Almost 20% Of Top New Sellers On Steam in 2025 Used Generative AI

As the 2020s have gone on, we’ve seen more and more games make use of the latest and most controversial technology: Generative AI. Whether that’s demos in Steam Next Fest or major games as we’ll see in this article, it has become more widespread by any level of developer.

While in theory Valve has a policy that Steam games must disclose their usage of Generative AI use, in practice, this is not particularly enforced outside of games that are actively making use of generative AI during gameplay. Titles that have assets, or made use of generative AI during development, often don’t disclose their use even if the end product doesn’t contain any of those assets. 

When we decided to examine Valve’s list of the top 100 selling new releases in 2025, we found 18 of the top 100 made use of Generative AI, with less than 50% of them disclosing it.

Below we’ll go through the games, broken up by their disclosure, or lack thereof. Additionally, there will be notes on if it finished in the top 12 (Platinum), top 13-24 (Gold), 25-49 (silver), or between 50 and 100 (bronze). 

Top Sellers That Disclosed Generative AI on Steam

EA Sports FC 26 (Platinum)
ARC Raiders (Platinum)
ARC Raiders – Upgrade to Deluxe Edition (Bronze) 
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 (Gold)
Inzoi (Gold) 
Anno 117: Pax Romana (Gold) 

Where Winds Meet (Silver)
Revenge on Gold Diggers (Bronze)
Jump Space (Bronze)

These 8 games, as well as the ARC Raiders Deluxe Upgrade, all have disclosed Generative AI use on their Steam Pages. They were among Steam’s top 100 selling new games of the year, even if some of them are hyper regional like Revenge on Gold Diggers selling over 80% of its copies in China.

Undisclosed Generative AI Use 

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Gold) 
Jurassic World Evolution 3 (Silver) 
The Alters (Bronze)

Each of these 3 games used generative AI in a way that has been previously reported on, but has removed at least some of the AI generated content. In the case of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it was experimenting with Generative AI in the use of textures, some of which made it into the game and were replaced several days after release. 

In the case of The Alters, 11 Bit has used Generative AI in that title’s development with placeholder assets that have now been replaced, while there are also subtitles of movies that were AI generated. Jurassic World Evolution 3 disclosed they were using Generative AI in the case of some scientist portraits originally, but after removing that art, removed the disclosure despite having used it in the development process.

Battlefield 6 (Platinum)
Season 1 Battlefield Pro – Battlefield 6 and REDSEC (Bronze)

Much like ARC Raiders, Battlefield 6 makes the list. Recently, stickers for Battlefield 6 have been scrutinized due to their art showing heavy signs of AI usage, such as nonsensical gun barrels, extra fingers, and other similar things. Additionally, Rebecka Coutaz, the VP of Criterion and DICE has discussed how they used Generative AI in preparatory stages, and Electronic Arts as a whole has announced plans to make heavy use of the technology.

Avowed (Silver)
Grounded 2 (Silver)
The Outer Worlds 2 (Silver)

While Obsidian owner Microsoft is associated a lot with Generative AI work with Co-Pilot and various other efforts, you don’t hear much about it from the hit RPG studio. However, the studio has previously discussed that they use Generative AI voice acting in their development, particularly from Sonantic as a placeholder. Brandon Adler, the co-director of The Outer Worlds 2, also shared how they use it as a production assistant and for tasks like summarizing meetings.

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road (Silver)

LEVEL 5 has jumped fully onto the AI bandwagon for use in production, though they don’t disclose it on Steam pages. They make use of it for temporary voice generation, promotional art, and website production, Parts of in-game backgrounds such as crowds or groups of buildings were also AI generated in Inazuma Eleven.

Escape From Tarkov (Bronze)

Released on Steam this year after years of sales off Steam, we come to Escape From Tarkov, which made waves when a new map was released earlier this year, which made use of generative AI. Found by players, it was then confirmed by Tarkov’s PR team that several background images that were shoutouts to other games were made with Generative AI.

Overall, of the 100 best selling new products on Steam, 18 of them were made with use of Generative AI at some point in the process that we can identify. There are almost certainly others, as several titles were omitted despite us being fairly sure that they made use of generative AI but we cannot say so definitively. Use of it in areas like coding and ideation is essentially impossible to know about unless a developer reveals it.