cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8882542
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.
I don’t think that gamers are actively boycotting AI games.
Tim Sweeny disagrees. :D According to Tim, Valve is to blame for forcing disclosure of Ai on their shop, as gamers would boycott and destroy Ai games (according to him). Therefore if the industry uses Ai, Valve is to blame, lol. Sorry, I just can’t get over it.
Game Oracle’s initial research, even at a surface level, is eye-opening. It studied almost 10,000 Steam releases between January and October 2025, discovering that games disclosing AI use averaged just 4 reviews in the first post-launch month compared to 7 reviews for games without AI.
What I want to know is whether this study involved any sort of pre-screening quality filter for the games considered. If that’s not accounted for, there’s definitely going to be a larger volume of very low effort asset-flip-equivalent AI games just because it would be faster and more scalable to make them that way, which would skew the numbers and not show whether people are avoiding games due to the AI label independently of their quality otherwise.
Edit: I realized I didn’t check the text of the study, looks like this is addressed:
We mitigated this however by filtering “slop” out of our dataset based on publication frequency and absurd initial prices (>$100; there is a little over 100 games in this group and most are scams). We removed developers whose historical publication rate is greater than 1 game per every 6 months working
The absurd initial prices of over 100 dollars is because steam will keep all of the money from games that don’t sell 100 dollars gross.
No different from an old-fashioned asset flip. LLMs kind of work for web dev because web-apps are 99% boilerplate, but games are a different best altogether
web-apps are 99% boilerplate
Not even 10%, that’s what libraries and frameworks are for.
Stigma nuts
Hell yeah
I’m thrilled to hear it.
I do have to wonder, though, if there isn’t a minority of gamers who are completely taken by the hype of AI in gaming.
Like, one of the last few shitty scam-bubbles to intersect with gaming gave us those ridiculous NFT games where you could play the game for blockchain monopoly money or whatever. And at the time, the folks who were super into that shit were super visible and vocal on social media (YouTube and such).
But I honestly have yet to hear a single gamer say “AI is the best thing that has ever happened to vidja-games.” Obviously I’ve heard that ad nauseam from, say, Nvidia, but I’ve never heard it from someone who wasn’t directly working for the companies at the heart of the whole AI bubble itself.
Maybe it’s just because the AI bubble doesn’t create “bag-holders” the same way blockchain did. With blockchain, there were definitely a whole lot of people making insanely optimistic claims about such-and-such shitcoin or whatever just because the hype-er was heavily invested and was trying to drive their own assets up in price. It recruited every participant in the economy into selling the grift in the process of being grifted themselves. But with AI, maybe mostly it’s only the big companies trying to sell the grift.
Which perhaps is reason for optimism in itself.
I do have to wonder, though, if there isn’t a minority of gamers who are completely taken by the hype of AI in gaming.
Sure, I’ll bite. Obviously nobody wants AI slop and the AI bubble killing hardware prices sucks. But I really do hope to one day see something like the holodeck.
Smaller LLM models could be great for expanding dialog options in game. Like tweaked versions of deepseek or others. Or to improve procedural generation and fill a generated place with life and characters. Or some kind of game master, when you do something unexpected that can alter the storyline to fit the new input. A “yes and” improv AI game master. Or maybe ingame crafting of items and armor (all I want is simple elegant armor lol).
I do think if you have concept artists who defines an art style and palettes and creates the characters for a game, using generative tools to “fill out” assets in that art style is also perfectly fine. Generative models that can directly generate AND render 3D models photorealistically plus 3D animations are very interesting too.
Video games are still very “limited” because costs to produce assets are incredibly high and that limits player freedom.
Lower costs to produce games will also increase diversity at least at the high end, and allows for smaller teams to make more creative games - in terms of gameplay at least. A game with new interesting gameplay and generic but aesthetically pleasing assets is win for me.
anyone could make their own shitcoin and pull the rug on you. They owned it from start to finish, and could do anything they wanted with it.
