Steam Next Fest June 2026 launches thousands of demos
Steam Next Fest June 2026 opened with thousands of free indie demos, featuring survival horror PHASE ZERO, relaxing Portrait Painter, GameBoy-style Orpheus: To Hell and Back, and the Forklift Basketball demo. PHASE ZERO’s demo runs about 30 minutes, Trees Hate You appears on the event’s Top Demos list, and Grave Seasons has been delayed to Fall 2026 with its demo cancelled. Organizers and developers flagged widespread use of generative-AI assets, with over a thousand participating games carrying AI content disclosures. The festival matters because it lets players sample and wishlist hundreds of upcoming indie titles while spotlighting discovery challenges and the rising role of AI in game assets.
The amount of games on Steam Next Fest using genAI for music is just hilarious to me. If there is one asset you can find so much good quality (royalty)free CC0 of, it's music!! Freesounds, Newgrounds, Humble Bundles, Bandcamp, etc. So much good stuff out there and professional releases use them too
Bertine van Hövell14Bespoke compositions for your game do add so much to it, absolutely. A great composer elevates every element of your production and gives it a unique feel. But genAI music is neither bespoke, nor adds anything unique to your game. Just use free/cheap resources if you're low budget.
Sos "Wishlist Lazy Kickers" Sosowski9My bet is 90% of asset packs and royalty free music coming out right now are AI, so it actually might be hard to find genuine stuff.
Dominic Tarason4One of my favourite game soundtracks of the past few years - for platformer action-RPG monster Astlibra - has everything picked from free music libraries.
