A new study attempts to prove gamers aren't sold on AI, but I didn't think the effects were this significant
www.windowscentral.com
A new study from Game Oracle demonstrates the negative effects the use of AI can have on sales (and reputation). There's a lot to unpack here, but the main message is resounding: we're not yet ready for the future of gaming.

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.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    12·
    16 hours ago

    Game Oracle’s initial research, even at a surface level, is eye-opening. It studied almost 10,000 Steam releases between January and October 2025, discovering that games disclosing AI use averaged just 4 reviews in the first post-launch month compared to 7 reviews for games without AI.

    What I want to know is whether this study involved any sort of pre-screening quality filter for the games considered. If that’s not accounted for, there’s definitely going to be a larger volume of very low effort asset-flip-equivalent AI games just because it would be faster and more scalable to make them that way, which would skew the numbers and not show whether people are avoiding games due to the AI label independently of their quality otherwise.

    Edit: I realized I didn’t check the text of the study so I went and did that, looks like this is addressed:

    We mitigated this however by filtering “slop” out of our dataset based on publication frequency and absurd initial prices (>$100; there is a little over 100 games in this group and most are scams). We removed developers whose historical publication rate is greater than 1 game per every 6 months working

    • AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      5 hours ago

      The absurd initial prices of over 100 dollars is because steam will keep all of the money from games that don’t sell 100 dollars gross.