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.
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.