The hidden AI signifier in Next Fest - and why it’s so complex...
The hidden AI signifier in Next Fest - and why it’s so complex...
You can’t just add up public AI disclosures, folks. (Also: the latest discovery news & this week on Steam.)
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
And… it’s the day before Halloween? If you celebrate, we hope you have a spooky time, and presume that you’re all dressing in 1983 Atari Asteroids Halloween costumes like we clearly are, complete with ‘crater face’…
Before we start, would you like to grok the game collecting trend landscape? Well, good news, Chris Kohler (ex-Wired journo & current Digital Eclipse editorial director!) did a talk at Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2026 which explains the ‘25/30 year rule’ for old physical game pricing, and why we’re edging in the ‘slab era’ of video games.
[NEED THE BEST DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP server, by reaching out today ->110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Basic gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Twitch x Phantom Blade…
Let’s check out the platform and discovery news for the rest of the week, going a little bit like this:
Looking at GameDiscoverCo Pro's data for Twitch hours watched over the last 7 days, for games released in the last 3 months? Top 3 ain’t surprising - soccer, the brand-new & huge Phantom Blade Zero, and Wardogs. But look at the viral & incremental indies next: Moon Sweepers (now 70k CCU!), Scam With Your Friends and ‘can I offer you a nice egg in this trying time?’ (newsletter on ‘em soon!) Crack.
Console hacking issues: Switch 2 security is taking a hit as hackers managed to unlock (limited!) homebrew access; there’s increased hacking of PSN accounts for PS4/PS5, with one ex-contractor (?) claiming: “The bad actors make [PSN] child accounts 17 years and [364] days old, buy a bunch of games on your saved [credit] card”, and then try to split off the adult account to abscond with the games. (Clever.)
The top ‘trad media’ mentions for games, Oct 21-28, according to Footprints.gg, are topped by GTA 6 (install is ‘just’ 210GB), Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (launched, people dig it), Cyberpunk 2077 (new update with console mods), and Phantom Blade Zero (brand new, huge, see below.)
The latest Nintendo Indie World showcase (here’s the official PR) had various hit or high-wishlist PC games heading to Switch 2, including R.E.P.O., Raccoin, Slime Rancher 2 and Super Battle Golf coming across, and upcoming goodness like Haunted Paws, Witchbrook, Dumpster Gang (raccoon-maxxing?) & more…
Microlinks: Nintendo eShop is launching in the Philippines on Nov.10th; Xbox cracks down on shovelware by targeting triple-stack achievement games; Amazon Luna’s reach has grown 5x since the relaunch (from x to 5x!); Roblox is “launching Web Play beta, which lets you play your own Roblox games in a browser.”
Xbox’s results? Non-stellar, again as “Xbox content and services revenue specifically decreased by 2% to US $5.4 billion… Xbox hardware revenue also continued to decrease, this time by 14%.” On X, Asha Sharma noted “Minecraft and WoW Forever set records… console sales remain constrained by supply”, playing up their refurb push.
Game-related tidbits: The Talos Principle 2 has increased its default price from $30 to $40, specifically ‘cos “the cost of developing and supporting games has continued to rise significantly”, mobile games like F2P megahit Block Blast are getting decompiled for monetization reveals - yes, it decides when you lose.
An important visibility change on Discord - search engines will be allowed to index “Discoverable Servers… the most public spaces on Discord, with at least 1,000 members [that] their admins chose to list” as such. (This may be good for game discovery long-term, but feels ‘different’ privacy wise. “In the EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea, it’ll be OFF by default”, others can opt out by hand.)
Roblox’s latest financials are again a weird melange: “👤 138M avg DAUs (🔻9% YoY); 📈 $1.70B in bookings (🔻12% YoY); 💰 $1.57B in revenue (+16% YoY); 👾 $403 million paid to devs (🔻6% YoY).” Notes from Ben Sarraille: “Q3 last year was a huge outlier (rise of Grow a Garden → DAU, booking spike). Everything looks kinda rough in comparison… APAC & ROW (Rest of World) have taken over [since 2019].”
Here’s Meta Horizon’s pitch on ‘winning’ with prompt-based game creation, via Saxs Persson: “Roblox is very opinionated from an artistic perspective. Minecraft the same thing… we’re trying to fade into the background to provide the components for the games to be the center, and Meta to be the platform that helps the games get there.”
Esoteric microlinks: this deconstruction of why Lego is popular is game-relevant: “just enough structure to make creation meaningful and just enough freedom to make anything seem possible”; ‘games as platform’-wise,is the Jonas Brothers performing live in Roblox’s Steal An Egg the most ‘2026 game biz’ thing ever?
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The hidden, complex AI signifier in Next Fest?
OK, so as referenced in Tuesday’s Next Fest newsletter, Oct’s Steam demo showcase had about 40% more games in it that we expected (>7k vs. 5k), based on previous event trending. That’s enough to make us break our ‘don’t make AI the main character’ rule, and spend some time looking at the data.
