// PC GAMER — GAMING
Steam Week in Review: spammy, AI-generated capsule art is a pox, and it makes browsing Steam less fun
All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending June 22.
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Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week's new games on Steam. I've always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it's also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy.
But if I'm perfectly honest, the reason I've always loved to browse through Steam's raw and unfiltered new release list is because it's fun: Steam is hilarious and bizarre. For every earnestly developed roguelite deckbuilder or metroidvania there's something like, I dunno, Fuck's Quest 2, or Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Lost in the murkier corners of Steam, untouched by recommendation algorithms, are some of the strangest, most distinctive pieces of software you're likely to ever see, most of which won't ever make the front page.
Most people don't see these games. What we see on Steam's front page is overwhelmingly determined by what Steam already knows about our gaming habits, or what's trending in our region, or what's discounted. Which is increasingly for the best, because in 2026—and I hate to complain about this—Steam bulges with more useless, tasteless, low-effort churn than ever before. It increasingly feels like a waste of time scratching beneath the guardrailed, algorithmic surface.
As I pointed out last week, AI-generated games are rife on Steam. You can usually tell straight away because the capsule art is obviously AI-generated, with that tell-tale uncanny AI sheen. Despite how ostensibly low effort these artefacts are, there's a uniformity among them that you may charitably call an aesthetic.
Take Store Simulator Pettikkada and Chiggas - Survival of the Mitiest as examples. That the capsule art is AI generated for both is basically unquestionable the moment you see it. Pettikkada has that familiar near-photographic illustrated realism that smacks vaguely of Grand Theft Auto loading screen art, while Chiggas adopts the wide-eyed Pixar tack, a style so ubiquitous in popular culture that it's basically become a generative AI default setting. Click through to the store pages themselves and the screenshots reveal an audacious disjuncture between capsule art and the game you actually get.
I do acknowledge that this contrast has been a feature of box art since the beginning of the medium. Atari 2600 box art never looked like the Atari 2600 game on the cartridge, for example. Doom didn't look like this. But key art created with generative AI has that certain grotesquely generic patina which immediately tells you that clicking through will be pointless and perhaps harmful to your senses.
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In the distant olden days before generative AI, a game's Steam capsule art and the general professionalism or care afforded to it, could signal straight away whether a game was likely a 99 cent asset flip or a possible unsung indie gem. Now there's greater ambiguity. Chiggas could very well have the same production values as The Smurfs - Dreams, until we click through to the page itself and discover its cheap, rudimentary in-game screenshots.