Steam AI disclosure explained, and what the 19.5% figure means

Rick Vu, 11 October 2026

An AI agent drafted this piece under Rick's direction, as part of an experiment in AI writing. Every figure links to its source.

The most recent Steam AI disclosure percentage this article could verify as of October 2026 is 19.5%, from the June 2026 Steam Next Fest. Dataconomy’s report on Steam Next Fest says 1,704 of the 8,700 titles listed for the June 2026 event carried a generative AI disclosure, based on Eurogamer’s count of SteamDB data. That figure counts self-reported labels across every submission, including demos that never went live, so it measures disclosure and not how many games were made with AI.

The rest of this piece covers what Valve asks developers to disclose and how the rules changed in January 2026. It then shows why the same event can produce figures from 12.5% to 26.5%. It ends with the case the headline number hides, a game whose AI runs while you play. Rick Vu, who directs this section, runs Red Dog Studio, a game studio, so he has a stake in how this field develops.

What Steam asks you to disclose

Steam’s AI questions sit in the content survey every developer fills in before release. The Steamworks content survey documentation says the AI part “is concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players.” It lists artwork, sound, narrative, and localization as examples. It also says that “Efficiency gains through the use of these tools is not the focus of this section.”

The same page splits AI content by when it was made. Pre-Generated content is “Any kind of content that ships with your game and is consumed by players that is created with the help of AI tools during development.” Live-Generated content is “Any kind of content created with the help of AI tools while the game is running.”

The two kinds carry different duties. For pre-generated content, Valve reviews the output before release the same way it reviews content made without AI. Live-generated content follows the same rules and adds one more. The developer must tell Valve “what kind of guardrails you’re putting on your AI to ensure it’s not generating illegal content.”

Two other lines on that page matter. Completing the survey does not make content allowed. Products still have to follow Steam’s content rules whether or not they are disclosed. Once Valve approves your build and store page, some survey answers cannot be edited without contacting Steam Support.

Players see the result on the store page. VGC’s report on the 2026 rewrite says the disclosure appears in a store page section called “AI Generated Content Disclosure”. There, the developer describes the AI use in their own words.

How Valve rewrote the rules

Valve announced the original pre-generated and live-generated structure in January 2024. GamingOnLinux’s report on Valve’s AI content rules quotes the original definition of pre-generated content as “Any kind of content (art/code/sound/etc) created with the help of AI tools during development.” Valve said the change would let it be “much more open to releasing games using AI technology on Steam.” The same announcement said Valve was building a way for players to report illegal content in games with live-generated AI through the Steam overlay. PCGamesN’s report on Steam AI content reporting noted at the time that Valve had not said what it would do with those reports.

Valve rewrote the form in January 2026. Game Developer’s report on the change, dated January 16, says the form now separates uses that need disclosure from uses that do not. The first disclosure is “AI to generate content for the game”, which also covers the store page and marketing materials. The developer describes the tools in a text box. The second is “AI content generated during gameplay”, which is a checkbox for games that produce images, text, or other content while they run. VGC’s report lists images, audio, text, and other content.

VGC’s report, dated January 17, says GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless spotted the change. It adds that “AI-powered tools” such as code helpers do not require a disclosure.

The biggest change is the word “code”. The 2024 definition named code next to art and sound. The current page names only content “consumed by players”. Read plainly, the line Valve now draws is whether a player can see or hear the AI’s output. A save system written with a coding assistant falls outside it. A generated texture on a wall falls inside it.

Disclosures were already rising before the rewrite. VGC reports that an analysis in July 2025 found nearly 8,000 titles released on Steam in the first six months of 2025 had disclosed generative AI, against about 1,000 in all of 2024.

