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’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’m moderately excited for its potential in video games, but in the future. If it could have AI playing as NPCs to make a currently impossibly-reactive world, i would be pretty thrilled.
I dont know how realistic my dreams are there. Imagine playing a game like LA Noire and actually investigating everything yourself instead of following along with a fairly predictable script.
Yeah, as I said in another comment in this post, I don’t think LLMs can do anything like that, and I think what you’re describing is going to require something that doesn’t exist yet and that we have no reason to think will exist any time soon. (And I’m super pissed that Nvidia et al are raking in billions in dirty grifter money on the contrary promise – which it can’t keep, mind you.)
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.
I don’t think LLMs (smaller or otherwise) can ever clear the uncanny valley. The level of adaptability you’re taking about but without hallucinations and random batshit-crazy behavior requires something humans haven’t invented yet and that we have no specific reason will ever happen. (In fact, I think if we can be said to be on a path toward building the first AGI, I believe LLMs and “generative AI” and this whole hype bubble will be looked back on as having been a diversion/destraction from that path that delayed the advent of AGI.)
Unless/until that someday happens, I’d much rather play, and feel like I’d find much more immersive, a game that generated, say, fetch-quests with something like
My {rand("health","Lord","wife","none-of-yor-business",...)} {rand("demands","begs","commissions",...)} you to bring a {rand("tufted titmouse","Gauntlet of Light","turkey dinner","giant's toenail",...)} that you can find in/at {rand("Illsword Manor","The Cavern of Lies","the afterlife",...)} to {rand("the illfated dragon","Fenworth Blurd","The Rusty Scabbard Inn",...)} in {rand("Feyspring Vale","Weston","the northern wilderness",...)}.than something with the problems inherent to LLMs.I suppose I can agree that I’d be interested in new technologies that make gaming more immersive, but “smart” NPCs that can improvise and riff while not ruining the immersion like LLMs would seem so speculative and far off that I might as well wish to stumble into the possession of a genie lamp a la Disney’s Aladdin while I’m at it. Meanwhile, grifters are making shit-tons of money at your expense promising you just that.
AGI has been only ten years away for the last fifty years. Anyone who says it’s less than ten years away now is trying to sell you a bridge.
As for the “filling out assets” and “increased diversity at least at the high end”, I think you’re overestimating the capabilities of (at least current) generative AI. And if you’re not, there are still a lot of legal issues with generative AI, and no matter which way those legal issues end up being decided, we can expect shitty results for consumers and competitors. (I fear, for instance, that the output of generative AI may be subject to copyright when big companies want it to be and not when lawsuits go in the other direction.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
Local models have no token prices.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Again, you’ve put one point that is heavily debatable, and respond like an asshole when people push back at all. You keep saying shit like
Yes I do disagree, why don’t you give a better reason than speed. I have enough dogwater games to play, I want to play games with soul, as a defense to your first point.
Sorry, I started out polite but the overwhelming majority of people here have responded as assholes so I’ve resorted to the same. I’ve essentially given up - people can’t even seem to discern the difference between AI and data centers, and I’m tired of explaining such subtleties over and over again without the other party gaining even a whiff of comprehension.
Let me start fresh, with you, after my sincere apology for my initial reaction.
Why do you believe using AI removes the soul of a game? There’s still a person involved, directing the AI - purposefully planning the prompts, meticulously curating the resulting content, and imparting their own judgement in determining inclusion. Refining the results until it meets their standard of quality. To attribute the results entirely to the tool used is to discount the human using the tool.
I remember having the exact same reaction as you when Final Fantasy VII came out. I was appalled the developers left behind hand drawn pixel art to instead use computer generated imagery. I literally said they removed the soul of the game by using a computer to create their art.
With age, I’ve realized I was wrong. The tools used don’t remove the soul, so long as a person is still there making the final call, they just enable the person to better realize their own vision and often times that clashes with what the audience expects/desires, but it doesn’t invalidate their vision, as I previously thought.
See the problem is knowing you use ai, everytime I see more than a paragraph it becomes not worth the effort of reading and replying because solid chance you’ve just got an AI doing your writing.
Your prejudice runs deep. I’ve never used AI for a conversation. I use it for generating art, solving errors, adding software features, solving technical problems, analyzing data, and identifying plants/animals. Using it for conversation seems a poor use for the technology. Some people probably do, though, but if they post it they endorse whatever it is that’s being said, so they may as well have written it.
I guess in the future the solution is to only respond with one or two sentences? I’ll try to continue the conversation in that matter but my arguments won’t be very compelling.
Startling lack of evidence for these incredibly bold claims.
The initial observation comes from personal experience and I don’t consider it particularly bold. If you meant something else, and would like to discuss it, please do call it out specifically.