Are Steam players of particular genres less accepting of AI?
Also in the mix: latest GameDiscoverCo show & lots of news.
[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.]
We’re back, and after our previous survey of 3,800 Steam fans on what they thought of AI usage in making games, we got one question from multiple devs: was that view on AI different for certain genres or types of game? And thanks to how we gathered the data, we can actually answer that question today….
Before we start, a shout-out to the ‘clever hook’ of Slayblade, which is out on Steam this week and, rather than being a roguelite mashup with poker (Balatro) or pachinko (Peglin), ‘unofficially’ mashes up with Beyblade instead. A spinning top roguelite? Sure!
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data, inc. MCP, by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets extra newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Phantom Blade scythes in..
Let’s start the week out with a whole bunch of game platform & discovery news, going a little something like this:
Looking at GDCo Pro's estimates of 'trending' unreleased Steam games, Aug 10th-17th (above), brand new at #1? PS/PS5 Wuxia ARPG standout Phantom Blade Zero, due to a pre-order trailer/reveal. Next up, one slot down from last week: planeslop Dear Passengers (#2) and Bayonetta-like action-er Swords & Slippers (#3).
The next 3 titles are intriguing too: Disney's D23 showcase brought interest to strategy title Star Wars Zero Company (#4) and the freshly revealed (& multi-platform!) sequel Kingdom Hearts IV (#6). And 100-player shooter Wardogs opened pre-orders and is getting good buzz (#5).
Talking of Wardogs, we’ve seen multiple people call out (in a good way!) this ‘10 reasons NOT to buy Wardogs’ video by the dev team, since it’s trying to aggressively expectation manage for the Early Access release around content, pricing & more. (It’s $40 for an EA pre-order, so we see why - interesting counter-spin approach.)
As spotted by The Verge: “Sony apparently hasn’t decided exactly when the PlayStation 6 will be released. From a Wall Street Journal profile of Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki: ‘Totoki said the company still hasn’t fixed a date for PS6’s launch.’” Totoki “not given to sentimentality”, says the WSJ profile - he does indeed seem no-nonsense, though he’s also “an Oasis superfan.” (We’re not sure what to do with that info.)
GDC has announced its format updates for the March 1st-5th 2027 show, and this r/gamedev post sums up the changes: “Festival hall is moving from Wed-Fri to Tues-Thur… Summits are more community driven… [The return of the] Friday career day… ” (There’s also “a new Business Hall at Moscone West” for focused biz meetings.)
ICYMI: Netflix’s video game pivot continues, as it “is closing Los Angeles-based Night School studio, which it acquired in 2021 and plans to close Helsinki-based Moonloot, which was founded in 2022.” Night School was doing PR for its interactive horror game Unhinged as recently as 6 weeks ago - v. unfortunate.
PlayStation’s official top downloads of July 2026 confirm GDCo’s reporting that Call Of Duty Black Ops II (#1) and Black Ops I (#2) were the big PlayStation 5 hits of the month. Black Flag Resynced also performed well, and in PlayStation F2P land, it’s Roblox and Fortnite perpetually holding down the top spots.
Steam 1.0 watch: co-op zombie shooter No More Room In Hell 2 hit 1.0 and an all-time peak of 15k Steam CCU, as it also shipped PlayStation & Xbox SKUs which GDCo estimates are doing well - 100k+ each & scaling up. (It’s a partial redemption for a sequel that’s slower & more foreboding than many expected.)
In ‘platform backlash’ news, “Twitch has confirmed that it is using livestreams, chats, and clips to help train generative AI models at parent company Amazon. Addressing the issue in a livestream, Twitch’s Chief Product Officer Mike Minton said it was an opt-out setting because ‘if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in’.” (Woops, etc.)
This week’s big release Mortal Shell II hit Advance Access and, thanks to a donated key to SteamDB, we can already see its CCU (23k!) But we also wanted to claim that ‘+$10 to play early and support the dev’ is the real reason people fork out $60 for the ‘Devout Edition.’ (The ‘Obsidian skin set’ ain’t worth $10 - but there’s also nothing wrong with monetizing this kind of early FOMO, is there?)
Steam’s official ‘top new releases’ of July 2026 tiers are posted, and we always like looking at the new DLC in there (since we don’t put those in our charts.) This time: this $30 Granblue Fantasy: Relink DLC hit Gold tier, and pricey DLC for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero (and less pricey for Grim Dawn) also charted Silver.
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Steam players & AI: does genre, age, game matter?
