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.
AI stigma seems to hit competent developers with a lot to lose the hardest
No. Competent developers aren’t using AI.
Competent developers don’t use computers either. Nor electricity. The really competent programmers do all their code solely on pencil and paper /s
Right, because anyone who doesn’t use tools that ruin their code with slop is archaic, right?
You can buy asset packs for couple bucks or even download some for free. Price for freelance from poor country on fiverr or upwork are pennies. The more I think about making game the more I’m convinced to not use AI for it. If you’re big studio and you can’t afford $10-50k for graphic placeholders but you can afford to delegate people to make a AI data pipeline and then spend $100k + on interference than you’re idiots and your company deserves to die.
Basically a big studio can hire more people, a solo dev or a very small studio cannot do it, so that’s why people judge harsher the usage of AI on big devs.
Personally I also judge on which areas is used, for a creative part (story, music, art) for me is a big no-no. For development it depends on how it was used, if as a tool to help in code reviews or menial tasks that are easy automated I won’t care as much as if there are vibecoded parts.
Did anyone ever ask the AI if it wants to create game or play games?
I think we all hoped AI would mean more convincing worlds and characters, what we got is effectively the opposite with a nice side dish of job losses and environmental catastrophe.
“The ‘excrement stigma’ is real and severely punishes sandwich shops.” A new study shows how much using excrement in sandwiches hurts sales…
I dunno, guys, have your maybe considered not serving shit sandwiches? But no, I guess “try to use it in ways your customers won’t notice” is the only way forward.
Perfect analogy.
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.
This actually makes sense. People are willing to turn a blind eye to more and larger flaws in a game if they know it comes from a small indie developer with barely any experience, than if it’s coming from a well-established studio.
The matter here is what players noticed, and avoid. I see three possibilities:
- people checking for AI disclosures, and avoiding games with them;
- AI output being slop and making a subpar game, something along the lines of Burton’s suggestion;
- the sort of dev who uses AI is likely to make crappy games, even without it.
#1 is irrationally brushed off by the author, but I think you should gather data before brushing off hypotheses like this. #2 and #3 are lumped together in Burton’s “advice” (that boils down to “if people complain about you adding shit to your sandwich, add a bit less, also if you’re pouring shit in the sandwich odds are the meat is rotten too”), but they’re two different beasts — one is about the tech yielding a worse product, and the other about the developers themselves being bad.
Games are already rushed and broken on release. Saying you used AI is like saying you rushed faster and broke even more than we thought possible.
Yes I have a stigma against idiots who are terminally obsessed with AI, I have it because the only way to stop them ruining everything with AI is endless shame.
It is the same with all forms of fascism.
Social exclusion is evolutionarily the prime way to handle people with problematic tendencies.
The simple solution would be to stop using it? It’s going to hurt us in the short and long term if we don’t stop.
But that requires too much work! And everyone knows taking part in society and being a human is easy and requires no work at all! /S
Good, good. That makes me happy.
*The AI Stigma is real and severely punishes “”“developers”“”.
