What do Steam fans really think about AI in games?
We surveyed 'em. Also: Steam MAU estimates, trending games & 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.]
As we finished prepping this newsletter, we got news that Xbox is planning a ~3,200 person team reduction - inc. layoffs centrally, at Id Software & beyond, and spinning off 4 studios: Compulsion, Double Fine, Ninja Theory & Undead Labs, with Arkane also likely to go. It’s a big change, but largely expected after recent leaks…
One notable quote from Asha Sharma’s internal memo, though: “Platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined.” So expect a lot of structure simplification - “a flatter organization” - for Xbox as a platform going forward.
Some housekeeping: we have holiday coming up, so the next newsletter will be on Tuesday, July 14th (we’re skipping this Friday.) Also: the GameDiscoverCo Show will be on hiatus for a couple of weeks, back Tuesday, July 21st. Also also: our very own Matt Styles will be at Develop in the UK next week, ping him to chat Pro & more…
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: that dino park? Very safe…
Let’s kick things off with a whole bunch of game platform and discovery news, shall we? Hey presto:
GDCo Pro's 'trending' unreleased Steam games by 'new wishlists in the last 7 days', June 30th to July 6th is headed by evergreens: co-op bomb defusal game Bombanana! (#1), JRPG Persona 6 (#3) and survival horror standout Resident Evil Veronica (#4). And alien Papers, Please-y checker XenoFeels (#5) is also thriving.
But new things? Very Safe Dino Park (#2) winningly & wittily jams on the 'Jurassic Park x friendslop' space, and Guns Of Eschaton (#6) is an apocalyptic Western FPS with art direction by the late Viktor Antonov (Half-Life 2 art director.)
Nintendo things: Nintendo of Europe has announced that it will stop selling original Switch consoles in early 2027, “after which point retailers won’t be able to order any new stock”; Nintendo’s shareholder Q&A is up, with largely anodyne answers, but Shigeru Miyamoto shouting out Pikmin Bloom as a reach-expander.
Bloomberg has a piece on increasing European government restrictions around games, citing the EU’s Digital Fairness Act, the UK’s Online Safety act, and more. More restrictions for minors (esp. around loot boxes) are noted: “Governmental pressure is mounting as officials have seen mixed results from self-regulation.”
It got easier to see SteamOS’ market share in the monthly Steam hardware chart for June 2026, and SteamOS Holo has 0.84% of all surveyed machines, vs. 70% for Windows 11 and 23.5% for Windows 10. (So sure, it’s a tad small, but Mac is only 2.2% across all OSes - when do we think SteamOS will surpass it? Or is that an if?)
Both PlayStation’s official most-downloaded games in June and a reader comment (thx Saty!) remind us that Escape The Backrooms released on console at the end of May & topped download charts. (We estimate it at ~1m PlayStation units & way over 10m players multi-platform, inc. Game Pass - perfect timing with the movie.)
Microlinks: some more Roblox lessons from the big recent algorithm change (whole genres are massively changed in visibility); PlayStation Plus monthly games for July are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, For the King II, CrossCode; some real data from F2P mobile devs - $13 eCPI, only 3.5% of installs ever pay $.
It’s not been happening much, but the ‘red line of death’ is the Steam Machine’s equivalent of the Xbox 360’s red ring of death, or the classic Windows blue screen of death. In this Steam Machine’s case, “this particular code signals that the system has detected a GPU failure.”
GI.biz has a good write-up on why physical game events in the UK aren’t very well. Reasons? Lack of big-ticket exhibitors, rising costs for venue hire & more, and the ‘gravity well’ of Gamescom: “Because people feel like they have to be there for the B2B side, it makes sense for them to extend their B2C reach at the same event.”
You may recall that an eInk device as a front panel was used by Valve for testing Steam Machine? Well, good guy Valve open-sourced the code for the e-ink faceplate, with detailed hardware instructions, also promising “eventually we'll have an app up on Steam” to control it - there’s an AppImage to use for now.
Microlinks, Pt. 2: GameFile notes that already-released physical PS5 games “will still be able to place re-orders” after Jan. 2028; here’s a detailed analysis of Epic & Fortnite’s ecosystem & worth; new Xbox Game Pass additions include Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+ 2, The Planet Crafter, and Palworld 1.0.
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What Steam fans really think about AI in games…
After we launched our Steam Fan Snapshot data in April - surveying 10,000 ‘core Steam fans’ on discovery methods & demographics via giveaways - we ran into a hitch. What if people already gave us their info, but they enter a subsequent giveaway?
Luckily, we found a good solution - ask them other interesting questions for the newsletter. So after our second cohort (fielded June 25th to July 2nd, 2026) we have ~16k Steam Fan Snapshot participants in GDCo Pro, but also nearly 4k respondents to ask extra stuff about, among other things, AI.
