Valve says it is working on Steam Next Fest’s low-quality game visibility problem

Valve has responded to complaints that the latest Steam Next Fest was flooded with low-quality and AI-generated game demos. It says many staff are working on the problem. The comments came from Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson of Valve’s Steam Business Team at the Steam Indie Connect developer event, GameSpot reported, citing Inven Global.

According to GameSpot, Wilkinson said Next Fest shows each user a fully random selection of demos for the first two days. Personalized recommendations only start after that. He said Valve randomizes the opening lineup so every developer gets equal exposure and to stop people from gaming the system.

We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed. We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.

Marc Wilkinson, Valve

Wilkinson also said that many of the complaints about low-quality games appearing were written during those first two days, GameSpot reported. GameSpot noted that the demos in question still stayed in the event until it ended.

VGC reported that Valve has said it will not gatekeep games made with AI, even as it works on the visibility issue.

The number of demos in the event was the other major complaint. Giardino called the rise in entries “the pendulum swinging to the opposite side.” He said only 50 or 100 games took part three years ago, according to GameSpot. The outlet wrote that with several thousand demos now in the event, standout games have become hard to find without recommendations from social media and websites. It suggested sorting demos by popularity on Steam’s charts as a partial workaround, but noted that some popular demos also carried AI disclosures.

Valve has not given a timeline or described any specific changes to Next Fest.