What once began as a shining flagship project for the indie scene now threatens to be completely overwhelmed by a flood of substandard software. The currently ongoing Steam Next Fest in October 2026 was supposed to be the stage for up-and-coming developers, playable demos, and fresh game ideas. Instead, a recent report by Kotaku journalist Zack Zwiezen paints a sobering picture: The event is suffering from an unprecedented flood of thousands of hastily cobbled-together AI demos and clones while Valve watches passively.

The Explosion in Numbers: From 900 to over 7,000 Demos

The decline of the format is clearly visible in the numbers. While the Next Fest a few years ago still allowed for a manageable, handpicked browsing experience, this year's edition breaks all limits:

  • October 2023: Around 900 demos competed for the community's attention.

  • October 2024: The catalog grew to about 2,700 playable demos.

  • June 2026: With already 4,300 demos, overload was becoming apparent.

  • October 2026: Nearly 7,100 free demos are currently online simultaneously.

With this sheer volume, organic discovery for smaller studios has simply become impossible. What once was a springboard to land on wishlists and convince publishers has turned into an insurmountable noise, in which even outstanding projects disappear without a trace.

“Vibe-Coding” and Assembly-Line Software Stifle True Creativity

The main problem isn't just quantity, but the alarming deterioration of quality. A significant portion of current demos consists of so-called “AI slop” — software pieced together within a few hours using AI coding tools like Claude or specialized generators.

Many developers don't even hide this origin: In official transparency notes on Steam, numerous titles openly disclose that large parts of the program code as well as graphical assets were entirely created by artificial intelligence. The result is unfinished, soulless clones of well-known game concepts that flood the fest. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky, the mood among developers, industry journalists, and players has accordingly shifted: frustration and resignation dominate the feeds, as the earlier spirit of discovery is suffocated by the generative flood.

Valve’s Refusal to Curate Backfires

Especially sharp criticism is directed at operator Valve. The platform giant still stubbornly refuses to introduce human curation or editorial barriers for events like the Next Fest. Instead, the company continues to rely rigidly on automated algorithms and the community's reporting and tagging system — an approach that is ultimately collapsing given the industrial speed of modern AI tools.

That competitor Epic Games even openly promotes generative AI and automated “vibe-coding” removes any pressure on Valve to enforce quality standards. Appropriately, October 2026 marked another bitter milestone: more games have already been released on Steam this calendar year than in the entire year of 2025. The current Next Fest feels like a sinister portent for the future of digital distribution — a market that threatens to drown in its own unfiltered mass.