Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week’s new games on Steam. I’ve always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it’s also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy.
But if I’m perfectly honest, the reason I’ve always loved to browse through Steam’s raw and unfiltered new release list is because it’s fun: Steam is hilarious and bizarre. For every earnestly developed roguelite deckbuilder or metroidvania there’s something like, I dunno, Fuck’s Quest 2, or Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Lost in the murkier corners of Steam, untouched by recommendation algorithms, are some of the strangest, most distinctive pieces of software you’re likely to ever see, most of which won’t ever make the front page.
Most people don’t see these games. What we see on Steam’s front page is overwhelmingly determined by what Steam already knows about our gaming habits, or what’s trending in our region, or what’s discounted. Which is increasingly for the best, because in 2026—and I hate to complain about this—Steam bulges with more useless, tasteless, low-effort churn than ever before. It increasingly feels like a waste of time scratching beneath the guardrailed, algorithmic surface.
As I pointed out last week, AI-generated games are rife on Steam. You can usually tell straight away because the capsule art is obviously AI-generated, with that tell-tale uncanny AI sheen. Despite how ostensibly low effort these artefacts are, there’s a uniformity among them that you may charitably call an aesthetic.
Take Store Simulator Pettikkada and Chiggas – Survival of the Mitiest as examples. That the capsule art is AI generated for both is basically unquestionable the moment you see it. Pettikkada has that familiar near-photographic illustrated realism that smacks vaguely of Grand Theft Auto loading screen art, while Chiggas adopts the wide-eyed Pixar tack, a style so ubiquitous in popular culture that it’s basically become a generative AI default setting. Click through to the store pages themselves and the screenshots reveal an audacious disjuncture between capsule art and the game you actually get.
I do acknowledge that this contrast has been a feature of box art since the beginning of the medium. Atari 2600 box art never looked like the Atari 2600 game on the cartridge, for example. Doom didn’t look like this. But key art created with generative AI has that certain grotesquely generic patina which immediately tells you that clicking through will be pointless and perhaps harmful to your senses.
These games are all by different developers:
In the distant olden days before generative AI, a game’s Steam capsule art and the general professionalism or care afforded to it, could signal straight away whether a game was likely a 99 cent asset flip or a possible unsung indie gem. Now there’s greater ambiguity. Chiggas could very well have the same production values as The Smurfs – Dreams, until we click through to the page itself and discover its cheap, rudimentary in-game screenshots.
I think most people would agree that a game’s Steam capsule art is a hugely important determinant for whether they click through to a store page or not. Capsule art tells us what kind of game we’re probably going to see when we click, but it also captures the spirit of the thing: the atmosphere of the game, its art style, its genre, whether it’ll make us laugh, rage, shudder in terror, zone out, and so forth.
The capsule art for the games above do none of those things. Like most generative AI, these images are not designed to persuade or entice: they exist to fill space. They’re steely, clinical, affectless, chillingly inhuman, and most offensively: they’re freaking ugly. They immediately signpost waste.
And there’s more and more of this churn with every passing week, gradually undermining the pleasures of curious Steam users who like to dig deeper for unsung gems. In 2026, your new favorite game may remain eternally ignored, wedged between a vape store simulator and Total Simp Death.
Will Valve ever allow us to reliably filter out AI-generated churn? It’s hard to imagine no one in Bellevue has noticed how ugly the store has become. Surely it’s only a matter of time?
Top Steam games by revenue (June 9 – 16)
Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn’t factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though it wasn’t a big week for splashy blockbusters.
|
Rank |
Game |
|---|---|
|
1 |
Counter-Strike 2 |
|
2 |
Meccha Chameleon |
|
3 |
Destiny 2 |
|
4 |
Forza Horizon 6 |
|
5 |
Steam Deck |
|
6 |
Path of Exile 2 |
|
7 |
EA Sports FC 26 |
|
8 |
Marvel Rivals |
|
9 |
Wuthering Waves |
|
10 |
Destiny 2: Renegades |
The obvious outlier here is Meccha Chameleon. It’s a multiplayer hide-and-seek game starring white, featureless bodies who must blend in with their environment using paint brushes. Since releasing on June 10, the $6 game has sold 7 million copies. Elie Gould wrote about it last week.
Interestingly, its Japanese creator Lemorion has been very prolific: it has released six games since late 2024. None of them have achieved anywhere near the success of Meccha Chameleon, not even this free-to-play Penguin-themed take on Exit 8. Meccha Chameleon’s immediate predecessor, Link Penguins, released only two months ago and is also an online multiplayer game.
Destiny 2 continues to see a resurgence since the announcement of its sunsetting. EA FC 26 is currently 80%, hence its return to the chart.
Last week’s Steam deep cuts
Steam review of the week
“Slop 👍”
BigFloppa332, with poetic succinctness, on Slop Fighter.
