The Steam Fest That Proves Why Everyone Hates on AI in Games | 16/09/26
The Steam Fest That Proves Why Everyone Hates on AI in Games | 16/09/26
Greetings from Los Angeles! I’m back in this neck of the woods as part of our work with Riot Games. So with my schedule being a tad insane (and jetlag somewhat crippling) this week’s edition is a little lighter usual. At first I wasn’t sure what to talk about but then a story hit me in the face last weekend that had me shake my head, and roll my eyes all at once. The “AI Gaming Festival” on Steam that was so badly conceived I am genuinely at a loss as to what was intended by it.
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The ‘AI Gaming Festival’ on Steam
Late last week I caught wind of the ‘AI Gaming Festival’: an event running on Steam throughout the month of September that is all about “educating and showcasing how AI is used in games”. Naturally, this sounds quite interesting to me, as someone who knows a thing or two about a thing or two when it comes to such endeavours.
However, when I found out about this event courtesy of social media the sentiment was far from positive. In that it appears to be focussed exclusively on showcasing how Generative AI can be used largely to take on human-driven game development tasks. Meaning the games in the festival are leaning on AI for asset creation, code generation, story generation, localisation, voice synthesis, and sound/music generation. While some games are what we refer to ‘AI-Native’ in that they use GenAI for some sort of gameplay purpose, most are using it to remove/replace traditional human creative roles. Alongside these games are a series of ‘learning sessions’ that are talks detailing how to use Generative AI tools to facilitate many of these elements.
Now while I am disappointed that an effort to communicate how AI is used in video games has largely been squandered as means to push an agenda surrounding Generative AI, I found the whole thing even more disappointing the more I looked into it. Given it’s not just a somewhat misguided effort from an editorial standpoint, but it also seems to be an effort largely for one company to push their own agenda.
An AI Festival From an AI Start-up
It’s worth raising that contrary to a lot of social media noise about this festival, this does not have any association with Valve. Third parties can host their own Steam sales/events on the platform and only require some base approval from Valve to appear on the store. This doesn’t mean they advocate for or endorse this AI festival, but rather that it passes the sanity checks for it be hosted on the platform. It’s funny, a while back I had pondered the idea of hosting one of these alongside the AI and Games Conference where we could try and get developers to put games on sale that have either appeared in our case study series or have been presented at the conference. But I backed away from it given I realised that would be an insane amount of work as we try to convince a whole stack of developers and publishers to participate - especially if you want them to put their game on sale. Particularly when you realise we’d be dealing with like 50+ AAA studios and publishers.
This very same level of effort helps give context as to the games listed in the festival. You’ll notice there isn’t a single big-budget AAA title because that would have required the organisers to engage with those studios, and not only is that an astronomical amount of work but it would open up questions and scrutiny from the devs/publishers as to the intent of the event. At that point I imagine most of the big players would back off given they’re not in control of the messaging around AI, which as we know is highly volatile. Though given the editorial of the festival, I guess having large teams of devs working on a video game is counter to their interests. Hence the games listed are almost exclusively upcoming indie games with lengthy AI disclosures. In fact despite the number of games that are already out there that use GenAI tools to some capacity, none of these appear to be in the festival. Which set off some alarm bells in my head as well.
So of course this then begs the question, who is organising the festival? As mentioned at the top of the Steam page, it’s organised by Invirtu Labs, which is a US-based tech company headed up by Devin Dixon. You’ll note that Dixon is one of the speakers for the live presentations at the event. So he’s clearly invested in making this work, and putting himself front and centre as part of it, which I respect to some degree.
However, it gets more interesting when you dig one level deeper. Invirtu Labs often trades under different names for a couple of businesses Dixon operates, including Glitch: a platform for the distribution and marketing of indie games. From what I can gather from skimming through the list of games on Glitch, everything is either AI-assisted or entirely AI-built. Glitch then offers the promise of AI-driven marketing for creators and for players to try games out by streaming them from the cloud rather than downloading them. Plus a whole bunch of publisher support tools including best practices for prompting game creation with AI tools - yay?
So we have an AI Festival on Steam that is focussed on showcasing how to use Generative AI tools to make games, organised by a company that advocates for and markets those kinds of games on their own platform. It begins to feel like this whole exercise is an effort to promote Glitch and Dixon’s efforts, to get more devs who make AI-crafted games to consider it as a useful platform, and to bring together likeminded devs who can share in the vision of making games (almost) entirely with Generative AI tools. This doesn’t really align with the opening tagline of “educating and showcasing how AI is used in games”, given it sort of ignores how 99% of the industry uses AI be it gameplay or production capacities.
The Ticketed Conference Advertised Within
So one big aspect of this festival is that it has a collection of talks attached to it. A selection of speakers coming in to talk about the state of AI in the games industry. However, this does feel like it’s continuing the trend both of promoting Glitch as well as the broader advocacy of making games using Generative AI. Given while it isn’t immediately obvious at first, the Steam festival is essentially advertising a paywalled virtual conference hosted courtesy of Glitch.
Now the big question is, was this all an effort to promote Glitch or did they seek to bring in speakers using Glitch as the frontend and it ultimately failed? I can’t help but notice that in the developer talk section, Dixon is listed to speak six times across the next week or so. I mean best of luck to him, that’s a huge amount of work and I don’t envy being on (virtual) stage that often so frequently - I mean I took to the stage four times during Gamescom week and I nearly fell into a coma.