The problem that AI poses to grifters is training and deploying your own AI is very cost-intensive.
At best they can make a chatGPT wrapper that grafts its own scripts and prompt to it. But they still pay for API, which is expensive, so it’s difficult to price it for clients too.
And the best part is their graft is easily copyable. Anyone can then set an agent on their service and reverse-engineer the entire thing to use locally, for free.
I turned an online photo editor to fully offline (no ads and no telemetry mainly) and am starting to bring my own changes to it. All with AI. Took an afternoon.
I’m a game developer of 14 years. It is not “the best thing to happen.” However, it is providing significant benefit in a low risk environment to make projects insanely fast.
While AI art may have a stigma, and rightfully so, I don’t see a future where humans write code manually as a regular occurrence. I expect the majority of code will be AI written. There’s a number of reasons why, and I’ve talked about this elsewhere on lemmy & .ml. I think the toothpaste is out, and it’s not going back in, at least here.
I really wish people would change this conversation to “How do we/society get our just deserts from this situation?” Rather than “IT’S ALL BAD.” They stole all our stuff. They’ve admitted to it. Okay, tech bros, then it’s the tools of the people. Or we get money back, especially so if you live near a data center.
I’ve been able to make prototypes of projects I’ve dreamt about in an insanely short time at pretty low costs. That’s good enough for me.
I’m a senior engineer of 10+ years. I do not, nor will I ever, use AI to write code. Fuck that shit. It makes everything worse in countless ways. So much garbage I have to deal with at work now because of it, and it absolutely has made no difference in velocity. I take that back actually, it’s slowed things down because now there’s a lot more “what the fuck is this shit” reviews I have to do now, which just slows everything down. Like just the other day where someone on my team submitted a MR where the AI wrote a pre-commit hook that ran a script to parse the source code of our entire monorepo to scan for occurrences of a few functions to make sure they weren’t used.
I have to deal with so many “ideas” now that no sane person would ever come up with, because they are fucking stupid.
Oh, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to tell people to remove absolutely useless tests from MRs. It’s almost a joke at this point.
The good news it’s already starting to get way too expensive to keep on like this and management is finally starting to feel the pain, so I doubt it really has much legs left. It always comes down to money, in the end, and this shit isn’t cheap and will only continue to skyrocket in price as the wildly unprofitable AI companies run out of money and need to start showing profitability.
Every coworker I’ve seen that uses AI code tools heavily is bad. They produce (or at least push) nonsense code they don’t understand.
I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they’re building than a team of excitable slop pushers going a thousand lines a second.
I think that a lot of the issue behind AI is profit motive. If that was removed from the equation, AI could be a really useful tool for development. But the fact that the main usecase at every company is “go faster so line goes up” gets in the way of that.
The other issue is efficiency. Burning down a rainforest to make a stupid banking app isn’t very appealing to me. But if we could work to make generative AI more efficient at what it does, and transition to consumer ownership of compute/hardware, it might be more feasible. That’s a long ways off, and I don’t think the powers that be want that future.
I use AI every day at work. We built an entire orchestration framework on top of Claude Code. It features skills that can pull in a jira ticket with well defined acceptance criteria and complete it without very much human intervention at all. We’ve built out entire epics and our QA team has not seen an uptick in defects. This is because we all still do manual code reviews in addition to AI reviews. We even have a skill that checks AC against the PR diff to make sure we’re meeting AC before it gets to QA. AI does make our team more efficient.
But at what cost? None of us are learning anything about coding. I feel more burnt out than I ever have. It’s an environment nightmare. It is a moral/ethical nightmare. Finally, none of us are seeing any additional compensation for improving efficiency. That compensation is going to Anthropic.
There is a world where AI can be a net benefit to the world, but it isn’t our current one.
I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they’re building
TL;DR I basically agree lol
I understand what you’re saying, but you’re talking about real world examples rather than the mechanics at play.
