Procedural Press is back from hiatus. Two things this week: real data on how Steam players feel about AI in games, and a handful of playable ships showing where builders are publishing in the meantime.

Steam's AI Question Splits by Genre

GameDiscoverCo published a new cut of its survey of roughly 3,800 Steam fans on Aug 18, crossing sentiment about "we used AI" disclosures with what respondents actually play. The headline finding: acceptance depends heavily on genre. Across the whole survey, 43% were accepting of buying a game with any kind of AI disclosure, 31% were not, and 26% were neutral. Break it out by playtime and the averages dissolve.

Among players with more than five hours in a given title, Frostpunk players were 53.9% accepting and 21.4% non-accepting. Battlefield 6 players split 41.8% accepting, 36.4% not. Then the handcrafted darlings: Hollow Knight: Silksong players were 31.3% accepting and 47.5% non-accepting, and Balatro players landed at 26.9% accepting, 51.8% non-accepting. By genre tag, naval, 4X, grand strategy, and base building skewed accepting; idler, boomer shooter, auto battler, and roguelike deckbuilder skewed the other way. Age mattered less: under-25s were 41% accepting, 35–44s 45%.

This measures sentiment about disclosure-level AI use, so it does not mean Frostpunk players want AI-driven features, and GameDiscoverCo is explicit that it isn't endorsing replacing human labor and that the data is too thin to overfit. But the shape is useful: "Steam's audience" has no single opinion about AI. Players of gritty systems-heavy games shrug at a disclosure; players of games prized for their handcrafted feel read the same disclosure as a defect.

"AI Game" Is Becoming a Runtime Claim

A working definition has been settling in across the AI gamedev community: call something an AI game when it runs a model at inference time — an NPC that thinks, a world that generates in response to play. Using a model to write code or produce assets is a production method, and increasingly just how games get made. Nobody tags a game "IDE game" because it was written in VS Code.

The distinction is practical. Players don't browse by toolchain; they browse by storefront and tag, and the survey above shows those shelves carry very different tolerances. A tool-assisted deckbuilder and a runtime-inference naval sim face opposite receptions on Steam, and lumping both under "AI game" predicts neither. The other reason for the tighter label: fully looped "the agent made a game" clips demo well on video and often don't respect a player once you're holding the controls. Reserving the term for games where the model is doing live work keeps it meaning something.

Meanwhile, Ships You Can Click

Builders kept publishing where the friction is low: itch, GitHub Pages, plain web builds.

• BlackLedger — @grvbbs put a merchant-trading game on itch as a name-your-own-price Windows beta (0.8.0): a playable 8-day market-booth run with seeded replays. One answer to where an AI-built game can live today. Windows-only and unsigned for now.

• AMOS — @bitplane is resurrecting a library of 90s AMOS kids' games at amos.bitplane.net, with some titles already click-to-run in the browser, all built in public via GitHub Pages and CI. The distribution argument in software form: ship where people can click.

• PCH Cruise — @majidmanzarpour posted a playable Pacific Coast Highway driving build. Early testers flagged rattling audio and loose steering and handbrake feel, but the core drive holds up. A public demo, and worth the five minutes.

• San Francisco sandbox — @EricLevin77 open-sourced a three.js ocean/boat/surf sandbox reportedly running around 60fps on an M5 MacBook Air, with an open invitation to fork and reuse it.

• @SeloSlav shared a procedural dirt-road spline with terrain blending — a small sign that people are posting reusable systems, not just clips.

Several of these are playable now from the Procedural Press catalog.