Steam study of over 53,000 games finds "60 – 90% of the growth" in monthly releases on Valve's store is from games using AI and "almost none of them make money"

Arc Raiders Riven Tides key art shows two characters, one in an orange, hooded outfit, and the other in a pink and gray one.

A new study of Steam games that use AI suggests that, while the tech is helping fuel a boom in new releases on Valve's platform, very few of those games are actually making much money. That's not a measure of Steam players rejecting AI, however – instead, it seems that games using AI are just as likely to fail as those without it.

This analysis comes courtesy of a Substack post from Sulka Haro, former lead designer on Habbo Hotel and now CEO of Mainframe Industries, the studio behind sandbox MMO Pax Dei. The study "is built from a full census of 53,597 games released between July 2023 and July 2026 – not a sample," Haro explains. "For each one I recorded whether its store page carries the 'AI Generated Content Disclosure' section, when the flag first appeared, an estimate of its revenue, and the actual text developers wrote."