Edition one
AI disclosure on Steam
What every game released on Steam since 1 July 2023 says in its AI Generated Content Disclosure, read and classified by what the AI was used for.
16,968 store pages, a seeded-random sample of the 62,612 games released on Steam since 1 July 2023. Not a census. Figures as of 26 August 2026.
The three measured figures
Share of new releases disclosing AI-written code
16,968 store pages, a seeded-random sample of the 62,612 games released on Steam since 1 July 2023. Not a census.
| Release year | Disclosing AI-written code | 95% interval | Releases | Sampled |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan–Aug 2026, year to date | 4.91% | 4.33–5.56% | 234 | 4,766 |
| 2025 | 1.02% | 0.79–1.32% | 57 | 5,602 |
| 2024 | 0.30% | 0.18–0.50% | 14 | 4,741 |
| Jul–Dec 2023 | 0.11% | 0.03–0.39% | 2 | 1,859 |
Across the same span, the share carrying any AI disclosure at all rose 2.8-fold, and the share naming code rose 16.4-fold — both measured from 2024 to Jan–Aug 2026, year to date. The 2026 interval does not overlap the 2025 interval.
What the AI is used for
- Any disclosure
- Visual assets
- Audio
- Translation
- Code
16,968 store pages, a seeded-random sample of the 62,612 games released on Steam since 1 July 2023. Not a census. In-game writing and Use not stated are given as counts, not shares — see the accuracy table under “How this was measured”.
| Release year | Sampled | Any disclosure | Visual assets | Audio | Translation | Code | In-game writing (count) | Use not stated (count) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan–Aug 2026, year to date | 4,766 | 35.04% | 26.29% | 9.32% | 5.14% | 4.91% | 165 | 172 |
| 2025 | 5,602 | 21.58% | 17.07% | 4.68% | 1.86% | 1.02% | 70 | 114 |
| 2024 | 4,741 | 12.44% | 10.10% | 2.11% | 0.59% | 0.30% | 34 | 65 |
| Jul–Dec 2023 | 1,859 | 1.29% | 0.70% | 0.27% | 0.22% | 0.11% | 2 | 5 |
In-game writing and Use not stated are counts and not shares, because their hand-checked accuracy does not support a rate. Each is a floor — the classifier misses some, so the true number is higher, and no share can be computed from a count that is known to be short:
- In-game writing — at least 165 of the 4,766 2026 releases sampled. Story, dialogue, lore, quest and item text. Store and marketing copy is excluded.
- Use not stated — at least 172 of the 4,766 2026 releases sampled. A disclosure that names AI use but no use type.
Self-published and externally published
The split is Steam’s own developer and publisher strings, compared after normalising case and punctuation. 16,968 store pages, a seeded-random sample of the 62,612 games released on Steam since 1 July 2023. Not a census.
| Publishing | Sampled | Any disclosure | AI-written code | 95% interval on code |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-published | 12,444 | 22.51% | 2.07% | 1.84–2.34% |
| Externally published | 3,967 | 14.42% | 0.93% | 0.68–1.28% |
| Publisher not stated | 557 | 21.54% | 2.15% | 1.24–3.73% |
This is not “solo developer”, and the bias runs one way. Self-published means the developer string equals the publisher string. A studio of forty people with its own publishing arm falls in the same bucket as one person on a laptop, so the self-published bucket overcounts solo developers — which means the true gap between a solo developer and a studio is at least as large as the one above, never smaller. Steam publishes no team-size field, so nothing finer can be separated from this data.
Publisher not stated is reported as its own row rather than assigned to either side: those are releases where Steam gave no developer string or no publisher string.
Against the published reference
- This study
- Published reference
Reference: Sulka Haro, "Three years of AI on Steam" (n=53,597 games, Jul-2023..Jul-2026).
| Release year | This study | Sampled | Reference | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 35.04% | 4,766 | 30.8% | +4.24 pt |
| 2025 | 21.58% | 5,602 | 19.9% | +1.68 pt |
| 2024 | 12.44% | 4,741 | 10.9% | +1.54 pt |
The two figures disagree, and the difference runs the same direction in every year. That difference is not smoothed here, and two measurement differences account for its sign.
Disclosures get added after release. The reference was measured to July 2026 and this corpus was read in August 2026, so every release cohort has had longer to acquire a disclosure by the time we looked. A later-measured census of the same cohort should read higher.
The 2026 row is not the same window. The reference’s figure for that year is year-to-July; this study’s covers Jan–Aug 2026, year to date. The rate is rising steeply within the year, so the largest difference landing on the most recent year is what a rising trend predicts.
Nothing in this pipeline is tuned against the reference. The classifier does not affect these figures at all: whether a page carries a disclosure is decided by the crawler’s extraction, and the classifier only decides what each disclosure is about.