Let’s said you have the best engineer in the world. They are fantastic as describing nuanced, complex ideas. The fastest they can write is about 300 words per minute. The fastest they can read is 1200 words per minute.
Put them up against an AI model. They write at 6000 wpm & read at like 11 mil or something ridiculous.
Now, you’re making the argument, “Speed isn’t everything!” and that’s true. Which would rather you have, though: the same engineer, the AI, or the same engineer using the AI? I’d argue you’d rather have them both, because you have someone who can describe what they want in depth, they can point it towards heuristics or targets, and they can setup evals or governance strategies to better control the output.
I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I work with competent, smart people. My experiences have been the opposite. 🤷
How are you talking about the mechanics at play when the price of tokens isn’t a part of your discussion?
There’s many facets to it, including token costs, the risk of captured markets, more “win more” economics.
Right now, this stuff is insanely cheap as a solo dev who isn’t making a bunch of autonomous agent API calls. Nearly all my interactions are working with an agent to make a game or project. I’m not attempting to, nor interested in, yet another AI service based company.
I work at a reasonable pace, usually 1 conversation is my focus with actual work, whereas another agent may be doing research or documentation. Too many things in motion turns into a mess to test or validate. Solve one issue at a time. I don’t hit token limits, and I’m making good progress.
When I read stories of people being inefficient or wasteful, yeah, that’s sad, don’t do that. I feel reasonably efficient & the cost is really low (for me/lifestyle). I use the $20/mon Claude subscription for my personal.
The problem has never ever ever been words per minute. That is a completely irrelevant metric. A distraction.
Anything the AI produces is going to need to be evaluated by a person, and that is a more difficult, less rewarding task.
And if it doesn’t need to be reviewed by a person because it’s magically flawless, that’s extremely anti-labor so fuck that.
It’s harder to review code than to write code. On our team reviewing has always been the bottleneck. Faster output would actually make things harder in some cases.
Good luck. They’ve been taught to hate AI, and their brains shut off as soon as you say anything positive about it.
As far as I know, the current iteration of Steam’s AI disclosure is for asset generation in games, not using AI for coding. So, most of your point is kinda moot in the context of the post.
I don’t think we can be friends.
Anyone who wants to claim that AI is good for vidya has to explain this discrepancy:
Logical Increments has, as part of their ~$1k build, 32gb of ddr5, at $130.
Clicking through to buy it, however, has it at $499.95.
The delta on an SSD is another 290 - 130 = $160, but hey, at least it wasn’t more than three times as much!
Manufacturers are contracting their production years out and ending their consumer lines.
AI is the worst thing to happen to gaming in our lifetime, so far.
It is certainly explainable.
OpenAI was given half a trillion dollars to ‘develop’ AI with. It’s called project Stargate.
The first thing they did with it was wave the check around and promise to buy 40% of all wafers produced globally. Wafers are the precursors to memory chips. OpenAI doesn’t need wafers; it needs working memory (either ram, Vram or SSD). They don’t manufacture anything so they don’t do anything with the wafers. They just don’t want anyone else to have them because the competition can use the memory.
But capitalism does what it does, which is to chase profit, and ever wafer manufacturer was happy to get a piece of that half trillion dollars. It’s no surprise that the first to abandon memory production were Micron (the company behind Crucial, which is the finished product division for consumers) and Sony, also producers of wafers.
There was never any guarantee written down anywhere that gpu prices would remain stable. That would actually be going against the laws of capitalism. If it hadn’t been AI, it was going to be something else upsetting this balance.
No, data centers are the worst thing to happen to gaming in our lifetimes. AI itself is a massive boon.
I don’t work for any AI-related companies. Just an avid gamer and part-time indie developer.
AI is the best thing to ever happen for gamers, and indie developers specifically, but the irrational, angry mob spoils it for everyone.
