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