The Surprising Number of Steam Games that Use GenAI
I haven't yet used this fancy new tech in any of our catalog, but I enjoy playing around with it. My pièce de résistance, I call "Five Fingers on My Right Hand":
Yes, this is high art. Please try to hold your applause, if you have hands!
To be fair, AI generators mostly get fingers right these days. But even with these advances, imagery generated by DALL*E, the zillion offshoots of Stable Diffusion, and even Midjourney are often easily detectable. They have a look to them!
A Chance Meeting
This morning, I saw a Steam game pop up on We ❤ Every Game's fancy-pants Fire Hose hub. It kinda looked like it used art created with Midjourney:
The Beasts in the Shadows shots all bear some of the tool’s hallmarks, with occasional strands of hair disconnected from the rest of the head hair as well as some artifacts you get when you upscale from MJ's 1456x816 to 1920x1080. I mean, it kinda has a Midjourney graphic novel look to it. Here’s a Midjourney image from the prompt, “a gritty graphic novel illustration of a woman“:
Now, fair game—the developer makes it clear right on their Steam Store Page that they use GenAI:
AI GENERATED CONTENT DISCLOSURE
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this: This game and associated materials uses AI generated audio and visual graphics content. All AI generated content is commercially licensed from the industries leading AI generation platforms.
These shiny new disclosures are the result of Valve’s evolving stance on games that use GenAI. They initially pumped the brakes on games generated with AI, then, earlier this year, came up with a policy:
“[We] are updating the Content Survey that developers fill out when submitting to Steam. The survey now includes a new AI disclosure section, where you’ll need to describe how you are using AI in the development and execution of your game.”
This allows devs to use GenAI pretty broadly, so long as they disclose how it’s used.
So, What All Uses GenAI?
I was curious how many games used any of the tech (or, at least disclosed such usage). It’s pretty straightforward to figure that out, as any game whose Content Survey discloses GenAI use will have it in the About section:
So, I ran a script to snag all of those, and I asked it a question:
Me: Hey, Computer, how many games on Steam use GenAI?
And, being a Python script, it answered dutifully if gradually:
Script: ONE THOUSAND.
Wow! This was an order of magnitude more than I expected! Here are some examples:
The Great Rebellion (99% positive of 280 reviews):
“Some of the backgrounds in a few levels are based on images created with AI, as well as a few props in the levels. They were only used as a basis to start from and have been heavily edited manually afterwards to make them fit with the rest of the game's pixel art artstyle.”
Atman: Rebel Flame (90% positive of 188 reviews):
During the game design process, we used advanced AI tools to generate some pictures as creative references and sources of inspiration, and professionals performed artistic processing on this basis to show the unique art style of "Atman: Rebel Flame". At the same time, we also attach great importance to player feedback and suggestions. If you have any suggestions on the artistic performance of the game, please feel free to communicate with us through the community.
Here’s a smattering more:
Girls of The Tower: “To better focus on the core design of the game, some of our item icons and a few NPC portraits, excluding the main characters, were produced through a process involving drafts by artists, AI-assisted rendering, and adjustments by artists. Moreover, to ensure the final artistic presentation, all AI-generated assets have been manually refined by the artists.”
ARC TCG: “All card concept are made by Leonardo.Ai through Leonardo Diffusion XL model.However, the generation of this content was done with complex prompts to provide more unique images, in addition, each image was further reviewed to provide more detail and alternatives than the basic model.This approach to AI was used to initially bring down development costs, which otherwise would have been too high to get the game out.In the future, depending on the economic game performance, we will gradually replace the AI-generated images with those created by a dedicated artist.”
RetroMaze: “Generative AI (DALL·E 3) was used in Steam community "resources. Specifically in trading cards and emoticon art.”
Just Small Games, Right?
I thought these would all be smaller, new titles, but even well-established games and studios had GenAI disclosures:
“We use AI to pre-generate some in-game banners and icons. Some of this generated content is used as reference and then modified by our in-house art team.”
Tribes is a storied franchise! The biggest of the bunch was The Finals:
“During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team. Examples include voiceover audio where we utilize text-to-speech tools to e.g. generate the audio of our in-game commentators Scotty & June.”
The Finals is not a tiny title. It’s huuuuuuuge! It’s got over one hundred thousand player reviews, and raves from Game Informer, IGN, GameSpot, and so forth.
The Eight Categories
After perusing the disclosed usage, I categorized the applications into the following (rough) areas:
Character and NPC Artwork
Girls of The Tower: "...some of our item icons and a few NPC portraits, excluding the main characters, were produced through a process involving drafts by artists, AI-assisted rendering, and adjustments by artists."
Background and Environment Artwork
The Great Rebellion: "Some of the backgrounds in a few levels are based on images created with AI, as well as a few props in the levels."
Concept Art
Atman: Rebel Flame: "During the game design process, we used advanced AI tools to generate some pictures as creative references and sources of inspiration, and professionals performed artistic processing on this basis to show the unique art style of 'Atman: Rebel Flame'."
UI and Icon Graphics
Sea of Radiation: Prologue: “Due to limited capacity and funding, our store page promotional artwork and some of our in-game icons are AI-generated, using the Midjourney”
Store/Marketing Imagery
RetroMaze: "Generative AI (DALL·E 3) was used in Steam community resources. Specifically in trading cards and emoticon art."
Voice Acting and Audio
THE FINALS: "Examples include voiceover audio where we utilize text-to-speech tools to e.g. generate the audio of our in-game commentators Scotty & June."
Narrative Content
DREAMIO: AI-Powered Adventures: "This game uses AI to dynamically generate stories, illustrations, and voiceovers in response to player input."
Artist's Tools
AI Tools were used to generate details, generate colouring and upscale to HD.ModLab was used to create the Normalmaps.
This is, by no means, an exhaustive categorization. Ain’t nobody got time for that. At least, I don’t got time for that today. But that’s already a lot of different ways devs are using it in shipped titles.
The Concluding Conclusion
So, there are three things that surprise me:
The sheer number of games on Steam that use the tech.
The fact that devs are already using it across small and large games. I really thought larger studios would avoid it entirely.
The breadth of use cases. I was expecting it’d be mostly generated images, but this goes way beyond that.
It's clear that a nontrivial portion of the game dev industry is actively exploring and incorporating this technology into their creative processes. I’m guessing that, as the tools advance and become more accessible, we’ll see this trend continue.
I'm curious how this will play out over the next year. What will the numbers look like at the end of December, 2024?
