They don’t need to court developers, they need to court consumers. The games will be sold wherever people are buying.
Consumers have already decided mobile gambling slop is the most successful investment in the gaming industry. I don‘t trust consumers to know what‘s best for them.
I think the studies showing how certain minds can be targeted and manipulated by dark gambling patterns made me think differently about gambling. I’m less likely to blame the victims now - in many ways it can be difficult or near-impossible for them to control those impulses. I’d at least like lootbox gambling slop to be regulated the same as casinos.
Look how popular fantasy sports is now. It’s basically just the casino industry seeking out new avenues to cheat the definition of “Playing odds to win cash”.
Yeah that shit is like selling heroine specifically to vulnerable people in depressing phases of their life. But wth gambling ads and dark patterns in video games we somehow accept it. 😕
Well yeah gambling is addicting, the mobile slop companies know that so they try to get people addicted to it. It’s really sad what’s happened to the mobile gaming space, as it’s so heavily dominated by gambling. Hell the entire world is being run over by gambling companies now. It’s a major problem that will have to be addressed at some point soon.
consumers
This is very much a pet peeve, but be careful about how you use “consumer” versus “customer”. They each imply completely different power dynamics.
This guy thinks he’s a “customer”
Maybe some people, who are an ocean away from me, have been gaslit into thinking they can’t be anything other than consumers. I know it can be difficult to grasp the concept, but you can refuse a service if the terms are unacceptable. It is possible to go into a transaction with open eyes and full knowledge of the rights granted to you by law and responsibilities demanded of you by the contract.
That’s why I say “customer”. It’s a reminder to myself that I should demand equitable treatment, even if the chances are slim unless the courts get involved. You don’t have to jump into the meat grinder willingly.
I just didn’t realize the distinction. TIL, thanks.
The reality is, that it’s often stated that generative AI is an inevitability, that regardless of how people feel about it, it’s going to happen and become ubiquitous in every facet of our lives.
That’s only true if it turns out to be worth it. If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
Those heavily invested in it, ether literally through shares of Nvidia, or figuratively through the potential to deskill and shift power away from skilled workers at their companies don’t want that to be a possibility, they need to prevent consumers from having a choice.
If it was an inevitability in it’s own right, if it was just as good and easily substitutable, why would they care about consumers knowing before they payed for it?
Don’t forget, “Turns out it was a losing bet to back DEI and Trans people”.
This is something scared, pathetic, loser, feral, spineless, sociopathic, moronic fascists come up with to try to win a crowd larger than an elevator; Assume the outcome as a foregone conclusion and try to talk around it, or claim it’s already happened.
Respond directly. “What? That’s ridiculous. I’ve never even seen ANY AI that I liked. Who told you it was going to pervade everything?”
If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
There’s another scenario: Turns out that if Big AI doesn’t buy up all the available stock of DRAM and GPUs, running local AI models on your own PC will become more realistic.
I run local AI stuff all the time from image generation to code assistance. My GPU fans spin up for a bit as the power consumed by my PC increases but other than that, it’s not much of an impact on anything.
I believe this is the future: Local AI models will eventually take over just like PCs took over from mainframes. There’s a few thresholds that need to be met for that to happen but it seems inevitable. It’s already happening for image generation where the local AI tools are so vastly superior to the cloud stuff there’s no contest.
MIT, like two years out from a study saying there is no tangible business benefit to implementing AI, just released a study saying it is now capable of taking over more than 10% of jobs. Maybe that’s hyperbolic but you can see that it would require a massssssive amount of cost to make that not be worth it. And we’re still pretty much just starting out.
Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.
The ethics and utility (or lack thereof) of AI is an important discussion in it’s own right. In terms of Steam though, I really don’t think it’s relevant. Players want the disclosures, that’s it, that’s all that should really matter. Am I missing some nuance here?
They want it? I don’t know, the review score of Black Ops 7 begs to differ.
Personally I’ll give money to a hard working indie dev that may use AI to help in their work spiradically over a big company shoving AI in everything to replace workers.
Perhaps they meant players want AI disclosures.
Oh yes that is what I meant. Edited for clarity.
Thanks, I thought it meant people want AI slop garbage 🤣
The nuance is that Tim doesn’t give a shit what players want, him and his cronies don’t want it because it’s harder to convince someone to play AI slop when they know it’s AI slop before they even try it 😂
I posted this in another comment but I think the nuance is really in what did they use the AI for. Are they using Claude code for the programming but did the entire artwork by hand? How many really care about that?
Compared to someone who tried to one shot a slop game with full AI assets and is just trying to make a quick buck.
It’s all they had to say for me to continue ignoring Epic.
Consumers have a right to be informed of information relevant to them making purchasing decisions. AI is obviously relevant to the consumer and should be disclosed.
“Calls to scrap” the disclosures make it sound like a societal movement, when in fact it’s just two people with obvious bias: Tim Sweeney and some guy who promotes Tim Sweeney’s products on youtube.
I don’t give a flying frog what they think. When I allow someone to sell me something, I like to know what’s in it.
I’m glad for those disclosures (because I’m not touching AI games), but tons of devs don’t disclose their AI usage, even in obvious cases, leaving us to guessing :/
There’s also the massive gray area of “what do YOU define AI to mean?”