Meanwhile the range of other speakers varies in experience and position within the sector. There are established names in gaming such as ex-Ubisoft designer Martin Capel, and former Take Two AI lead Luke Dicken - who was one of the devs affected by the shutdown of the AI team that was heavily misreported earlier in the year. However the rest of the speakers are largely founders of their own AI- and tech-related start-ups in/around games, many of whom only now making their first foray into games. So right now the editorial doesn’t imply an effort to have a more balanced conversation on the future of AI in game development.
My thinking that this effort to bring speakers may have backfired is further supported by Dicken taking to social media to comment on the situation. Luke is currently out doing a number of speaking engagements in his new post-T2 life, and noted that he had agreed to speak with the intent of being a part of a more balanced line-up. That his presentation that would be counter-narrative to the AI hype would not seem out of place, but now he appears to be the only person on the programme doing so?
I will say in the interests of fairness and transparency, I am not writing this in an effort to sabotage this event given I run my own as part of the team at Game AI Events. I can see how this might be perceived as someone who is part of an organisation that runs events on AI for games seeking to undermine another one. That is the antithesis of what we’re doing, which our collaboration with Gamescom Dev highlights. Our goal as an organisation is to support meaningful discussion of AI in the games industry, and to provide a means through which to provide a venue for continuous professional development.
In truth I don’t see this as a competitor in any meaningful sense to the AI and Games Conference, given we’re a developer conference aimed at the established Game AI community within the industry. We cover use of AI as part of gameplay and traditional production pipelines, and the use of Generative AI to make games in their entirety or to supplant human expertise, creativity, and personnel does not align with our editorial; there is a difference. Plus this festival is aimed more at smaller indies and/or aspiring devs who are looking at using Generative AI tools rather than established studios.
Rather, I’m reporting on this because there’s both a big issue in that the festival is advertising these sessions in a way that suggests they are for free despite it being behind a paywall - which might be a violation of Steam’s terms for running an event, see rule 4 of the event hosting rules. But also in that if the intent was to provide a means to discuss AI adoption in games, this strikes me as an awful way to go about it. This event is being hosted on a platform with an entrenched audience base where a good proportion of core users hates everything being proposed, and so you have to manage that message very carefully.
What do Steam fans really think about AI in games?
3 months ago · 38 likes · 1 comment · Simon Carless
If the Goal Was Exposure, It Worked!
I’m still scratching my head as to the intent of this. Sure, I posited some theories earlier that this is essentially a marketing effort for Glitch. But if it was a psyop intended to try and advocate for AI adoption in video games I can only say that it has backfired massively. The only reason I was aware of this was how angry it made people on social media, with coordinated efforts to list and subsequently block all of the games appearing in it. Meanwhile it has also led to some games being identified and discussed on social media given some titles do not have an AI disclosure on the store pages, but they’re included in the festival(?). Also, as many people have pointed out Bad Rats - which is something of a meme game on Steam that’s been around since 2009 - appears in almost every category, suggesting that the devs have submitted it to the festival as a joke?
All of this does strike me as a shame given some of the games listed have worked hard to build a reputation and prove themselves at festivals and the like as an example of AI-Native games that could prove of interest to an audience. Instead it’s becoming a mechanism for Steam players to actively target these games given they’re perceived as slop - despite the story generation only being achievable courtesy of GenAI techniques.
The one thing that didn’t cross my mind until much later, is that it’s possible that some of these games could also have been added to the festival without consent. My understanding from reading the Steam guidance on creating an event is you only need to gather up the relevant app ids and add them to the event. So it’s possible I’m seeing games here that have no idea what’s happening to them?
In all seriousness I would love to hear from devs who participated in this project, and whether it led to any serious increase in wishlists versus other events they have participated in. Or was your game added without your consent? My perspective of this is skewed given the aforementioned AI startup vibe, the general poor quality of the marketing, and the negative sentiment that appears on socials and on Steam itself. So hey, if you had a positive response to this and you think it’s helping your game get more exposure do let me know either in the comments or drop me a message in confidence.
Wrapping Up
Well, that’s it for me this week as I am swamped with work over here and need to focus on that when jetlag permits. Normal programming will finally resume next week as I stop travelling around for work things - it really hasn’t stopped since Develop in July. However, does anyone remember last year that I mentioned there was a new Snoop Dogg video game on Amazon Luna called Courtroom Chaos that uses GenAI to have him run a courtroom? Well, it seems like Arnold Schwarzenegger has got in on the action as well.
@arnoldschnitzelHow will Arnold's "arms of justice" rule in this case? @Amazon Luna 🎮 @Amazon Game Studios
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I won’t lie in that seeing the Terminator do a “6-7” joke about a year after the kids stopped thinking it was cool did break my brain a little. A proper trailer for the game is below. See you next week!
@arnoldschnitzelJudge Arnold is on the case! Here's a quick rundown on how to play Courtroom Chaos @Amazon Luna 🎮 ! Remember, Judge @Schwarzenegger always decides who wins.@Amazon Game Studios
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Source: AI and Games · aiandgames.com