Art is the use Steam Next Fest developers mention most when they disclose AI, according to a November 4 analysis by DreamEp (@dreamep.bsky.social), founder of the Steam marketing tool NextWishlist, posted as a thread on Bluesky. DreamEp read the 2,443 AI disclosures on games in October's Next Fest and found art in 72% of them; the most common disclosure covered art alone.
After art came translation (29%), writing (26%), the store page or trailer (26%), code (20%), music (19%), sound effects (18%) and voices (7%). Disclosures can list several uses, so shares overlap. They are based on the 2,421 disclosures written in English or another Latin-script language.
Most disclosures are vague. Only 117 name a product, led by Suno or Udio (38), Claude (31), ElevenLabs (30) and ChatGPT (22). The median disclosure runs 33 words, 315 use 10 words or fewer, and 7% don't say what the AI produced. About 47% say the developer reviewed and edited the output, 52 call the AI content a placeholder, 67 say their tools are licensed or "ethical", and 53 games create AI content during play rather than before release.
The mix shifts with a game's following. Music appears in 19% of disclosures from games with under 50 Steam followers but 5% of those with 500 or more. In a first thread on November 3, DreamEp found that 36% of 6,826 Next Fest pages disclosed AI, falling to none of the 28 games with 10,000-plus followers.
Why it matters: AIGamer has reported how often games disclose AI, about 1 in 3 Next Fest demos in our October 29 story. This count shows what the label covers: mostly art, and seldom which tool or how much.
Caveat: this is one developer's keyword count of self-reported text, not Valve data, and AIGamer has not rerun it. DreamEp found uses by matching keywords sentence by sentence, and is building NextWishlist, in free closed beta, on the same data. Since January, Valve's disclosure form has said it is concerned with AI content that ships to players, not efficiency gains from AI tools used during development, so code is likely undercounted. The 2,443 total is lower than the 2,596 and 2,628 snapshot counts of SteamDB's disclosure tag in our earlier story.
The next test is Valve's February 2027 Next Fest, which runs February 22 to March 1, when the same count would show whether disclosures get more specific.
