Steam asks developers to disclose when a game uses generative AI, and in July 2026 that small box on the store page turned into a proper fight. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney called Steam's AI disclosure a "Scarlet Letter of AI" that invites a pile-on before a game gets a fair look, as reported by VGC. Bellular News ran the other side of it under a blunter headline: Steam users are punishing AI games. We think the label is clumsy and still worth keeping, and the reason has less to do with AI than with how people decide what to buy on Steam.
What Steam's AI disclosure actually covers
Going by VGC's summary, Valve's rule has two parts. Developers have to disclose when AI is used to generate content that ships in the game (art, audio, text and so on), and when a game generates AI content live while you play. It doesn't treat every development helper the same way. A code assistant in an engineer's editor isn't in the same category as a character improvising dialogue in the build you bought.
That distinction is the right one. The second case changes what the player experiences, and the first mostly doesn't. Players might care about both, but only one of them is plainly the buyer's business.
Sweeney's fair point
Store labels do get blunt. Steam tags start out useful and end up stretched over half the catalogue ("soulslike", "cozy", "roguelite", "survival"). An AI flag can go the same way. Some players will see it and leave. Others will treat it as a proxy for quality, or as a moral line. A studio that used an image generator to rough out concepts, then paid artists to paint every final asset, can end up with the same stigma as a shovelware page full of generated art.
So yes, the current label is crude. That's a case for making the disclosure more specific, though, not for removing it. As Techdirt put it in response to Sweeney, players have a right to know what they're buying. If the label costs a game sales, it's fair to ask whether the label is unfair, and also whether players are reacting to something real in the work.
The capsule art problem
Most players never read the disclosure box. The first place they run into generative AI on Steam is the capsule art, the little key image on every tile.
In June, PC Gamer's weekly Steam column complained that spammy AI capsule art makes browsing Steam less fun, and anyone who scrolls the raw new-releases list knows what they meant. More and more games arrive with polished, generic key art: the fantasy hero, the neon soldier, the cozy shopfront, the horror face. Then the screenshots underneath look nothing like it.
Old box art lied all the time, so this isn't a new sin. What's changed is that bad art used to be bad in a specific way. A wonky hand-drawn capsule told you something about the person who made the game, maybe that they had no budget and a weird idea, and that was often a good sign. Generated art is smooth and forgettable. It looks like a genre and gives you no clue about who made the game or what it's actually like.
That hurts the games we'd most like people to find. When a lot of pages overpromise, players scroll faster and assume the worst. The small sincere game with no marketing budget ends up on the same shelf, dressed in the same visual language, as the low-effort churn.
Players aren't wrong to care how a game was made
The argument gets flattened fast. One side treats every AI-assisted asset as theft. The other treats any objection as nostalgia from people who don't understand tools. Most players are somewhere else. They want to know whether a game was made with care, and production details have always fed into that.
We care when a game was made by one person over seven years. We care when localisation was rushed, or when a soundtrack was recorded with a real orchestra rather than built from stock loops. Players have also been trained to read store pages like contracts: editions, season passes, online requirements, kernel anti-cheat, launcher accounts. AI disclosure didn't create that suspicion. It just became the latest thing on the list.
What better disclosure would look like
"Was AI used?" is too blunt a question. A useful disclosure would answer a few more specific ones:
- Where? Concept exploration, final art, voice, dialogue, code, localisation, live in-game generation.
- Does the player see or hear it? Placeholder art that was replaced before launch is a different thing from generated voice lines in the final build.
- Who reviewed it? An artist-directed pipeline and unedited output aren't the same.
- Did it replace credited work? If a role that would normally appear in the credits was generated, say so.
None of that fits on a checkbox. It fits in a short paragraph on the store page, in developer notes or in an interview. If a studio's use really is careful and limited, it has every reason to explain it in plain language. If the explanation sounds embarrassing written down, the player learns something from that too.
How to judge an AI-labelled game as a player
Our own approach is unexciting. We don't skip every game with an AI note, and we don't pretend it never matters. What we look at:
- Do the screenshots match the capsule? If the key art is generated and the game looks nothing like it, that says something about the rest of the page.
- Read what the developer wrote in the disclosure. Some are specific and reassuring. Some are vague on purpose.
- Look at the developer's other work. A studio with a history of handmade games using a tool for one part of the pipeline is a different case from a publisher that launches forty games a year.
- Wait for someone you trust. A friend's two-hour impression tells you more about whether a game has a pulse than any label.
That last one is where we think discovery is heading anyway. When the store is noisy and its signals are blunt, people fall back on each other: smaller curators, developers they follow directly, friends whose taste they know. It's part of why we built Perthro around following people rather than a trending tab. A short review from someone who actually played the thing is still the best filter we've found. If you're digging through new releases right now, we collected more ways to do it in how to find indie games the storefront won't show you.
