam releases found 49.9 per cent of October 2026 games carried an AI-content disclosure, up from 26.4 per cent a year earlier, with artwork the most commonly reported use.
Almost half of all new games released on Steam in October 2026 carried a disclosure that generative artificial intelligence had been used in their creation, according to an independent analysis of the platform's public data that has been picked up by Dexerto, Digital Trends and Outlook Respawn.
The analysis, by Reddit user u/ploz, who runs the tracking site PCGame.com, examined roughly 63,600 Steam releases since January 2024, when Valve first required developers to disclose certain uses of generative AI. It found that 49.9 per cent of games released in October 2026 carried such a disclosure.
That figure is nearly double the 26.4 per cent recorded in October 2025, and a dramatic rise from the 1.7 per cent seen in January 2024, when the rule took effect. Across all of 2024, the disclosure rate was 13.2 per cent; it rose to 24 per cent in 2025, and has reached 40.1 per cent for 2026 so far, with October the highest month yet recorded.
The pattern is not evenly spread. Smaller projects lead the trend: 47 per cent of 2026 releases with fewer than 10 reviews disclosed AI use, compared with just 14 per cent of games with at least 1,000 reviews. Developers releasing 10 or more games a year disclosed AI use in 68 per cent of their titles, against 37 per cent for developers releasing only one game a year.
Artwork is the most commonly reported use, accounting for 63 per cent of disclosures, followed by text and translation at 30 per cent, store pages and marketing materials at 26 per cent, music at 21 per cent, code at 16 per cent and voices at 7 per cent. Because one game can report several categories, those shares overlap.
Valve's rules, revised in January 2026, focus on AI-generated content that players can see or hear, rather than tools used behind the scenes during development. A single disclosure can therefore cover anything from one generated image or translated line to a store-page asset, and it does not by itself say how much of a game was AI-made or how heavily humans edited the result.
That caveat matters for how the headline figure should be read. The disclosures are self-reported by developers, so undeclared AI use is invisible in the data by definition, and the 49.9 per cent figure is best understood as a floor for disclosure, not a precise measure of how much AI is actually used across the platform.
The rise also reflects changing economics for small teams. Generative AI can produce images, text, code snippets and audio far more cheaply than hiring specialists for each task, which helps short-cycle, low-budget projects reach the store at all. Critics argue that the same tools flood Steam with low-effort releases, making discovery harder for players and for developers who work without them.
Valve has not attributed its growing review backlog directly to AI, pointing instead to increased submissions and repeated reviews, Digital Trends reported. Steam also offers no native filter to hide AI-disclosed games, leaving players to read individual store pages if they want to avoid them.
What is clear is the direction of travel. In less than three years, AI disclosure on Steam has gone from a rarity affecting fewer than one in fifty new releases to a feature of roughly one in two. Whether players come to treat the label as useful information, as a warning sign, or simply as background noise will shape how developers use the tools next, and how much they choose to declare.
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