In what specific ways? There are 20 comments in the thread you commented on explaining in detail why they think the opposite, but you said “nuh uh AI cool actually” so you must be right.
Because it enables developers with fewer resources to create better games, or games that wouldn’t even be possible without AI.
There are 20 different comments about things that apply to humans the same as AI but they think that AI need a special solution, or different regulation. We agreed to disagree.
Let me guess, you disagree too? You must be right, there’s no way someone other than Concetta could be right. AI must be bad in every conceivable way, with zero redeeming value, right?
Startling lack of evidence for these incredibly bold claims.
I can’t wait for both AI and Microsoft to entirely shit the bed.
AI and gaming are becoming an inseparable match. Whether it’s AI used in modern graphics rendering or AI used in actual game development, I’ve stated several times that I don’t think they’ll be separated anytime soon.
This is going to age like milk. I hope this person gets lambasted for being so confidently wrong and is fired and discredited from being a tech writer after the AI bubble pops.
Cale Hunt is his name and he is an AI promoting hack.
https://www.windowscentral.com/author/cale-hunt
Like it or not, I can’t leave out AI integration with the OS. Based on what I’ve personally experienced with NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5 and tools like multi frame generation (MFG), AI will play a major role in the future of PC gaming. Windows already has an Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) feature available in Copilot+ PCs, and it’s the only system-level technique on the market.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows/windows-gaming-edition-future-os-look-like
Ahahahahahahahaha
if you need steam to tell you a game has AI in it then that means you couldn’t have any way of figuring it out without the disclaimer. If you can’t determine, without the disclaimer, whether a game contains AI then there’s nothing to complain about and you fall back to the age old “do I enjoy this game? yes/no” metric. Backwards policy by Steam to cover their ass.
I feel that disclaimers like “this game contains gambling mechanics. It is a casino.” would be way more important and actually helpful. But no, better to admonish a game priced $2.99 that only sold 10 copies for using AI to generate concepts in the early stages of the game.
Or if you don’t want to take the risk of playing “AI slop” just pirate your games like a grownup.
I don’t really agree with that.
You also wouldn’t really know that a coat was made of ethically sourced pelts or if it was made from animals in abhorrent and cruel conditions. But knowing that could shift your opinion of buying that coat, simply because you wouldn’t want to support the practice of abusing and the cruel treatment of Animals.
“AI” is something that a lot of people are not OK with. Disclosing that something contains AI is a good thing because it increases transparency, and a person could determine that they don’t want to support its usage.
I also think that, no, “AI” isn’t as easily distinguishable anymore as you might think, at least not generally. Heck, I am still sometimes getting the “ignore all previous instructions” comments because I like to explain things in more detail, which ends up in walls of text (because regurgitating solutions doesn’t really help). What you clearly be able to distinguish as “made by AI” are the poor examples, the “slop”.
You also wouldn’t really know that a coat was made of ethically sourced pelts or if it was made from animals in abhorrent and cruel conditions. But knowing that could shift your opinion of buying that coat, simply because you wouldn’t want to support the practice of abusing and the cruel treatment of Animals.
I don’t think any coat is made ethically under capitalism, no matter what material it is made of.
In truth labels such as Fairtrade, FSC, and others like that are just a band-aid to make people feel good about their purchase decisions. Fairtrade is not any fairer; farmers in Africa who grow cocoa beans don’t even know what the beans are used for. They have never tasted chocolate made with their beans.
Same thing with AI. If declaring usage of it hurts sales… then maybe it’s better to not declare it. Is there a disclaimer that a game uses Unreal Engine or Unity? No, because we don’t care care what tools people use, we just care about the result of it. The disclaimer doesn’t change the material conditions of why people might use AI for their app, it just makes it so that they have an incentive to hide it. So it’s not a solution. The fact that Steam doesn’t require a disclaimer for code generated by AI, which is what 80% of AI is probably used for, is an indication that this policy is really just trying to soothe over customers. Players can’t see the code so it doesn’t count as AI to them though.
