The moment hints of AI generated content can be found, large amounts of people dismiss products in an instant. That group will only grow as the AI industry keeps making the hardware you need for video games more expensive and bringing it further out of reach of normal people. Mybae in 2030, when hardware is hopefully affordable again, you can ignore these people, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.
Games are art, and the people who make them are by and large: artists. Why would artists want to use generative AI?
Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.
[0] And library music for games, which I'm getting into making: https://clubhouse.kyefox.com/posts/2016-2026-162342979
That is orthogonal to the issue of game developers exploiting technology to disenfranchise labor and produce a shoddy product. There certainly should be economic breathing room in the richest societies on the planet in the wealthiest era of human history for artists to spend time crafting work how they like.
Adding to the fact that people who write code are in general much better compensated in most industries than people who produce art, having software replace artists feels like "punching down" in a way that having software replace people who write software doesn't. As a software engineer, Ilif I use AI to write a bunch of code for myself, I'm much better able to understand the tradeoffs to my future employment in a much more visceral way than I ever could for what using AI-generated art might mean for an artist. Even with all of the recent proclamations that code is "solved" and fearful predictions that programming jobs are going to stop being so cushy, the job market for the average software engineer is probably at least an order of magnitude better than it is for the average artist in terms of compensation and job security, and AI or not, I don't see that changing any time soon.
But a line of buggy code will be substantially more impactful than a poorly drawn model. An extra finger on a model doesn’t cause your save to be corrupted or a quest to hard lock.
I don't think that's true, I could mention a few examples, the cliché of the Unreal Engine hair style or lights and on the other side of the spectrum, the custom made engine which made TinyGlade what it is.
Game development iterates with what's brought from the coding side.
But also, game development economics are very different from SaaS products. You can't spend a ton of money in tokens per month and expect that the gains from selling those features will support the cost of building them. Game dev margins are already slim-to-negative for most independent studios.
I'm so excited that LLMs are great at coding. Most of my problems I have with various games I love is that they're written by people who couldn't write performant code at all but are great at building a world and telling a story.
Just look at Escape from Tarkov. Great game but some of the worst software architecture choices of all time. It used to take 4 minutes to get out of match and often 10-15 minutes to get into one and it was all just because of shitty code / design.
It's been fixed now and I'm sure modern LLMs were the reason.
John Carmack is the exception not the rule.
If this code made it into a game, at what point did I do something wrong?
It is fantastic at the code. Monobehaviors are completely solved. I ~never have to look at c# code or shaders again if I choose not to. However, this was like 5% of the problem.
Composing a three-dimensional scene graph in a way that is compelling to a human observer is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at. I worry about those who are in the midst of conflating the capabilities of diffusion models with those of "world" models. The former make it seem as if we are "so close". The latter are more or less non-existent.
>[X] is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at
I'm no longer convinced that this is a particularly safe bet for any value of X. LLMs have absolutely been demonstrated as capable of doing things that they're theoretically the wrong type of model for, like generating images by writing SVGs or simulating brush strokes.
And then they wonder why the their ugly-ass game with no consistent art style and no coherent design doesn't take off since it was coded with a superior artificial intelligence, in less time, and must therefore be objectively better.
They don't understand that there's some knowledge that exists within the heads of human beings and their experience that you can't reverse engineer from the human-generated artifacts in the training data. You can't derive Leonardo Da Vinci from a PNG of the Mona Lisa. Am I claiming that all designers are Leonardo Da Vinci? No, so hands off the keyboard. I am saying there are aspects of art that are bound to the human experience in a way that are beyond current LLMs, that can't be replicated through the simulation of mechanics alone.
Say that and they'll just think you believe in ghosts, though.
If you have a subscriber base at $X in 2022 and are profitable, you will still be profitable in 2026 if the subscribers stay.
Gamers generally don't want even want slop.
“Hello, it’s me, again, talking about Gen AI, again.
We’re aware of the concerns raised about the Dragon Slayer 2 trailer and have taken it down, while we investigate urgently. This trailer was produced by a trusted external partner who had explicitly confirmed that GenAI would not be used. But, among other things, there’s a sixth finger and, well, that’s pretty hard to explain away. For that we apologise.
Our position is clear at Jagex: we don’t use GenAI to create our games, artwork or creative assets, and will not knowingly allow it to be used on our behalf. This is the second time in quick succession that concerns about generative AI have arisen through partners we trusted, and for us that highlights an issue with our own processes which we must address.
Immediately following RuneFest we’re overhauling our review processes, and we’re going to work with and commission creators from the community to make sure that the story of Dragon Slayer II is told to the standard befitting of such an update.”
