Three years of AI on Steam - Sulka Haro

Sulka Haro

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Three years of AI on Steam

Sulka Haro<br>Jul 13, 2026

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A data study of ~53,600 Steam game releases from mid-2023 to mid-2026.<br>Since January 2024, Valve has required developers to disclose AI-generated content on their Steam store pages. That disclosure is a small, machine-readable footprint — and if you collect it for every game, month by month, you can watch the entire generative-AI wave roll through the games industry in real time.<br>So I did. This post is built from a full census of 53,597 games released between July 2023 and July 2026 — not a sample. For each one I recorded whether its store page carries the “AI Generated Content Disclosure” section, when the flag first appeared, an estimate of its revenue, and the actual text developers wrote. Here’s what the data says.

1. The disclosure was switched on in 2024 — then adoption climbed

One caveat first, because it’s essential to reading this chart: Steam’s AI-disclosure mechanism did not exist before January 2024. There was no field to fill in and nothing to show on a store page, so contemporaneous AI disclosure in 2023 was structurally zero — not low, impossible.<br>So what’s the ~1% sitting under the shaded 2023 stretch? It’s entirely retroactive : a small number of older games later went back and added the flag once Valve’s system went live (more on that in §7). Read the pre-2024 portion as a near-zero baseline that only exists because I’m measuring today’s flags against historical release dates — not as early adoption.<br>What the data shows cleanly is the moment the mechanism turned on. The first cohorts submitted under the new rule surface in February 2024, and the flagged share jumps from ~1% (retroactive noise) to ~7% (real, at-submission disclosure) in a single month — then climbs steadily:

By mid-2026, roughly one in three new Steam games carries a genuine, at-submission AI disclosure — a real adoption ramp built on top of a baseline that started at literal zero.

2. The launch boom is an AI boom

Steam’s release volume has grown a lot — but the growth isn’t evenly spread. Non-AI launches have risen only modestly (~1,030 → ~1,320 per month), while AI-flagged launches went from a rounding error (~13/month pre-mandate) to ~530/month. Depending on the window you pick, 60–90% of the growth in monthly Steam releases is AI-flagged games. The record-setting months of 2026 are the blue layer stacking up, not a surge in traditional development.

3. Where it’s heading

Extrapolation is not prophecy, so this is a scenario, not a forecast. But if the current trajectory holds, AI-disclosed games cross ~50% of all Steam releases somewhere in 2027–2028. The band reflects two models: a saturating curve (plateau near 50%) and a straight-line continuation.

4. But almost none of them make money — because almost no games do

Before comparing AI to non-AI economically, you have to internalize how brutally hit-driven the platform is. Across the measured games:<br>The top 1% of titles capture ~94% of all estimated revenue.

The top 10 games alone account for ~62%.

The median game that gets any reviews at all makes an estimated ~$300 ; about 28% get zero reviews (≈ no measurable sales).

This is why “AI revenue” lurches around quarter to quarter: it’s not a broad trend, it’s whether one or two AI titles happened to hit. In the chart above, the coral slice is just the top two AI games each quarter — routinely 45–79% of all AI revenue. More AI games shipping barely moves the needle; landing a hit moves everything.

5. AI’s share of sales is rising — on volume, not skill

Measuring AI’s share of sales (using review counts as a units proxy, and stripping out re-dated back-catalog titles whose reviews span years), the share grew from ~3–6% in 2024 to ~10–27% across late 2025 and 2026. It’s real growth — but it still sits well below AI’s ~33% share of launches , and it’s volatile because it rides on hits.

Crucially, when you control for time-on-market by comparing AI to non-AI within each launch month, the per-game picture is flat. An AI-flagged game reaches a real modest-success tier (≥100 reviews ≈ ~3,000 sales) at only about 55% of the non-AI rate — and that ratio hasn’t improved in two years. So AI’s rising sales share is currently a volume story, not a quality story : more shots on goal, not individual AI games converting better. With models improving this might change, and it’s maybe worth noting the games using latest models & other AI tools are still in development.

6. What AI is used for — and how hits differ from flops

There’s a trap here: looking only at successful AI games tells you what winners do, not what the population does — and the population is 87% commercial non-performers. So I scraped the disclosure text for two groups: the 138 that succeeded (≥1,000 reviews) and a random 400 that flopped (

A bit surprisingly, across both, disclosed AI is overwhelmingly visual — but...