- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.ml
- gaming@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.ml
- gaming@lemmy.zip
It’s a different story for the more established studios with an existing following and previous titles. Game Oracle found that the use of AI by these studios resulted in a significant 40% to 60% drop in sales.
That’s a huge difference. AI stigma seems to hit competent developers with a lot to lose the hardest, and I’m not sure that game studios are ready to accept it.
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The poop stigma is real and severely punishes people who keep using poop. Seems like nobody wants to hang out with them. Weird.
Lol good
sling slop watch it flop
Good.
I refuse to engage with anything that uses LLM shit.
One of the worst thing to happen to gaming is the use of LLMs, both in game development and in modding.
I feel like 80% of mods now are LLM vibe coded and it makes me want to scream.
Do the mods not work? Is the problem that people are publishing shit they haven’t checked?
I don’t know about mods, but for vibe coded programs I’ve used they have this weird overly slick themed look on the frontend, but the descriptions of the functions aren’t quite right and you don’t really know what you’re getting when you click something, and half the time clicking something does apparently nothing at all.
This is thoroughly misleading. There’s no apples to apples comparison here, and they’ve instead just found that people are less likely to buy low-effort slop games.
Game Oracle performed a sensitivity analysis to account for unmeasured factors like marketing costs, raw talent, and pure luck.
It was discovered that inexperienced developers with no marketing budget, who likely turned to AI simply because of a lack of other resources, saw hardly any negative impact on sales despite the AI disclosure. These games were almost certainly going to struggle even without the use of AI.
…
It’s a different story for the more established studios with an existing following and previous titles. Game Oracle found that the use of AI by these studios resulted in a significant 40% to 60% drop in sales.
Obviously there’s no way to objectively measure ‘effort’ that went into a game. But there is as good an implication as you can get here - that even established studios that are likely to be putting in some comparable amount of ‘effort’ are selling worse when they utilise AI.
It’s interesting to me that the effect seems more pronounced on more established studios. Maybe it’s because higher profile games generate larger backlashes, or maybe it’s because smaller devs have lower expectations and a more forgiving audience.
The only AI i want in games is the kind of AI needed to make the NPC countries in EU5 not act absolutely stupid
I spent like 3 hours last night trying to get a Granada playthrough going and it would have been SO SIMPLE if Morocco and my vassal Algiers would just fucking put their shit fucking armies into boats and bring them to Iberia but instead they literally just spent 4 in game years running around northern Africa. What the fuck is that shit
I eventually won but only because I got Tnuis to blow up their navy so i could drop 2000 dudes into northern Spain, occupy stuff and run away x1000 until I barely managed enough war score to get what I needed for it to be a victory
Yeah I mostly stopped playing Stellaris because the AI was so frustrating, I tried playing with the Federations DLC exactly once and my allies proceeded to do fucking nothing and refuse to goto war with the militaristic xenophobes that were knocking on my door.
It’s just nuts that the only way I can win a war with castile is to cheese the AI so bad. Like literally i just carpet seiged the unfortified parts before they could get my levies, disbanded them, then re raised them while their armies were on the other side of the peninsula. I shouldn’t be allowed to do all that but I HAD TO because every single war i ever fight my northern African allies just run around doing nothing
I just don’t get how the fucking game devs look at this and don’t think, wow, this needs to be our highest priority to fix
In the same way that a reader doesn’t want to read an AI novel, why would a gamer want to pay an AI game?
Ultimately it’s art, and the human connection matters.
Honestly, this makes me happy. I wad so frustrated to try so many demos this next fest just to find out they were made with AI.
I also don’t fully get the AI placeholder artworks. I understand that there is value in quickly accessing an asset that fits the game, yet there are plenty royalty free textures, materials songs and sounds you can use nowadays. Why generate stuff that will get binned anyways?
royalty free textures, materials songs and sounds you can use nowadays
For my own game I’m using stuff from kenney.nl as placeholders, and the thing is I don’t think anybody would rake me over the coals if some of those ended up in the final product - wheras if we take these companies at their word that AI keeps ending up in their games by accident then the risk of letting an AI asset into your process is massive. People really, really don’t like to see it.
Early in AI image generators, before the consensus developed, I made a game using AI for placeholders. It was faster than programmer art, and covered a wider range of stuff than royalty free art. It could’ve been a good workflow if the zeitgeist around AI image generation settled on “replacing AI images with real art is a new kind of job for a contract artist.”
But the “advancement” in AI image gen has been laser-focused on replicating production-quality commercial art in a narrow range of the most common commercial styles (Warcraft, dark fantasy, anime waifu), the reification of the desires of creatively bankrupt rich people who want interchangeable cogs rather than art. People who would be better served by ripping the models from Warcraft, but can’t because they respect copyright as much as they disrespect artists. It’s absolutely tainted with a radioactive garbage ideology at this point, you can’t just ask an artist to ignore that and replace it.
because they respect copyright as much as they disrespect artists.
Or at least, they disrespect copyright indirectly.
That gets to something I’ve often thought. AI is like reinventing the wheel constantly. If there’s 20 games using AI placeholders for a tree they’ll generate 20 different placeholders. Like let’s just say we are letting them use AI in this scenario. Why would you not simply use AI to generate placeholder textures for any object you could think of, and then publish those and everyone use the same ones? Generating new ones for every person is so insanely wasteful if all it needs to do is be a placeholder.
it takes time to go through library assets and presumably you can generate something more specific in one or two tries.
i’m grey box pilled so i don’t care too much about placeholder textures and would never use gen ai for that, but on the other hand if you’re showing your game to the public, everyone is a dumbass and will look at a pre-alpha and complain that it doesn’t look like red dead
That is true, and there are also very specific things you might not find in a library. But then again promting an AI like ChatGPT was somewhat tedious as well, last time I tried well over a year ago. So I am not sure it works that much better, and with textures you may still have to to some tweaking in engine/ 3D software
from here
Pre-Generated: Any kind of content (art/code/sound/etc) created with the help of AI tools during development. Under the Steam Distribution Agreement, you promise Valve that your game will not include illegal or infringing content, and that your game will be consistent with your marketing materials. In our pre-release review, we will evaluate the output of AI generated content in your game the same way we evaluate all non-AI content - including a check that your game meets those promises.
How would they determine whether or not your game’s code is AI generated? Valve is going to review every game’s source code now? Is that already how it was?
Edit: oh, I see. This article linked to the old policy, not the updated one: https://www.remio.ai/post/steam-ai-disclosure-policy-updated-efficiency-tools-now-exempt
In other areas of software development this stigma doesn’t exist (as it’s usually crap like business solutions), which creates a bit of a rift between those and game development, that hasn’t existed before.
The stigma is mostly related to art assets. You can vibe code your entire game and Steam doesn’t require disclosure unless you used generated assets too.
I feel like that’s most people’s preference too. a common bit of gaming wisdom is that a great game can have bad code and that’s really because players don’t see and don’t care about the code but they do see and care about the icons the art the sprites etc.
I’ve seen 3 games with relatively good developers get massive backlash for using AI generated icons and portraits. To me it didn’t really seem like a huge issue. Not every small dev team has an artist.
There are royalty free icons and stuff you can find out there. And there are tons of artists out there looking for work. It’s not that hard to find one.
I’d literally rather play a game with stick figures and shitty MS paint icons than one with AI art. And in fact I have purchased and enjoyed games with shitty art made by non-artists but I never have purchased and never will purchase a game made using AI art.
