The glory days of Epic Games are long gone and Tim Sweeney is a god damn moron.
He’s not wrong about the main point, but I think it just means you need to be clearer about the AI disclosure. Was this AI generated images, text, or voices? Was the codebase just using small amounts of AI tab completion or substantial portions of AI generated code?
I’m not surprised. People thought he was a good guy because he sued Apple and Google, but he did it for his own profit, not for the principle. And now he wants AI slop games for his own profit, too.
Him not ordering support for Fortnite on Linux says it all about how serious he actually is about wanting to escape OS ecosystems like Apple, Google, and Windows. He doesn’t care about alternatives.
His only goal is getting more profit, since when it comes to supporting movements that would help Linux grow that might allow him to not be at the mercy of other corporations he chooses to do nothing. As long as he makes profit he is happy to be on copilot riddled Windows and spyware Google Android. He considers Linux a waste of money to put resources towards.
“Waaaahhhh! Waaaaahhhh! Why is Steam such a good service? That should be illegal! Tell them they should be worse!”
That’s all I’m hearing from these other corpos.
Go ahead and remove it Tim, I already don’t spend money on your platform and I will just continue that.
The closest I’ve come is when I bought Alan Wake 2 on my PS5.
Sweeney has Steam living rent free in his head. Whining about Monopoly
Meanwhile, Epic Games already has something resembling a monopoly with the unreal engine, its buggy and resource hungry as fuck, and just seems to be getting worse. Necessitating an arms race of computer upgrades just to run the newest games on their obtuse engine thats being used for everything now. Epic certainly isnt doing anything about it. Its just a money printer for Tim’s legal battles.
re: unreal - and unity - have stopped caring about devs and just chase new tech like nanite or new advertising shite.
godot ftw, they’ll never come back and say “hey we’re changing the contract now you gotta pay for every install” or “hey everything is AI now”.
yeah dumbfuck that’s why we require ingredients what the hell is this man oh - oh
oh yeah
this adds up hold on
yeah: DAIN BRAMMAGE
This sounds like “If we let men marry men, what’s next? Men marrying goats?”
His leap of logic sounds more like, “If we let men marry men what’s next? Cars eating babies?”
If the developer puts shampoo in the game box, I’d probably want to know that before opening it.
If that actually happens and the label becomes redundant, then we can talk about removing it.
Or better, inverting it to a “No AI” label for the people like me who will still care.
Tech bros always act like this : they don’t want to actually win by making a good solution. Instead they try to make you feel like their solution is inevitable and they have already won…
For a group of people who claim to be all about meritocracy and the “marketplace of ideas”, they sure like to short circuit those whenever possible…
Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself
Sigh.
I swear, Epic would probably have a decent reputation (and storefront) if Sweeney would just shut his trap and delete all his social media.
It does make sense, because I’ll boycott nearly all future productions.
Fuck that. I’ll delete my Epic account
Funny he thinks that, I think that Tim Sweeny should stfu.
He’s right IMHO.
You can make hundreds of AI slop games in the time you can make one game that is a creative work of art.
It would be waaay easier to police 100 games with a “No AI” label, than making sure 10000 slop games have a “Made by AI” label.
Maybe you think something like “but the ratio SHOULD be the other way around”, but to that you honestly have to deal with the answer “should could woulda”.
That’s not his argument, tho. He’s saying all games will be using the slop machine. And hopefully he’s wrong, but if not, there’s plenty of already-made games to go through.
He’s right though it’s not a very useful label in general. The AI process is unavoidable as you can use it as a coop tool or inspiration or thousand different ways where AI is not a direct generator.
Personal anecdote: I do quite a bit of visual design these days and always start with some ai prompt to give me some inspiration as subjects I work with are highly corporate and unheard to me. The final product is made by me in Inkscape with some parts being manual traces of AI generated images but it would be dienginous to say that I didn’t use AI here and silly to say that it some “mindless slop”.
Your anecdote isn’t as against expectations as you seem to think. People just also think that what you’re doing is grody.
If you traced a design you found from a Google result, people would object to you saying it was “your” creation. In the ai case, it just also isn’t anyone else’s.
People used to do your job by learning a bit about what they were designing and applying some creativity. You’re quite literally describing the AI enabling you to be less informed and creative as a creative worker.
No one much cares when the button layout for an accounting firms CRM is rote, but people do care when they hear that the designers for the game they’re playing kinda phoned in the art design and it’s significantly a mathematical approximation of other designs.I disagree, people fundamentally don’t understand creation and art process if they think it’s an artist in a white room doing everything from the blanks of their mind.
It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up.
Saying people who disagree with you are childish is a sure sign that maybe you’re not giving their argument proper consideration.
Particularly when you’re arguing that the consumers are wrong about their feelings towards the product and need to grow up and adapt to how the producers want to make it.You’ve got a situation where people are seeing the assets, coding, design, and writing of games being moved from being human endeavors to being human supervised endeavors, while also being asked to pay higher prices.
The producers and vendors aren’t entitled to consumers happily letting them do less work to deliver an inferior product for more money just because the graphics card manufacturer says it’s the way of the future.I don’t think anyone thinks you’re spending your time doing corporate graphic design putting yourself into your work. No one calls you an artist either.
People buying art though have a reasonable expectation that the person they’re buying it from isn’t tracing ai content or random things from google.Keep in mind that if the “vocal minority” “grows up”, it means people stop paying you, because you’re the one not really adding anything to the equation.
You’re building a strawman as thats not what I said. Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process, period.
I make casual games and most of the time you are looking for inspiration by copying stuff - this is a fundamental part of the creative process. But americans are brainwashed by copyright and IP law propaganda into thinking that copying and tool assistance is somehow “impure”.
The public sentiment will grow up and shift and I’m willing to take a long term bet here of real money to prove my point. I’ve been a creative since the 90s and seen this same story a dozen times at least.
I apologize if I misunderstood your point, but I truly fail to see how
It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up.
And
public sentiment will grow up
Isn’t calling the opposing view childish, which is a pretty strong sign that you’ve failed to actually consider what they’re saying. Same for calling them “brainwashed”.
Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process
Do they need to? You’ll find that most consumers don’t know how a car works or how industrial design is done but they still have justifiable opinions and concerns about the impacts and quantifiable attributes of them.
If you actually look at what consumers are concerned about you’ll find that IP and copyright concerns don’t even make the list. People are concerned about the errosion of human connection and the diminishment of creativity. Privacy. Data usage and accountability.
And what’s more, even if they were opposed for those reasons the consumer is still intrinsically correct about what they value. If consumers respect your work less because you trace AI art it doesn’t matter if you still creatively contributed, the value has been reduced.
Telling consumers their preference is wrong because you want to be able to copy and trace AI content while viewing yourself as a creative is some backwards boomer shit. 30 years making casual games doesn’t give you lofty insight into the nature of the creative process. It’s just “trust me, I know more”. Same for trying to bolster your position by talking about betting on it.
I like how he’s basically admitting that it’s a negative that would hurt the game sales. Because consumers don’t want it.
Yep all those people not liking the idea of AI labels telling on themselves. For how much the AI bros talk up AI they are incredibly skittish about having to show what products were created using it. If it is so awesome why the fear?
Like an artist who traces their drawings, but doesn’t want to disclose it so more people will assume they free handed it.
