AI in Games: The Impact On Sales

AI in Games: The Impact On Sales<br>Share:

Author: Ross Burton, PhD, Head of Product and Data<br>Category: Data Analysis<br>Published: 12/17/2025<br>Updated: 12/6/2025

Does Using AI Tank Sales?

In part 1 of this series on generative AI on Steam we showed how AI disclosure is accelerating rapidly, with ~21% of games released in 2025 declaring some form of AI use (as of November). In this blog, we'll be tackling the second and more tricky part of our analysis: how is the use of AI impacting sales?

There are a bunch of questions we can ask here all fuelled by assumptions around how players perceive AI and the impact of the technology on game quality. Do players actively avoid games with AI disclosures? Are players oblivious to the use of AI? Does using AI inherently reduce the quality of games, impacting sales? Is generative AI only used by inexperienced or under-resourced teams, biasing the impact on sales in the first place?

All of these questions are incredibly complicated. We're going to try and address this with a very thoughtful statistical analysis where we'll take a lot of care to make sure we're not biasing our results. Fundamentally we're going to focus on one clear question: "If a developer uses AI, how many reviews will their game get compared to if they didn't use AI?"

You might immediately ask "Wait? Reviews? I thought we're talking about sales here?". Unfortunately, the number of sales is only known by the developer and therefore we will be focusing on the number of reviews, which is a good proxy for the number of sales; this proxy is used across the industry, has been written about at length, and is summarised in our blog about how you can estimate Steam sales.

To answer our question in full we're going to have to make a lot of tricky decisions, so lets lay it all out so you understand our assumptions going into this:

Our biggest assumption is all this is that developers declare their AI usage on Steam. This seems like a reasonable assumption since it is strict Steam policy: developers must declare when and how AI is being used during game development. Of course, it is possible that some developers may choose not to disclose AI use, but ignoring such a clear policy from the platform that controls your primary income would be riskier than simply declaring AI use truthfully, so we stuck to our assumption here.

We also decided to keep things simple and treat AI declaration as meaning "AI was used in development somewhere". We know this isn't perfect, but as we showed in part 1, AI disclosures are really messy and splitting our data up based on the content of the disclosures risked introducing a lot of potential bias.

Reviews on Steam are complicated and not all of them directly reflect sales. We recently changed how we collect review data at Game Oracle, ensuring we only measure reviews directly from Steam purchases. However, for this analysis we couldn't guarantee this is the case. We therefore considered all reviews (regardless of whether they were purchased via a third-party or not) under the assumption that the total number of reviews is highly correlated with actual sales; we think this assumption is fair.

Most game sales occur immediately after launch, therefore, as our outcome we measured the total number of reviews received in the first month after release.

Since AI disclosure is a relatively new factor in the Steam marketplace and our previous analysis showed between 15 - 25% of releases each month had an AI disclosure, we focused our analysis exclusively on games released between January and October 2025; we excluded November because, at the time of writing this, we didn't have the complete first month post-release data for all the games released in November.

We excluded games that are free-to-play or currently unreleased (as of November 2025), so up-front our analysis is only relevant to commercial projects.

Even after deciding on the assumptions above, we then had to think really deeply about what we could measure and how we would analyse the total effect using AI has on the total reviews a game receives. The best way to do this is to draw out a diagram. In statistics we call this a Causal Graph.

Our causal graph showing all our assumptions around what causes the use of AI and the total number of reviews received in the first month after release. One look at our diagram above and you're probably thinking "oh, I get it, so you had a mental break right?". But please stick with us...<br>Realistic depiction of us drawing our causal graph Our causal diagram is just a visual way of saying "here is what we think impacts sales and also impacts whether a developer uses AI". Each arrow is saying "I assume X has some causal effect on Y". The orange circle represents whether AI was used in development or not and the green circle is the outcome i.e. the total number of reviews received in the first month post-release.

We think using AI will impact the average...