As always, a caveat: this is “a snapshot of a particular type of Steam player”, more committed than normal. But here’s what ~3,800 of them think re: AI in their games:
Firstly, what do the fans think of buying games that show any type of AI disclosure? (PSA: all Steam games have to disclose this when they submit.) Well, it’s quite a mixed bag even now, with ~43% of players having no big issues, 26% being neutral, and around 31% viewing it negatively. (With 8% of those saying they just won’t buy…)
This headline result is still a little concerning for those who want to use AI more extensively in their games, and shows the public are still not that enthused. (It’s not just a handful of outliers…)
The actual AI disclosure on Steam pages requires a bit of study, since it’s often one or multiple paragraphs of text. So we wondering - how much do fans self-report as reading it? Turns out 44% say they look in detail, another 45% ‘glance at it’, and around 11% don’t even try to engage. (This seems just fine to us…)
One question that’s come up recently: since Steam games’ AI use info is necessarily self-reported, can we trust it? And yes, there’s public skepticism, not surprising given many recent news stories, with only 17% of respondents believing game devs are fully disclosing all audiovisual AI use in games.
From there, 25% say ‘many’ disclose AI use, 35% suspect that only ‘some’ do, and then 16% opt for ‘not many’ and 4% play the cynical side with ‘basically none’. Since the biggest answer is only ‘some’, we def. have a trust issue here. (The negative effects of disclosure probably incent devs to skimp on adding those AI disclaimers, right?)
Next, we covered a change back in January where: “Valve's making it clearer that 'AI powered tools' (like code helpers) do not trigger the need to disclose any use - ‘Efficiency gains through the use of [AI powered dev tools] is not the focus of this section.’”
So we asked players whether they think use of AI coding helpers like Claude Code should be disclosed. A significant 56% said they should be disclosed, and only 8% said they shouldn’t, with 37% in the ‘neutral/i don’t care’ category. Of course, if they were, a giant percentage of games would suddenly need disclosure…
Our final question was just asking players a freeform text question about “the kind of AI use you are OK with when buying a game on Steam or console, if any.” The results (Claude-analyzed, in part):
Conditional acceptance is the order of the day: ~51% of the 2,100 analyzable answers accepted AI for some uses but not others, for example: “I'm fine with limited AI use for support tasks, not for replacing human creativity.”
On the ‘acceptable’ side, the clear winner is coding/programming: code helper tools like Claude Code had ~239 mentions as acceptable. This was way more than other categories like prototyping & and placeholder assets (119 mentions), and/or tedious or repetitive tasks (101 mentions).
It’s all pretty nuanced, and players care about it a lot: the amount of detailed, thoughtful comments we got was striking - we put 5 examples up in a LinkedIn post - everything from “I'm OK with AI being used in games as long as there is human review and oversight” to “AI must and should NOT BE USED in GENERATING CREATIVES AT ANY STAGE OR DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.”
Steam: our new monthly active user estimate..
Next: you may recall that Steam’s monthly active users (MAU) are a bit of a mystery in recent years, since the last official Valve announcement was an average of 132 million MAU back in 2021. (As a comparison, PlayStation Network - including PS4, PS5, and even some PC/Steam users - announced 125 million MAU as of the end of March 2026.)
Anyhow, thanks to NobodyInteresting from the SteamDB Discord, we were reminded that if you’re in the European Union, you can see Steam’s Digital Services Act notice here, revealing 31.1 million MAUs in the EU in H2 2025 (roughly.) Look:
How can we use this regional number to extrapolate worldwide MAU? Well, we do have the Steam bandwidth chart, which has a global Steam traffic map for the last 7 days. And look, here’s some GDCo-captured data on region share for the last 3 years:
In this case, Western Europe + Eastern Europe = 19.2% of the world’s bandwidth on Steam in the last week. Taking away non-EU countries: the UK (2.7%), Norway (0.3%) and misc other non-EU European countries (let’s say 0.5%?) gets us to 15.7%.
And if 15.7% of Steam bandwidth equates to 31.1 million MAUs, then Steam had 198 million MAU in H2 2025 - and likely a bit more now. Incidentally, that would put China at 48 million Steam MAU and the US at 39.5 million Steam MAU, based on bandwidth extrapolation* alone. (*Due to broadband speed differences, isn’t 100% sound.)
Another view: Steam does show concurrent on-platform users, which have grown from ~25m in 2021 to ~40m in H2 2025. With simple extrapolation of CCU to MAU, this would put Steam’s monthly actives at ~210 million by the end of 2025, not that different on a macro level. And yes, the scale’s impressive: ~2.5% of the world as MAU.
[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.]