Steam Next Fest drowns in demos, and the complaint is AI

This time the crowd is just too big. Next Fest, Valve's free demo festival, ran on Steam from 19 to 26 October 2026, and by SteamDB's count it opened with between 7,100 and 7,200 demos. If you go by GameDiscoverCo's figures, that number was around 900 in October 2023.

The complaints started in the first two days. Nexxtic, lead developer of Selaco, wrote on Bluesky on 19 October that this was the most depressing Next Fest he had seen. A Reddit post calling the festival "AI Slop Fest" collected more than 11,000 votes. Players, for their part, want Valve to add an AI filter. Mind you, nobody has a firm number. On Steam the AI disclosure is made by the developer, and Valve does not check those disclosures. Two sites worked from SteamDB data: GamingOnLinux counted at least 1,054 demos with a disclosure, PC Guide counted 2,593 (about 36 percent; at the June festival the share was reportedly around 20 percent). Valve has not answered the criticism.

To my mind the real problem is less the AI than the store's shop window. Finding a small handmade game among seven thousand demos was hard enough already. Clones stamped out of the same mould make it harder still. A filter would make the reader's job a little easier.