Millions of people who don’t even feel back pain yet are about to feel real nostalgia for the first time like the rest of us gamers

I’ve never even looked at a next fest . I don’t buy games at release and don’t get games via discovery. I’m often looking for a specific game when I buy one. I don’t browse.

Cool.

So... what?

Means they only buy games people tell them to buy.

PatientGaming is a wonderful experience. It also saves a ton of money

I only buy games people tell me not to buy

People of the world. Hear my wisdom as an "old"

In the before times of home computing, anyone and their mother could make and try to sell video games, floppy disks and cassettes were plentiful. The barrier to entry was essentially non-existent. You could get fully fledged games in magazines. (In fact some magazines included the actual programme for you to type out yourself)

But it turns out when publishers just shovel slop onto the market it drowns out good quality Indy stuff and even some of the high production value games. This feels quite similar to before the great video game crash.

There's a reason Nintendo started putting their "Nintendo seal of quality" on their games. To try and reassure buyers that they didn't just shovel slop people mailed in. At one point you even had to send them a video tape with evidence the game could even be completed. Interestingly that seal is still found on their games.

We've almost returned to that state of low barrier to entry. Digital distribution means there is no real difficulty in physically producing and distributing the game. AI makes it so that anyone's half baked idea can be shoved on Steam.

Don't get me wrong there are many excellent games that would have struggled to make a name for themselves using steams old green light system.

Exactly ! Back to eighties bubble

Which them people find through...

I've found a handful of promising ones, but it's taking ten times the usual effort to sift through the slop.

Oh, it's gonna be so much worse than the eighties bubble. AI has been forced into every single facet of our lives thanks to technofascist shillionaires snowballing their money back and forth. So it's not just gonna be a video game crash, or a dot-com crash, or a housing market crash. Everything is going to crash, and it's gonna crash so fucking hard. And that's not including the orange fuckwit's ongoing war of choice with Iran keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed.

Get your canned/non-perishable food stock in order, make sure your water and heating is up to date, have an exit plan if necessary, cause shit is going to get rough.

It also reminds me of the nineties a bit, which was another time of rampant shovelware because of how cheap it was to produce a CD.

There were so many crappy discount games in the mid to late nineties that Wal Mart was selling them for under $5 at one point and you could get them in cereal boxes.

I only buy games magazines tell me to buy.

Valve’s chokehold over PC gaming continues to make me nervous, as the company seems completely uninterested in lifting a finger to actually improve Next Fest or stem the amount of garbage that fills Steam every day now.

The author is correct, there is a lot of garbage on Steam these days. I wish I could go back to the way Steam was in the 2010s, when there were only a few dozens new games each week to chose but they were mostly good. Now you have to spend too much time sorting through the crap.

I think it is not fair to put all the blame on Steam for the current situation. The Steam store is merely a reflection on how the gaming market is in 2026.

Seeing G*mers complain about this. While circlejerking about AI vibe coded ports is a trip.

Edit: see. Look at the g*mer troglodytes replying

AI cannot create! Only steal!

So that pretty much checks true with current held values.

Not at all. I see something that catches my eye outside of a store, then I check it out. You buy what the store algorithm puts before you

This is why I loved NMS at release

Indeed. I’ll never pay 60-70 for a game. That’s nutso

certainly it's not difficult to understand that those aren't the same people doing both, right? like, this is trivially easy to understand.

Hey buddy, there's a massive genre search that doesn't use an algorithm. Plenty of hidden gems can be found this way. Nothing wrong with using other sites, but the store isn't only feeding you garbage.

Just don't vote for slop, if slop wins, that's not steams fault, that's consumers fault.

Only circle jerking I'm seeing is people like you complaining about AI doing things programmers couldn't on their own months ago.i never liked LLM's but for programing it's all about how willing you are to clean up the code even if it is sloppy to begin with, y'all couldn't jailbrake the play station consoles for decades without the little pc workhorse. If you care so much about this, refine it and make it not sloppy.

I think people have more problems with generated text, audio, and art than code.

There's things where people prefer human created things even with their flaws, and areas where function is all that matters.

It's also not fair to put all the blame on AI. The bar to entry for making a game has been getting lower and lower over the past two decades. First we got free middleware like SDL, Cocos2d etc. Then we got full game engines available like Unity and Unreal with flexible licencing options. Then we got content stores for those game engines that let you bolt something together in no time. Then we got Fortnite, Roblox and the birth of the YouTube-style microgame within a game. AI was just the next step in this process. The slop is just a symptom of a free and open marketplace, whether it's human or AI-driven. We saw the same thing happen with music once it started going digital. Less barrier to entry = more content, whether it's good or terrible.

All we needed was a filter.

I don't wanna see F2P bullshit either when I'm looking at a genre, AI use could be the same thing.

The Nintendo Seal was also them raising the barrier to entry. Many people had an NES/Famicom, not a lot of people had dev kits or Family Basics+Famicom Disk Systems.

Crazy seeing LegendaryFrog in 2026.

I just looked and I don't see the AI flag in the filters. Maybe I'm blind, but zero chance I'm going to engage with it if I can't filter out AI.

Although I do think the picture is grin, I was looking through some of those slop games and it was very clear that they were getting no interactions and no players. Discussions were completely empty, no store reviews, and not a single sign of engagement, even for games that would have attracted quite a lot of people, like a farming/deck build game that I saw, that had a cute artstyle, but that zero obvious interests from the community.

What I have been doing is that I always scroll all the way down to the bottom of a store page to check their AI disclaimer, if they have any gen-ai shit, I am immediately out. I believe a lot of the community has been doing the same. So it's not entirely fair to say Steam has been doing nothing to address the situation, they have, you just need to check if there is any AI disclaimer yourself.

The only other thing I wish they would do, is to have an AI filter that can be turned on and hide all games with AI generation in their disclaimer, and maybe even allow you to distinguish between gen AI on coding and gen AI on art and things like that.

But I also don't want Steam to block AI games. To me, it is the consumer's choice if they want to play AI games or not, just having it be clearly shown what is AI or not, for me, it's enough.

Edit: my didaction fucked up at the end

Valve needs to do something about publishers not disclosing AI, though. There are high profile games like Fall of Avalon that lie about it.

I got Roller Coaster Tycoon in a cereal box. That game was a masterpiece

The solution is simple: Steam should use AI to filter out the shovelware. /s

Unless it's to create pirated versions of software. Then it's fair game.

And it's only going to get worse, unfortunately...

"I used the stones to destroy the stones"

Indie*

There will be no slander of Chex Quest!

that is the essential concept in warfare.

Spoonsaw master weapon!

If it's been abandoned, then emphatically and unironically yes!