This Steam Next Fest has around 7,000 demos — almost double the last one — and fans agree it’s the AI-sloppiest yet. But according to a new GameSpot piece by Steve Watts, the flood of AI-generated games isn’t just an annoyance for players. It’s actively killing the good games before they even launch.
Steam Next Fest (Credits: GameSpot)
How AI Slop Is Hurting Steam Next Fest
Next Fest used to be Steam’s great discovery engine: a multi-day event where developers release demos and players find unexpected gems. With roughly 7,000 demos to wade through this time, the event is becoming unwieldy — and the rise of AI models and vibe-coding has made it worse.
But the real damage, Watts argues, is the second-order effect: the cloning problem is so bad that talented developers are refusing to release demos at all. The cautionary tale is ReVamp, a stylish tower-defense game from Digital Sun where you play as Dracula defending your lair. The studio canceled its planned public playtest this week, fearing a big public demo would be downloaded, scraped by AI models, and cloned.
ReVamp’s Playtest Cancellation: Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place
“We’ve been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned, and published before the original is even out,” Digital Sun said in a statement. “With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk.”
The studio acknowledged the cruel irony: “Showing games early is how indies get seen and find the fans who keep us going, so we hope platforms keep strengthening protections for original work.” They’ll run a smaller playtest through their Discord server later this month — safer from clones, but reaching far fewer people.
Cloning a Game Now Takes 30 Minutes
Game developer Tim Ruswick demonstrated just how easy this has become: he cloned the game Polyfury with the original developer’s permission using Anthropic’s Claude AI, feeding it everything from a single sentence prompt to the actual game code. Some clones were generated in as little as 30 minutes.
Copies of popular games are nothing new — but AI has collapsed the time and skill needed to make them. The result isn’t just more bad games on Steam. It’s fewer good ones, as handcrafted indies retreat from the open demo culture that once helped them survive.
Also Read: DevGAMM Awards 2026 Nominees: 70 Games, 25 Countries, and Most Made by Tiny Teams | Drunken Goddess Reflux Cancels Public Steam Demo Over AI Copycat Fears
Source: GameSpot — read the full story there.