Heck, I am still sometimes getting the “ignore all previous instructions” comments because I like to explain things in more detail
Exactly, people are going after anyone for the cardinal sin of using AI. Meanwhile BP commits another oil spill and openAI buys another 40% of the world wafer supply. It’s misguided, they just want to yell at someone. But I’m not a priest, and I don’t operate a confession booth. Neither are you! If they want to expiate their anxieties against AI they should formulate an actual actionable platform.
The thing about this data is that it isn’t controlled for quality (probably, I only skimmed the article). I don’t support AI “art” myself but I don’t bother checking the AI disclosure normally unless it looks clearly AI generated.
EDIT: I got around to reading the original PC Gamer article it’s implied that various factors are controlled for. But realistically there’s no way to actually control for the quality. They apparently filtered out obvious slop though. We can conclude from the data that AI disclosure reduces sales, or that AI use reduces game quality, or both.
Forcing developers to report AI usage is like forcing people that oppose Israel to wear pro-Palestine shirts to a Trump rally. The mob doesn’t understand it at all, they just know they’ve been taught to hate it.
The public’s hatred of AI generated assets is entirely rational. This is an example of a consumer boycott seemingly working to discipline the market.
In a way, I guess, in that there are real material consequences to both of thsoe things and people are watching and remembering and forming opinions based on those observations and interactions. Like how there’s a Genocide going on against Palestinians in Gaza, and AI is constantly underperforming, losing money, and menacing the stability of our civilization on several levels. It could also not be fOrCeD by tyrannical BIG GUBMINT, but in fact demanded by consumers because they care about this issue. Kinda like how voters don’t all want their tax dollars funding murder, and such.
No, large companies that focus on AI are losing money, underperforming and menacing the stability of society. When I use Qwen on my local hardware, using renewable energy, I’m doing none of those things. It’s hated all the same.
You act like you can somehow separate the two of those things or like other people are at fault for recognizing they’re directly connected. I’m glad you’re being mindful, in so far as anyone can, but you have to recognize that everything AI affords you in terms of conveneince comes at the expense of creators who had their creative works stolen by data scraping, and still relies on the resource and capital extraction that is currently and increasingly devastating us all in order to operate for your convenience. Plenty of other developers just put in the work and effort, and frankly if they’re doing it you can to. You shouldn’t get an advantage over them in the market should you try to take your products there given you had the assistance, which you would be doing if there were no demand to label your work for how it was made. People will still engage with it knowing it’s had AI assistance, so why be afraid of them knowing and try to hide the fact?
That’s no different from saying all art/music you enjoy comes from the other art/music the creator stole for inspiration. Nothing is derived from a vacuum.
You also make it sound like using AI takes no work or effort. It, also, doesn’t work in a vacuum. You need skillful prompts to get anything of value, and oversight to ensure it’s of appropriate quality. It’s less work and effort than not using AI, but that’s the whole point.
Some people will, but that’s the same as saying “Every non-straight person should be outed, because people will still like them” completely ignoring the hate that those with irrational abhorrence will target them for being open. If you don’t want to face that animosity no one should be forcing you to.
And if the argument is that AI is low quality, then you shouldn’t need to disclose that it was used - it will be self evident, if that argument holds any water. The closing argument is that all creations should be judged based on their quality, not based on prejudice of the tools used.
Ispiration and theft are different concepts, and we DO punish people for stealing artistic content in other contexts, the histories of the music industry and cinema are rife with legal disputes over the boundaries between the ideas and the qualities of works that cross that line. On that point, are you going to address the fact that trillions of gigs of personal and professional data have been copied without respect for copyright laws and without renumeration to original creators to build the AI tools you recognize? Facebook for one explicitly said in court filings they couldn’t make AI if the had to pay creators for copyrighted materials in their data scraping.