What the 19.5% figure does and does not mean

The 19.5% figure passed through several hands. SteamDB, a third-party site, lets anyone filter Steam entries by an “AI content disclosed” flag. Eurogamer applied that filter to the June 2026 Next Fest, which ran from June 15 to 22, according to Next.ink. Engadget’s report carried Eurogamer’s count on June 16, and Dataconomy repeated it on June 17. The October 2026 Next Fest runs from October 19 to 26 and will have its own figure, which had not been reported when this article was written.

The denominator is the weak point. Next.ink’s analysis of the June 2026 Next Fest, in French, says the 8,764 entries in SteamDB were publication requests submitted to Steam. Only 4,390 demos were actually available on June 17. The rest were rejected, withdrawn, or never finished. Among the demos that were live, Next.ink counted 550 with an AI disclosure, or about 12.5%. By that count, about 1,200 of the tagged entries never reached players or were already gone.

A third count points the other way. The Recognizing Patterns newsletter’s Next Fest analysis, dated July 5 and written by a consultant who advises game studios, cites GameDiscoverCo’s tracked pool of 4,382 demos. It says 1,163 of them, or 26.5%, carried a disclosure, up from 21.2% in February 2026. That base is almost the same size as Next.ink’s, yet the tagged count is twice as large. Neither page explains the gap. Timing during the event and the definition of “eligible” are possible causes, but that is an estimate, not a finding.

So the same week of demos gives 12.5%, 19.5%, or 26.5%, depending on who counted and when. Each is accurate for its own base. None of them answers the question most people bring to the number, which is how many games use generative AI.

All three undercount that. The disclosure is self-reported, and since January 2026 it excludes AI used only as a development tool. A demo built with heavy help from a coding assistant and no generated assets carries no label.

They also lump very different games together. One AI-generated icon and a character that runs on a language model both produce the same flag in SteamDB. No percentage can tell you what share of demos are AI-native games, where a model runs during play. To learn that, you have to read the disclosure text on each store page.

What it means for a game whose AI runs during play

Pre-generated and live-generated content are different problems for a reviewer. A generated texture is a file in the build. Valve can look at it before release, and it will look the same on every player’s machine. A line of dialogue from a live model does not exist until a player types or says something. No one at Valve can review it in advance.

That is why the live-generated path asks for guardrails instead of output. In practice the reviewer can check how you constrain the model, but not every answer it will give. If you ship a character that talks, the guardrails section is where you explain your input filters, your output checks, and what the character does when a check fails. The piece on keeping AI NPCs safe from jailbreaks covers what those checks look like in code.

Two shipped games show how developers word this on the store page. The Steam page for Whispers from the Star, released August 14, 2025, says the game “features fully voiced, AI-powered conversations and performances created in collaboration with an actor.” Its mature content note adds that the game “uses safety filters and content moderation” and that open-ended play means players “may still generate responses that are not appropriate for all audiences.” The Steam page for Suck Up!, released on Steam on October 1, 2025, says players talk to AI characters by voice and that “the AI responds in real time based on tone and strategy.”

The Whispers from the Star page is the better model. It says what the AI does during play and which parts the team made with AI tools before release. It also admits that the safety filters can miss. A player can decide from it whether they want the game.

Valve also sets limits that apply only to live AI. The Steamworks content survey FAQ says Valve does not want to ship live-generated Adult Only Sexual Content “at this time”, citing legal and customer risk. Another answer covers games that call a paid AI service for each input and output. Valve’s suggestions are to build the cost into the game’s price, charge microtransactions, sell a subscription, or sell a one-time DLC that unlocks unlimited use, all through Steam-supported payment. The guide to AI NPC cost per player works through what that cost looks like.

Two practical points follow for a team adding a live model. First, tick the live-generated box even if every asset in your build was made by hand, because the checkbox is about runtime output, not production. Second, if you add a live model in an update after release, check whether the survey still lets you change that answer. Valve says some answers lock once the build and store page are approved, and changing them then goes through Steam Support.

A headline percentage treats every label as the same kind of use. For a game with a live model, the disclosure that matters to a buyer is the text on its own store page. It should tell them what the model does, and what stops it, before they pay.