A new study on the proliferation of the generator AI used to develop games on Steam reveals a 681% increase in the number of titles that disclose the use of the technology. In fact, there are over 7,500 titles that disclose Genai usage from just 1,000 in 2024, according to the entirely human media.
Ichiro Lambe, a veteran game developer who wrote the study, noted that around 1,000 steam titles revealed the use of generated AI over a year ago. The intense AI tide continued to flood before that, which spurred follow-up. Lambe says his latest numbers show that he uses the AI generated in all abilities to show the propagation of the game.
Lambe says there are 7,818 titles on Steam that disclose their use of Genai. Starting in January 2024, Steam will need to add a new field to the content survey that developers must fill out when submitting games to the platform, and declare to developers how they are using AI in game development. Use cases are broadly divided into two categories: live-generated, created with AI. While the game is running – And it was pre-generated.
This surge shows a 681% increase in total titles using Genai compared to last April. However, that number represents only 7% of the entire Steam library, and about 114,000 titles. Perhaps more interestingly, there was an exponential influx in 2025, with five (20%) of all titles released in 2025 featuring Genai in one way or another.
Useful, Lambe provides a breakdown of what exactly Genai uses can be used in certain games production. As you can imagine, visual asset generation is large, with about 60% of the disclosure mentioning it to be used to create characters, backgrounds, models, textures, and more.
As mentioned before, there is also audio generation. This could mean anything from background music to voiceovers, narration, and even character voices using text-to-tic tools.
The Text and Story Generation also shows developers leaning against LLM to make copies, covering everything from item descriptions to the entire story arc.
Perhaps more vague is that developers are using AI in their marketing and promotional materials in Steam stores for game descriptions, sections and promotional images.
Finally, Lambe says there is a lot of code generation assistance going on.
However, Lambe's Insight also points out that games are using more and more AI during runtime. This is the aforementioned live generation category that developers must declare. His notes include using Genai to flag player-created attack material, using LLMS to generate an entire 3D world based on player-created prompts, and real-time game mechanic decisions.
While attitudes towards AI tend to be divisive, according to a Lambe report, the response is not completely negative, highlighting games that lead AI in ads and have positive reviews.
If you've been wondering, the biggest game featuring Genai for the past 12 months is My summer car, liar bar, quinfall, and inzoi. The biggest title is the former, which sells 2.5 million copies and features paintings generated by AI within the main house. This also highlights how different the dependency on AI is across the title.
Perhaps noteworthy by developers' attention and the sense that Genai could perturb users, Lambe says that developers are seeing more frequent instances of carefully crafted languages that disclose their use of AI in a defensive way, reassuring potential customers about their inclusion.
Questions remain about the consumer recruitment of AI-assisted steam titles. Of course, there are big blind spots in the data. That is, whether some games have not disclosed their use of AI.
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