Where are you digging up these insane hypothetical juxtapositions to infuse moral biases? Stop asking AI to make your bad arguments. Labelling a product based on it’s production is no different from outing gay people to you? What the actual fuck. A game is not a person, and customers have a right to know what they’re buying and what kind of development they’re supporting. Writing a prompt is a different skill from graphic design, you’re prompting the AI to use the styles and assets it’s absorbed from other creators to reach your described goal without your direct engagement with the process.
I literally typed assisted, I didn’t say no work, I implied LESS work, which is objectively true and a fair representation. The disparity in working hours per product outcome is where I take issue because I believe in paying humans fairly for labour, especially creative works, rather than elevating producers who use tools that if adopted universally, over time will by necessity degrade skill and damage the capacity for humans to produce original high quality works.
I guess that’s the point on which we disagree fundamentally - I don’t see it as theft anymore than an author reading a book, being inspired by it, and writing their own works by incorporating ideas from the various media they’ve consumed. At a technical level, that is true of AI, too. At the base level, it is an adjustment of weights in synapses - same as our brains. You will only ever see it as theft, though, and I suspect it’s because you hold an incorrect view of how the information is retained by the model.
I’ve never once used AI for a post here, or on any social media. Not once. That just illustrates my point that you cant tell the difference between something that is AI created, and something that is not. My intent in comparing it to similar situations is to invoke empathy for the developers involved. You say “a game is not a person” and no one is ever saying they were, but if you were following my analogy correctly your statement would have been “a developer is not a person” which highlights the moral quandary you are conveniently overlooking.
My mistake, I mistook your argument. It is a common one with people who here AI and I over generalized in my response. However, I also believe in paying humans fairly for labor, especially creative works. However, that is not viable for a lone developer with no budget, and that is AI is such a boon. In it’s absence, they wouldn’t be paying people, the art just wouldn’t be created at all. I think that governments should be taxing organizations that benefit from AI and using those funds for Universal Basic Income. That would be fair compensation for any inspiration from original works, in my opinion.
Meta is scum, with morally bankrupt practices. No argument there. I’ve never used their models, and never will. However, by using community developed, open models, I’m opening myself up to the same hate that they’ve earned by self-reporting that I’ve used AI because the angry mob does not do subtly. They don’t make that distinction, so only harm is done by reporting that I’ve used AI.
“I don’t see it as theft anymore than an author reading a book, being inspired by it, and writing their own…”
Great, so then the result is neither your work, nor something that anyone should be paying for when you produce a game using AI. The AI was the one inspired to make it and did so with existing materials, you just ordered it to.
“I suspect it’s because you hold an incorrect…”
If it’s factually incorrect, then you can’t suspect such a thing because there’s no room for doubt. It’s no more correct or incorrect than your subjective assertion which is how we can have a disagreement. Just asserting your correctness is not a factual validation of your stance, which is one driven by bias as you personally benefit from the use of AI. Not saying you’re not allowed to use that language but it is rhetorically deceptive and that’s not lost on me.
“However, that is not viable for a lone developer with no budget…”
Countless now successful independent developpers started out this way. I personally think we should have a financial incentive system to reward their effort and help them start up like some pilot programs in Ireland seek to do, rather than defer to private capital and technology that is ruinous to our ecology and economy for a tool to ease access and lower the threshhold of skill. The blissful ignorance of externalities in your used of AI in an apparent ‘vacuum’ is galling, frankly. Cursing Meta and acknowledging their horrible practices begs the acknowledgement that ALL AI training as we have seens so far has similar impacts, and if not I think you should send me some information about this miraculous tool you’re using that shows how it is markedly different. I’ll believe in such a thing if you can.
“which highlights the moral quandary you are conveniently overlooking…”
No, because even if that were your argument, and to be clear it wasn’t; Using AI is a choice and being gay is not. There’s nothing at all convenient about the terrible analogy you invoked, and I don’t know why you’re trying to rescue it lol.
