Every fifth game on Steam in 2025 was created with the help of AI, — report

In the first half of 2025, Steam accumulated a lot of new games — every fifth of them was officially developed using generative AI.

The author of the study, Ichiro Lambe, mentioned in the Totally Human Media report that last year Valve opens a platform for developers using GenAI to create a game. He decided to find out how many such games have been released. It turns out that in less than 7 months, the platform has already accumulated 7818 such projects, which is about 7% of the entire Steam library, which now contains more than 114 thousand games. In 2024, there were about a thousand such games, which is a 700% increase per year.

But that’s not the main thing. The most interesting thing is that almost every fifth new release this year uses AI in at least some form. It can be anything: the generation of models, textures, illustrations, soundtracks, voices, even dialogs or descriptions of objects. According to Lambe, about 60% of such cases involve visual elements: characters, backgrounds, 3D models, textures. Other options include generating sound, text, code, and marketing materials for Steam pages.

Moreover, a separate trend is games where AI works directly during gameplay. For example, it moderates player-generated content or creates new worlds based on real-time prompts. Even popular releases are already openly using GenAI. The largest game on the list is My Summer Car, which has sold over 2.5 million copies. Here, AI generated only the paintings hanging in the main house. And in InZOI, which was called «The Sims on maximals», players themselves can create textures and clothing using generative AI.

Lambe adds that developers are increasingly trying to be as careful as possible when mentioning GenAI so as not to scare players. Although some developers are trying to hide the use of AI, as was the case with The Alters. However, there is no denying that in the future studios will increasingly rely on such technologies. The tech giants are trying to be the first to grab the opportunity to save money, so in the spring Microsoft has released the Muse AI gaming model. And after a while she showed An AI version of the classic Quake 2. So, there will only be more games using AI, and the game dev will continue to grow feverish about mass layoffs.

Source: Totally Human Media