Half of New Steam Games Will Flag AI Use
One in three new Steam releases now carries an AI disclosure. A store-wide census says the figure reaches half of all new games by 2028.
For the first time, roughly one in three new games on Steam ships with an AI disclosure attached. Follow that line forward and it ends somewhere uncomfortable: by 2027 or 2028, about half of every new release on the store could carry the label. That is not an alarmist prediction. It is a straight trend line drawn from a census of the entire store.
The census
The numbers come from Sulka Haro, a developer and former Habbo Hotel designer, who tallied every Steam release carrying a generative AI disclosure going back to January 2024, when Valve first required the declaration. The study covered roughly 53,600 games released between July 2023 and July 2026. One month after the rule took effect, about 7 percent of new releases carried a disclosure. By mid-2026 the figure had climbed to about 31 percent, or one in every three new games, up from effectively zero before the disclosure field existed. PC Gamer's weekly Steam review counted the trend from the ground: one week in August saw more than 300 new releases, and 120 of them carried AI disclosures. Extend the curve and half of all new Steam games carry the label by 2028.
Who is actually making them
The flood is not industrial. Haro found that 80 percent of Steam's roughly 37,000 publishers have never shipped an AI-flagged game, and of those that have, 89 percent shipped exactly one. What is growing is a small cohort of AI-first developers: they are about three times more likely to ship five or more titles than their peers, and nearly all of Steam's new-release growth in the study period came from flagged games while the output of non-AI developers held flat. The market has already voted on the batch. A GameOracle study of 2025 releases found that disclosed-AI games earn roughly half the first-month reviews of comparable non-AI titles, and other estimates put their purchase conversion at about 55 percent of normal. Meanwhile the June 2026 Steam Next Fest ran 40 percent of its demos with an AI disclosure, and almost none of them broke into the month's best sellers.
The label is becoming a badge
Valve refined the rule in January 2026: efficiency tools, code assistants, and bug hunting no longer require disclosure, but anything players see, hear, or read, from art and audio to story and marketing, does. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney attacked the labels as irresponsible. Most indie developers disagree. When GamesRadar surveyed more than thirty indies, the majority backed the requirement, and Pocketpair's publishing lead put it plainly: if players do not want AI, that settles it. Players have built their own tools on top, including a browser extension that blurs or hides flagged games outright. For hand-crafted indies, the disclosure system is quietly turning into marketing: in a store where a third of the shelf admits to AI, saying nothing was made by machines is starting to look like a feature.