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2890955408
Here’s the most egregious example:
Extremely needy, demanding, and simultaneously spineless.
Riot releases a $500 skin and make a million dollars, GTA6 has a $400 edition that doesn't include the game, and of course the OG horse armor.
Outrage after outrage, yet they keep on buying.
Additionally, 99% of them have no clue how hard it is to build a game, at any scale really. They don't understand where corners have been cut, and that it's possible to use AI without cutting corners.
They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.
Personally, it makes no sense to build a game without AI. A lot of code is needed and you need to iterate on it, perfect use case for AI.
Art, buttons, sprites, and models, often need rounds of iteration, why not start with a basic set and work on it?
There's nothing wrong with iterating, there is plenty wrong with slop (like the 6 fingers in the trailer). So let's be mad at the slop, not the AI itself.
I'll define "human" as "person with six fingers". Here's my disertation about why they keep complaining about the glove industry.
Billions of people spend money on games. You're picking a ridiculously small subsection of the gamer populace, pinning all kinds of assumption on them, and then judging them for it. This is barely even a strawman argument, it's what strawmen dream about (or more likely, rant about on LinkedIn).
Does anyone else in the world share this definition? This seems very contrived because the vast majority of people who care a lot about games are not going to be putting a full time job's worth of time into it. It's like defining being employed as working over 70 hours per week.
The only reason I can see for jacking the requirement up so high is to try to narrow your scope so you can merge people into one group and define a single average 'gamer' opinion that everyone apparently has, so you can then come in and demonstrate their insane hypocrisy.
Would you be surprised if I said that the person complaining about $400 special editions is actually less likely to buy it? Gaming is mainstream. When you're talking about controversies in games with millions of users, there will always be a proportion of people who really care about it, but in spite of that there are always many thousands of people who won't, and will keep buying the thing they like without much thought given to it.
> They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.
If the chef brings you a meal that tastes horrible, should you be shunned for complaining about it? You've never made something 1/10th of that level of culinary sophistication. Even if you're the one paying for it.
What's even funnier is that in this case, 'the world' means 'making games the exact same way they've already been made for over 40 years to enormous success'. And the developer says "Yes, we will continue to do what has been successful for us for decades". If even the developer agrees and you still find an issue with it, it seems that the real problem for you isn't that gamers are demanding something of developers, it's that the developers aren't using the big new thing you really like. Which is immediately proven by your next sentence.
> Personally, it makes no sense to build a game without AI. A lot of code is needed and you need to iterate on it, perfect use case for AI.
Again, games have been built without AI for decades. Some of the best gaming experiences have been created in that way. And yet, genAI comes along, and after a brief few years it's suddenly unthinkable that anything good can be created the old way? And besides, if we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater - where are those AI-first masterpieces that top the old games? Where are the games with loads of AI code and assets that people love and regard as highly-polished, one of a kind experiences?
From a technical standpoint, AI is a less good fit for games anyway. We have basically solved 95% of all products people would ever need to put out on the web. For any problem you have, there is probably already a combination of high-quality solutions someone has made. AI has vast amounts of training data on web stuff and will probably produce something that doesn't stand out from the pack. But games are highly variable, have very unique problems, are very sensitive to optimization and can involve some of the most complex fields of computer science. Simple games may fare better, but anything large or really unique needs a solution made with purpose. Something that's just 'almost good enough' and not 'good enough' in a high-quality game will be immediately noticeable, especially in terms of gameplay.
otoh I would put the Runescape community and people who play Yo-kai Watch games as far away as possible from each other
People may be forgetting the game has 20 years of content already, why do they need to make more faster with GenAI? Its already a massive piece of software.
Runescape is quite literally a dinner table name it is that famous. Their only true competition is probably World of Warcraft. The community is already huge. What competitive advantages are they going to lose? Likely none.
I'm kind of looking forward to games that leverage locally generated art/content assets using local large/small language models, as a way to make game content more expansive: you make choices in the game that causes different content to evolve in different ways, everyone's game play is different. I see that as a much harder problem for artists to work on (how do they express the meta art for an expansive experience rather than concrete art for a fixed one). I haven't seen anything like this yet, but I'm sure we will see it eventually.
Now should have Jagex reviewed it? Of course. However, there’s just this mistrust in art now. I’ve commissioned two things from artists. I asked both, as for my work I want to fund actual artists. However as these tools get better, I’m concerned that trust won’t be good enough.
Fake edit: “Well if it’s so good you can’t tell the difference then why’s it matter” completely misses the point so let’s not bother with that.