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Steam passed 2025's total of new games on 16 October: 21,388 so far, about 66 a day
Steam has had more new games in 2026 than all of 2025, and it's only October. A study of 53,597 releases says AI-labelled games make up most of the growth. But Valve's rules mean vibe-coded games don't have to say so, and there's no way to filter any of it out.
Steam passed 2025's total of new games on 16 October: 21,388 so far, about 66 a day
A census of 53,597 Steam games found AI-labelled releases grew from 10.9% (2024) to 30.8% (2026 so far)
Haro: "60–90% of the growth" in monthly releases is AI-flagged games, and most don't sell
Since January 2026, Valve's AI disclosure covers art, sound and text, not code, so vibe-coded games can ship with no label
Steam has no AI filter and no AI-coded tag. SteamDB and itch.io offer filters
It’s only October, and Steam has already had more new games in 2026 than in the whole of 2025. According to SteamDB figures reported by Kotaku, 21,388 games had launched this year by 16 October, beating 2025’s 21,248, with the two busiest months still to go. That’s about 66 new games a day, up from 55 last year, and SteamPageAnalyzer reckons 2026 will finish on at least 24,000.
Kotaku points the finger at vibe-coded games, which are made by getting AI to write the code. So is that what’s actually flooding Steam? And will we get a tag to filter them out? We dug in. The short answers: partly, nobody can actually measure it, and no.
The best data comes from Sulka Haro, former lead designer on Habbo Hotel and now CEO of Mainframe Industries (the studio behind Pax Dei). In July, Haro went through every single game released on Steam between July 2023 and July 2026, all 53,597 of them, and checked which ones carry Steam’s AI disclosure.
The bit that matters: games without the AI label have only grown from about 1,030 to 1,320 a month since the disclosure arrived in 2024. AI-labelled games now add about 530 a month on their own. As Haro puts it: “Depending on the window you pick, 60–90% of the growth in monthly Steam releases is AI-flagged games.”
Are people buying them? Mostly not. In the first quarter of 2026, AI-labelled games were 28% of new releases but only 17% of estimated sales. In the second quarter it was 33% of releases and 10% of sales. Haro’s own caveat is fair, though: most AI-labelled games are small games from small teams, and those mostly struggle on Steam whether they used AI or not. The two biggest AI-labelled games on Steam are Crimson Desert and ARC Raiders, both of which spent years in development.
Here’s what most people don’t know. Steam’s AI disclosure is about what you see and hear in a game, not how it was made. Valve rewrote the rules in January 2026, and the developer survey now says:
“We are aware that many modern game development environments have AI powered tools built into them. Efficiency gains through the use of these tools is not the focus of this section. Instead, it is concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players. This includes content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.”
Code isn’t on that list. Valve hasn’t spelled out “code is exempt” in so many words, but as VGC reported when the rules changed, AI coding tools don’t need a disclosure. So a game written entirely by AI, using hand-made or stock art, can go on sale on Steam with no AI label at all.
That means Haro’s numbers measure AI art, voices and text, not vibe coding. Nobody can say how many of 2026’s releases were vibe-coded, because there’s no data. Kotaku might be right, but the honest answer is that we don’t know, and Valve’s rules make sure nobody can find out.
Not from Valve, as far as we can find:
The only real gatekeeper on Steam is still the US$100 Steam Direct fee per game. That hasn’t changed, and it’s clearly not stopping anyone. Valve’s answer so far is better recommendations, like the Personal Calendar on the Steam homepage, which picks upcoming games based on your wishlist and the tags you play.
Making games with AI has gone wild in the last few months. In July, 404 Media reported on vibe-coded clones of an indie prototype that one cloner said took “several prompts and roughly a day”. This month, Kotaku reported hundreds of AI-made browser ports of classic games springing up after Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 arrived. Activision has already sent DMCA notices against vibe-coded Call of Duty browser ports that used ripped assets. And in the most 2026 story possible, the makers of a Needle In A Haystack clone are upset that someone used AI to clone their clone.
The numbers are real. Steam is drowning, and AI-labelled games are most of the extra water. But let’s not pretend vibe coding automatically means bad. Plenty of rubbish was being shovelled onto Steam long before AI, and Haro’s data shows most of these games die quietly either way. Good games built with AI tools aren’t the problem. The problem is the flood of quick clones and asset flips that push a good indie game off page one.
Where Valve deserves a serve is transparency. Making developers disclose AI art and then giving players no way to filter it is half a job. And writing the rules so AI-written code never has to be declared means the label tells you less every month. A US$100 fee was a speed bump in 2017. In 2026 it’s nothing. If Valve can build a recommendation system that knows exactly which roguelikes we’ll buy, it can build a toggle that says “hide AI-labelled games”. Players deserve to make that call themselves.
Would you filter out AI-made games if Steam let you, or do you only care if it’s fun? Tell us in the comments, or come and argue about it in the GetRekt Discord.
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