The 50 most-played Steam Next Fest demos include 7 incremental games, 4 AI disclosures, and only one instance of haystack slop

Last week's Steam Next Fest had over 8,000 demos; now Valve has revealed the 50 most-played among them. The results aren't surprising: there's lots of friendsloppy casual co-op, incremental games continue to be popular, and players have by-and-large rejected games with overt generative AI use, with only four of the games among the 50 declaring AI use in development.

7 incremental games, including 10 Million Pixels and Unharvest

15 lighthearted or comedic co-op games (aka friendslop) including Dude, Trust Me, Oar'Some Adventures, and Banana Airways

3 survival games including Frostrail, Never Be Alone and Arctic Drive

3 games that self-describe as "cozy" including Loftia

Among all 50 of these games, the only entry published by a traditional "blockbuster" publisher was Tropico 7, a Ubisoft affair.

Teach My Little Sister How To Drive was one of the four games with AI disclosures. It leans heavily on an LLM-powered NPC which apparently cost its developer over $1,000 a day.

I'm not super …