As noted above, our previous AI-related survey of 3,800 Steam ‘fans’ got a lot of interested comments from devs. And we did get a lot of ‘I’m working on this type of game - do players of those games have more or less of an issue with AI?’ questions. And normally, we can’t easily ask in that much detail…
But because the players we surveyed are already opted in to our Steam Fan Snapshot cohort, they’re OK with us (in aggregate!) checking out their public Steam accounts to see what games they’ve been playing. So this enabled us to cross-reference behavior…
Just to re-establish context - the Q we asked is: “What’s your view on buying Steam games that have any kind of ‘we used AI’ disclosure?” (This isn’t about AI code help, but focused on things that trip a ‘Steam AI’ disclosure like minor audiovisual use.)
And the possible answers are: ‘I have absolutely no problem with it’ or ‘I am fine with it’ (we’re labeling those ‘accepting’; ‘I am neutral’ (we’re labeling as, uh, ‘neutral’), and ‘I’m not super keen on it’ or ‘I won’t do it under any circumstances’ (labeled as ‘Non-accepting’.)
So I asked our coders to pull AI ‘acceptance’ levels based on accounts that had played either Stardew Valley or ARC Raiders for >5 hours. They then tried a couple of other contrasting titles: Battlefield 6 & Hollow Knight: Silksong, and finally found the two bigger games with the highest contrast: Frostpunk and Balatro. Here’s what we found:
Grittier, more realistic AAA/strategy game players seem less concerned by AI: for Frostpunk, 53.9% of >5 hour players were ‘accepting’ of AI, compared to 21.4% ‘non-accepting’. And for Battlefield 6, it’s 41.8% ‘accepting’ vs. 36.4% ‘non-accepting’.
Pixel art, cozier & roguelite title players skew more concerned by AI: you can see Balatro has just 26.9% ‘accepting’ of any AI use, and 51.8% ‘non-accepting’. (The rest are neutral.) And Silksong also has a low ‘accepting’ rate - 31.3% and a somewhat higher non-accepting one: 47.5%.
This is a great starting point, right? It feels to us like there’s a skew towards players of obviously handcrafted games being more strident against any AI elements in their games. But can we go further? We can, and here’s what we found in genre:
When looking at players who’d tried at least one game with these Steam tags for >5 hours, we again see some divergence of views:
At the high end of ‘accepting’ are hardcore strategy genre players like Naval games, 4X, and Grand Strategy, as well as crossover genres like Base Building.
At the lower end of ‘accepting’ are genres like Idler, Boomer Shooter and Auto Battler, as well as Roguelike Deckbuilder.
Just as a reminder, the original question had 43% of players saying they were potentially OK with buying games that had any kind of AI disclosure, even if super-minor, 31% were potentially not OK with it, and 26% were neutral (not shown here.)
Finally, we were wondering if age had anything to do with this, given we might stereotype some of the ‘accepting’ genres as those enjoyed by older players. So we filtered the 3,800 responses by the age of the player, and got the following:
So the answer appears to be - yes, age matters somewhat, though it’s subtler than we thought it was going to be. Under 25s we surveyed are 41% ‘accepting’ of any level of AI disclosure in games they buy, whereas 45% of 35-44 year olds are. So up to a point, older folks are incrementally more AI-accepting, and ever so slightly less negative.
But the 45+ year olds - only 7.2% of the respondents, smaller sample size - who are the wild cards, since they convert about 5% of the ‘Accepting’ to Neutral responses. They don’t care one way or the other, folks! And that’s the way they like it…
To conclude: we’re testing for sentiment on low levels of AI inclusion, and this survey should NOT be taken as reading ‘Battlefield 6 players want lots of AI in their games!’ It’s difficult to convey nuance around this subject, and various headlines after the last survey ended up going overly broad.
Also: we’re not printing these results to endorse anyone who wants to put AI elements in their games, esp. if it straight-out replaces human labor. That’s not, uh, our favorite thing at all. We’re just curious on which of Steam’s genre/age ‘microscenes’ are less or more OK with this trend - which is def. a trend - than others….
GameDiscoverCo Show: PlayStation Plus timing?
And to round things off, it’s The GameDiscover Show - inc. one ‘weight falling on foot’ incident - with myself (Simon) and Post Games’ Chris Plante talking about game discovery goodness - sub to the podcast via Apple Music, Spotify & elsewhere (audio), with a video version on YouTube (above).
On this episode, we talk about Helldivers 2 finally making it onto Sony's console subscription service (and the ideal PS+ timing for first-party games!), the state of paid mods/UGC in 2026, how AI interfaces may (or may not) change how people pick out their media, and discuss which game showcase might be right for devs.
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]