Steam's AI disclosure, explained

When Valve opened Steam to AI-made games in January 2024, developers read the new section of the content survey as a confession box: tick it if AI touched anything. Valve's January 2026 rewrite made the point plainer. The section is about content players consume, and Valve wrote that efficiency gains through the use of AI tools are not its focus.

That changes how to fill it in. The question to ask of each AI tool you used is not "did I use it?" but "did something it made end up in front of a player?" A coding assistant that wrote your pathfinding does not; an image generator that made your loading screen does; a language model that wrote your item descriptions does, even if you used it in the same editor as the code.

• Pre-generated: content made with AI tools during development that ships with the game and is consumed by players: artwork, textures, models, sound, voice, music, narrative, dialogue, localisation. Store page and marketing material are in scope too: generated capsule art, screenshots or trailer narration count. Valve reviews it the same way as any other content.
• Live-generated: content an AI creates while the game runs, such as generated dialogue, images or levels. It follows the same rules, and you must describe the guardrails that stop it producing illegal content. Live-generated adult-only sexual content is not allowed, and players can report illegal live-generated content through the Steam overlay.

For either, Valve asks you to describe the implementation in detail. A disclosure is a description, not a checkbox.

How the January 2026 wording applies to the uses developers ask about most:

Your answer appears on the store page in a section titled AI Generated Content Disclosure, in your own words. Players who care read it before buying, and press and curators quote it.

It is no longer unusual. Flockbay's report on AI disclosure on Steam found 35.04% of a sample of 4,766 games released from January to August 2026 carried an AI disclosure, up from 12.44% in 2024 and 21.58% in 2025. Visual assets were the most common use named (26.29% of 2026 releases), then audio (9.32%), translation (5.14%) and code (4.91%). Across the whole window since July 2023, self-published games carried a disclosure more often than externally published ones, 22.51% against 14.42%.

Name the use, the share and the human hand. Specific beats vague, because players reading "AI was used in development" assume the worst. Three illustrative wordings, for made-up games:

• Light use: "Some background textures and two ambient music tracks were generated with AI and edited by hand. All character art, writing, voice and game design are by the team."
• Heavy visual use: "Environment art and item icons were generated with AI from our own concept sketches, then painted over and made consistent by our artist. Character art and the store capsule are hand-drawn."
• Live generation: "Villager dialogue is generated during play by a language model, constrained to the game's lore and filtered for hate speech, sexual content and real-person names. Quest text and the main story are written by the team."

Valve holds you to what you write. A game whose disclosure turns out to be inaccurate risks removal, and players who discover undisclosed AI say so in reviews.

1. List every generated asset that ships, by type: images and models, audio, voice, text, translations, store and marketing material.
2. Strike out anything only used to work faster and anything replaced before release.
3. Open the content survey from the app's store presence checklist in Steamworks and go to its AI section.
4. Describe the pre-generated content, using the list, in plain sentences.
5. Describe any live-generated content and the guardrails in detail: what generates, what constrains it, what is filtered.
6. Submit with the store page for review, and update it whenever generated content is added or removed, including in patches and DLC.

A narrated devlog or trailer published on the store page is marketing material, so a synthetic voice narrating it belongs in the disclosure. A voice you recorded yourself, or a licensed recording, needs nothing. The same goes for a generated music bed under a trailer.

The line between an efficiency tool and a content generator is clear for code and fuzzy elsewhere. An AI upscaler that sharpened hand-drawn sprites, an AI denoiser on a recorded voice, an autocomplete that suggested half a sentence of a quest: each is arguably a tool, and each changed what the player meets. Valve's text does not settle every case, so the honest default is to disclose the edge cases briefly. A line saying hand-drawn sprites were upscaled with AI costs nothing; a review discovering it costs more.

Flockbay is a free AI game builder on the official Godot engine. It keeps a record of the images, models, sounds and music it generates into your game, and its Steam page drafts the AI disclosure from that record, adds the store page text the AI wrote, and marks the answer Drafted by Flockbay for you to check and edit. Video studio's devlogs and shorts are narrated with a generated voice unless you give it your own, so the draft says so. Preparing the page by hand and its .zip are free; the drafting is free in beta until 1 December 2026, and you upload the page yourself.