Games that change their mind
A game can ship with an AI disclosure and later delete it, or ship without one and later add it. Nobody publishes that rate. This edition does not publish one either, and the reason is worth stating exactly.
The forward method works. Re-fetching the live store page for a game we already hold a snapshot of gives an exact before-and-after with no archive involved. 50 games were re-checked and 50 were readable; none had changed. The longest interval between our two observations was 0.1 days, so this is a working method rather than a measurement of churn — nothing could have changed in that time.
The backward method has no number. Reading history needs a web archive, and the archive was unreachable from the crawling machine for the whole session: 5 games were queried and history was read for 0. Archive coverage is not measured. That is not evidence that nothing changed — it is an absence of evidence, and no backward churn rate appears anywhere in this report.
How this was measured
Steam publishes a game’s AI Generated Content Disclosure only in the store page HTML — not in the store API, and not in any structured field — so the corpus is store pages, fetched one at a time at a rate well below the one that earns an IP block, with the language pinned so the heading is stable. Pages that are age-gated or are not really an app page are recorded as unreadable rather than as “no disclosure”, and every rate below is over readable pages only.
The catalogue was enumerated in full: 181,621 games, of which 62,612 were released on or after 1 July 2023. Store pages are then fetched in a seeded random order, so any prefix of the crawl is an unbiased sample of the window rather than a front-loaded slice by release date. This edition reads 16,968 of them — 27.10% of the window. Every figure on this page is a sample estimate, which is why each one carries its denominator and its 95% Wilson interval.
The classifier is a pure function over the disclosure text. It never reads the game’s name, tags or other store metadata, so a label always traces back to the words that produced it. It is multi-label: a disclosure naming two uses counts in both.
Accuracy was measured by hand, twice. Two hundred disclosures were read and labelled by hand and the classifier was tuned against them; a further 100, disjoint by app, were drawn afterwards and labelled once with no tuning. The held-out set is the one quoted below. All five labels correct on the same record: 92% of the held-out set.
A label is quoted as a rate only where both its held-out precision and its held-out recall reach 0.85. Below that it is reported as a count. That rule is applied to the measured numbers, not to a list of approved labels — which labels appear as rates on this page is decided by the table below and by nothing else.
Held-out accuracy, measured on 100 hand-labelled disclosures drawn after the classifier was finished.
| Label | What it counts | Precision | Recall | Hand-labelled positives | Reported as |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual assets | Images, textures, 3D models, icons, UI, animation or video — in the game or on the store page. | 1.00 | 0.96 | 80 | Rate |
| Audio | Music, sound effects, voice, text-to-speech or narration. | 0.96 | 0.96 | 23 | Rate |
| In-game writing | Story, dialogue, lore, quest and item text. Store and marketing copy is excluded. | 0.86 | 0.75 | 8 | Count only |
| Code | Source code, scripting, programming or debugging. | 0.89 | 0.89 | 9 | Rate |
| Translation | Localisation into other languages, including machine translation. | 1.00 | 1.00 | 10 | Rate |
| Use not stated | A disclosure that names AI use but no use type. | 0.57 | 0.80 | 5 | Count only |
What this does not measure
- Disclosure, not use. This measures what developers say. A game that used AI and said nothing is invisible from here, so every figure is a floor on real use.
- In-game or marketing. A large share of visual assets disclosures are store page and capsule art only, and many say so outright. The correct reading is “discloses AI-generated visual assets, including marketing”, never “contains AI art”.
- Development-time or runtime. A game whose feature is a generative AI companion and a game whose developer used a model to fix a bug both count once under code.
- How much. Three lines of dialogue and every image in the game each count once. There is no intensity in this data.
- A sample, not a census. 16,968 store pages, a seeded-random sample of the 62,612 games released on Steam since 1 July 2023. Not a census. Rates are estimates with the intervals printed beside them, and they will move as the crawl continues.
- Engine. Steam publishes no engine field and the data collected carries no reliable engine signal, so no cut by engine is computed or published here.
- In-game writing and Use not stated, as rates. Reported as floors and never as shares, because their hand-checked accuracy is too low to support one. Non-English disclosures are the largest known miss.
- Backward churn. No rate, because the archive was unreachable. See above.
Reuse and citation
The charts and figures on this page may be republished with attribution to flockbay.com/reports/ai-in-games. If a figure is quoted, quote the denominator and the interval with it — a rate from this page without its n is a rate this page did not publish.
Flockbay, “AI disclosure on Steam”, edition one, 26 August 2026. https://flockbay.com/reports/ai-in-games
Classification as of 26 August 2026; catalogue coverage as of 26 August 2026; churn as of 26 August 2026.