There are legitimate use cases for machine learning and neural networks besides LLMs and “art” vomit. Like, what AI used to mean to gamers: how the computer plays the game against you. That probably isn’t going to upset many people.
(IIRC, Steam’s AI disclosure is specifically about AI-generated graphics and music so that ambiguity might be settled here)
Not voices, too?
I’d say it depends on whether or not the voice actor whose voice the AI is imitating has agreed and is fairly compensated.
I’m imagining a game, where instead of predefined dialog choices, you talk into your microphone and the game’s AI generates the NPCs answer.
Man I use AI a lot and I’m not even going to dispute that lol. It’s absolutely true.
Yah the more I use AI the more I can detect the absolute bullshit people on both sides spew.
It’s the most amazingly complicated averaging machine we’ve ever invented. It will take the most interesting source materials, the most unique ideas of other people, the most creative materials, and it will find a way to find the safest, most average common qualities between those things. This isn’t a model problem or input problem, it’s fundamental to how generative AI works.
It helps with searching for things online, it helps create guide plans for taking on new tasks like learning some new skill. It’s far better at teaching how to do something like coding than it is left to just code on its own and you copy and paste. It can certainly do that, but you spend so much time correcting it and fixing it that you do far better learning the code yourself and how it works.
Same with art, the people who are using it to best effect are themselves already artists and they use AI to thumbnail compositions or rough layouts, color tests and such, and then just do the work themselves but faster because they already know roughly what direction they’re going.
But using it to write your scripts, to copy/paste code, to generate works of art… it’s literally just giving you other people’s ideas mashed together and unseasoned.
I actually would kind of like ai in games. Not slop visuals though. What I really would love would be in a VR game, going up to an NPC, and getting a feel for different cultures of the world I’m in through talking. Maybe you have to have a certain type of conversation to find out the plot for a side quest, or talk to a guard at a bar and work your way to find out the shift rotation as he gets drunk or something so you can infiltrate the castle.
I feel like ai could be useful like that…but getting rid of artists in favor of ai slop is just the worst way to implement this AI thing.
Avoiding slopification seems to be the main priority, and you would have to have the AI be incorporated into a game it would have to do something that AI is already passable at, otherwise it wont pass that barrier and will get shunned like the rest of the slop.
For example, you could have an LLM act as a character or have a neural net incorporated into the game-ai like how tool assisted DOTA2 competitions work.
I see three main problems, first is that you would need the hardware to run it locally, which may be a hard sell to some people depending on what the game it is, only online expirenes should endebt themselves to AWS, if its single player, its going to lose a ton of sales there. Two, its really hard to convince audiences electrons have feelings, remember Final Fantasy (2001)? Thats what happened last time someone tried to personify a digital construct, and well… It went swimmingly (Microsofts Tay, does not count). Lastly, impact, would a narrative focused title have the same impact of an AI wrote the script? How would you feel after playing through a title like “Papers, please” and when the credits roll it says “script generated by CoPilot”? I feel like it would ring hollow, the feelings would be cheapened by it…
I would be interested to see how this plays out, but im content to support the titles and studios that do things the traditional way.
What exactly is “Used AI” though?
Most developers are going to have some form of auto complete - AI powered or not.
Is it just assets I assume?
Autocomplete isn’t AI. It’s string recognition which predates AI by about 35 years.
T9 predictive texting definitely didn’t contain AI, but was absolutely a thing for a really long time.
There are 2 versions these days.
One powered by AI that can complete the rest of your function, and regular that is typically only the word you are working on.
i think it’s impossible totally exclude ai from a developing process nowadays (you googled something? you use ai. etc.), but not having generated images/assets/texts is realistic
auto complete
It’s called lexical analysis or lexical tokenization. It existed long before LLMs (as long as high-level programming languages have, since lexical analysis of the source is the first step of compilation), it doesn’t rely on stolen code, and doesn’t consume a small village’s worth of electricity. Superficial parallels with chatbots do not make it AI – it’s a fucking algorithm.
Besides, there is a world of difference between asking a clanker to spit out a Python function that multiplies two matrices, and putting the knock-off Shadowheart from TEMU in a million-dollar game.
And more and more engineers use genAI to generate code. Hell, even I do, because it’s superb at getting the boilerplate ready from standard definitions, allowing me to focus on the important bits.
LLMs are also pretty great at extrapolating a good working document from basic requirements.
They’re really just a quite knowledgeable but inexperienced intern, and any software engineer that refuses to utilise them to some extent will be left behind - just like those who refused to move to IDEs with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and other helper tools.
Use of AI should be disclosed the same way 3rd party DRM and EULA agreements are. And similarly it should mention some details. People are free to boycott Denuvo if they want, but people are also free to buy it anyways if they want. Disclosure is never a bad thing.
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Yeah it was hard to parse for me too
“valve ignores requests to remove ai disclosures”
…what calls? No one is calling for this. One dude said it was unnecessary. That’s not a call, it’s an opinion. He’s not out picketing for the end of fucking AI labels.
I heard the new Game of Thrones game is using LLM’s to generate some of its content. Pisses me off.
lots of big companies are using them to generate code. i agree with what I think is your point of view, but where do you draw the line
I don’t buy a lot of the big company games anyway, but if this becomes commonplace, what’ll happen is I’ll buy my big-company games second-hand so the benefit to the perpetrators is lessened.
