AI-Tagged Games on Steam Have Increased 40x in Two Years — While Regular Releases Barely Grew

The feeling that Steam has been flooded with games isn't an illusion, and there's exactly one explanation for it. Finnish developer Sulka Haro, co-founder of the studio behind the multiplayer game Pax Dei, conducted a full census of all 53,597 games released on the storefront between mid-2023 and mid-2026. Not a sample — every single one. And the picture that came out of it is unambiguous: the record release numbers of the past few years are entirely driven by an AI wave.

The count became possible thanks to Valve itself. Since January 2024, developers have been required to disclose on a game's store page whether generative AI was used in making it. The disclosure is machine-readable, which means it can be pulled across the whole catalog and used to track the wave rolling through the industry almost month by month.

Here are the numbers. Before the mandatory disclosure took effect, roughly thirteen AI-flagged games came out per month. Now it's around 530. Meanwhile, releases without AI tags have barely grown over the same period — from about 1,030 to 1,320 per month. In other words, human studios haven't started working several times faster; a parallel stream simply appeared alongside them. The share of tagged games was 10.9% in 2024, 19.9% in 2025, and hit 40% of all new releases during one week in June 2026.

The showcase for this pipeline is Polish publisher PlayWay, the company behind Thief Simulator, Car Mechanic Simulator, and Jesus Christ Simulator. Its catalog currently holds 474 entries, more than a hundred of which still haven't launched — a wall of "coming soon," "sometime in 2026," and "Q1 2027." In just the past month alone, 16 projects shipped. The company's business model has been well known for a while and, to its credit, it's an honest one: the publisher doesn't pretend to know the secret to a hit. It opens dozens of store pages for raw concepts, watches which ones build up wishlists, and only pushes the ones that catch on through to release. It works reasonably well — the upcoming Low-Budget Repairs already has over a million wishlist adds.

The real problem lies elsewhere. The AI disclosure works like a simple on/off switch: a game where a single texture was run through an upscaler and a game entirely assembled by a generator get the exact same line on their store page. As of January 16, 2026, Valve also narrowed the requirement further — only what the player actually sees needs to be disclosed, and development-support tools no longer fall under the rule at all. So the tag alone can't tell you the scale or nature of the AI use involved.

Haro's data does show something more interesting, though. Among tagged games that failed to find an audience, 72% used AI specifically for imagery — the most visible and most disliked use case among players. But the breakdown looks different for commercially successful projects: voice acting shows up in 24% versus 8%, localization in 18% versus 6%, plus text and music. In other words, the winners are the ones using AI in places players don't look directly at, and as an amplifier rather than a replacement for the work itself.

The wave isn't bringing in much money, either. AI-tagged games make up a third of new releases but account for only 10 to 27 percent of revenue, and the store's baseline rule still holds: roughly 94% of all money goes to the top one percent of games. Generation has made shipping a game cheap, but it hasn't made anyone actually want it. The real damage falls on small studios without a publisher — breaking through hundreds of monthly simulators and visual novels has gotten noticeably harder for them.

Do you pay attention to the AI disclosure tag on a game's store page? Tell us in the comments whether it affects your decision to buy.