The obvious step is to look at official Steam AI disclosures in Next Fest. Several outlets have done so, and we will also rotely perform this task. (We don’t think it’s really the whole story.) Nonetheless, AI disclosures went from 750 (21.2%) in the Feb. 2026 and 1,163 (26.5%) in June 2026 to 2,517 (34.4%) in October 2026.
We grabbed all the AI disclosures to summarize the percentages from the plain text declarations for us. After removing some odd categories, we get to the following:
So ~70% of the disclosures mention visual art and graphics in some way - though most of them are things like in-game or store icons rather than ‘all art in the game’, followed by localization (28%), marketing/store page (26%), music/soundtrack (19%), in-game text/dialog (17%), sound effects/audio (15.5%) & down from there.
We also looked at the CCU for the event alongside AI disclosure, and you may not be surprised to hear that the AI-disclosed games are generally clustered a bit more in the ‘less popular’ zone:
Looking at the highest-ranked games by CCU with more disclosed AI use, some of them like Bore actually appear to have suspicious CCU highs, and others like No Mortal Space seem quite Asia-first, where AI use is a tad more culturally acceptable? Most of the 52 with >100 CCU are disclosing fairly non-core AI elements…
So far, so… meh. I think this gives a general sense that ‘smaller/less popular games are disclosing they use AI’. But this is purely data on:
what Valve says you need to disclose, which excludes ‘AI code helper’ software.
ignoring people who didn’t disclose AI use, but actually used it. (Though Valve does have systems and/or manual checks to monitor for obvious AI art, we’ll note.)
Anyhow, we wanted another angle of attack, and we found it in our data on which game engines were used in Next Fest. We scanned file manifests for almost every demo (!), and discovered that some intriguing trends - such as the absolute percentage of Unity (~46%, still #1) and Unreal (12.3%, down to #4) games bumping down.
But we noticed two other things - Godot (#3) growing a couple of percentage points faster than we expected, from 12.6% to 17.4%, and‘Game engine not detected’ shooting up from 12.9% to 17.7% (now #2!)It had previously been pretty stable for 2025 data & the last two Next Fest editions:
That’s not a smoking gun, but it’s very interesting. Folks in the GameDiscoverCo Pro Discord pointed out that a lot of vibe-coded games use frameworks like Three.js which aren’t detected by our current game-specific tools. And that Godot is used for vibe-coding extensively because it’s open-source and even has an MCP interface.
We then took time to split the engine use by the top games in the festival by peak CCU, and found just 7% ‘engine not detected’ and 6% Godot in the Top 100 games, with a whopping 28% Unreal and 53% Unity:
The percentage of ‘no engine’ and Godot keeps going up as we look further down the popularity list, with the Top 1,000 Next Fest games by highest CCU seeing the former up at 14% and the latter at 12%. (Of course, you can make games quicker in Unity too with code helpers, so that’ll swell the absolute numbers too.)
We did visually inspect ‘no engine detected’ games that topped out at 1 CCU, like Slime Glutton, Calibration Sequence, Ribbit Robber, Anomaly Grid, and Song Of Larithea, and we’re seeing just a ton of 2D bullet heaven, bullet hell and puzzle games. And on the Godot side, there’s an even wider set of genres being explored…
So here’s our view:
There was a sea change when the rise of cheap/free Unity & Unreal engines made it easier for people to make games. But even with Unity & access to Asset Store assets, it’s still non-trivial to make for less skilled programmers.
AI tools are, simply, an even lower entry point for certain genres. You can probably make a 1 CCU Steam Next Fest demo near-100% via prompts, without ever getting super-deep into the actual code. (You can even have it use asset packs or open-source art, though I presume a lot of the vibecoded games don’t do that.)
The vast majority of these games won’t be troubling the charts or competing with your game. And we won’t be seeing AI-first titles at the top of Next Fest in the near future, though it’s obviously not quite as simple as that.
But where we see the real threat to the status quo is still skilled solo/tiny devs, enhanced by ‘code helpers’ or not, putting out great games quickly. (And judging by dev examples we’ve seen, the successes will be wielding AI code help like a scalpel, not a messy can of vibecoded spray paint.) AI may notably speed up ‘doing more with less’…
So: we do find a lot of the panic about AI and Next Fest a little curious. This Next Fest would have had >5k games in it, separately of what looks like a filling-out of small, vibe-coded games. Is 5k a ‘keep calm and carry on’ and 7k a ‘full-on freak out’ situation?
But we are going to see some wild release amounts on Steam in upcoming months, so please strap in. Lucien Parsons (thx!) just pointed out some big year-on-year monthly release numbers - Sept. 2026 was up 76% YoY to 2,875 games, and Oct. 2026 up 53% so far to 3,114 games. At those rates across a full year, we’ll see ~35k games on Steam in 2027, vs. 21k in 2025 & 23k in 2026 so far.
And just as we go to publish this, news is out that Claude has added a mandatory rule trying to crack down on cloning: “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.” Will this… work? So crazy out there right now…
This week on Steam: wow, Phantom Blade, Probably Stolen…
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