// PC GAMER — GAMING
Steam Week in Review: More than 300 games released on Steam last week, and 120 of them had AI disclosures
All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending June 14.
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Android Who Dreams of Stars looks like the kind of visual novel that has appeared weekly on Steam for over a decade. Its trailer shows a series of static sci-fi anime images accompanied by simple plaintive music. It centres around "autonomous android" Eve Nova whose existence is cause for wonder and concern in a futuristic Tokyo governed by AI. In this future, "war and hunger [are] treated as relics of the past" thanks to the governing prowess of said AI.
Uh, did AI write this? Turns out, yes. Developed by JinCycle, who has released 11 games on Steam since 2020, Android Who Dreams of Stars uses AI generated content for its "artwork, sound, story, localization, and store assets". In other words: pretty much every element the user interacts with is made by AI. Amusingly, its low-effort trailer even includes an erroneous Steam screenshot chime.
My Summer Love Memories is an FMV romance game whose videos, images and music were created using generative AI. Even its dialogue was composed by LLM. Meanwhile, as Ted Litchfield pointed out yesterday, Kryonull is another visual novel whose "voices in the game, as well as on the store page" were generated using AI. The developer NovelkaGames is charging a cheeky $100 for it, leading some in the Steam discussion forum to speculate that it's a money-laundering exercise.
$100 AI-generated games aren't new, though. Typical NPC was developed by SmogGames, a fairly prolific slop vendor. That visual novel released on May 11 for $100, and according to its disclosure, "all images used in the game were AI-generated. All images on the story page were also AI-generated". SmogGames issued another $100 serving of churn on June 13 with After the Hero, though apparently only its images—and not its very many words—were AI generated. The wording of their disclosures is eerily similar.
Joining SmogGames in this mysterious pricing exercise is KalendulaGames (notice a consistency in naming convention?) who released Velvet Emergency for $110, and in May, released Blood in the Ice and Signal Snow on the same day, both for $100, and all with heavy AI disclosures.
I clicked into every Steam listing for games released from June 9 here in Australia through to, well, about an hour or so ago. That's just under a full week. During that period 338 new games released, and 120 of those had an AI disclosure.
An AI disclosure doesn't mean a game is predominantly made with AI like those listed above. Many developers disclose AI use for store page assets, especially for capsule images. While that's a dubious creative and business decision—I can always immediately tell when a game's capsule image is AI generated, making it easy to skip—it may not affect the actual game it's advertising.
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