If that’s true that takes my interest in it into the negatives. ASOIAF has about a million moving parts and very distinct characters with complex backstories, there’s not even a small chance an LLM could come close to imitating that.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😕
I like to think I hold myself to a higher standard or at least just a standard. General consumption, I’m not sure, but for video games, people standards have dropped significantly, the masses accept a lot of bullshit and even defend it.
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.
We need laws passed where AI should have to be clearly labeled or the user faces severe fines. Robo calls and AI IVR phone systems should clearly tell you “this is AI”.
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)
It also confirms what we already thought: these f***bucket big studios already think of gaming as a cheap product to generate money, not as a piece of art and enjoyment in its own right.
So does Nintendo’s estore and they don’t bother to filter or sort the slop out, it’s a worthless store to search through. At least steam filters out the slop trash and allows refunds if you somehow fall for garbage.
What is your point here? Some niche forgotten game from 12 years weighs that heavily on your mind?
Where do you even find asset flip games? I haven’t seen any in 5+ years and that period only existed because malicious people found the angle, which valve plugged.
Steam dominates the market because all my friends are there and we all have a great experience. Sales on PC games are better than physical console games ever get. Customer support and in general user experience has been phenomenal.
You can look past weaknesses that were addressed and solved my guy. Greedy assholes will always try to game the system and valve plugs those quick.
You do know it’s a market place lil bro and the best marketplace available in general? The only better one I can think of is Costco and their tech return policies are worse than steam.
You do know DRM isn’t enforced right? You can release without it.
You do know the refund policy is MORE consumer friendly than what the legal obligation from EU requires right?
If calling me a sheep helps you feel better about your poorly researched takes (and incredibly outdated). All the power to you. I’ve said my piece now, I have no further will to continue this fruitless yapping.
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?
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 😂
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.
It might make players demand lower prices if some cheap AI slop is used in the game. That’s the thing publishers want to avoid. They want to sell cheap slop for full price and pocket the difference. That’s what it’s about in the end.
I haven’t really seen demands for lower prices on AI slop, but I’ve seen a lot of outright refusal to buy at any price, and returns when the disclosure came later.
I don’t think the epic guy is making an argument for slop, he’s just saying that gen ai is at the point where avoiding using it is as much of a choice as deciding to. Generating the basis for digital art using something like flux then converting that into a 3d asset, with or without help from other AIs, would count, but could be made to look just as nice as something that didn’t use those tools, but took significantly longer. I understand that argument. What it fails to understand is that for the foreseeable future that is not how this tech is going to be used. It will be used by relative amateurs who push out garbage as quickly as possible. Maybe in five years there’s an argument to be made here, but even then I doubt it. People just won’t care about good utilization of AI because they’ll never even notice it. They’ll still hate the slop but that will inevitably become less sloppy. They’ll be able to tell the difference just based on the quality of the other aspects of the game.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, the term “AI” as it’s used in this context refers to output from Large Language Models (or whatever other complex machine learning systems) that scrape the content of the internet and produce images, text, etc. based on the collective artistic/linguistic work of innumerable uncompensated, unaware human contributors.
Algorithms written by programmers that interpret internal variables and react based on that aren’t the kind of “AI” in question.
The thing is that it’s kind of voluntary. Game developers could have use AI to develop the game and if they wouldn’t want to disclose it no one would know.
Unless the use of AI is the very crappy “AI art” that’s easy to notice the rest of uses would be very hard or actually impossible to figure it out to audit the legitimacy of the tag.
And this will end like r/art where the mods deleted a post accusing the artist of using AI when it was not AI and the final mod answer was “change your art style so it doesn’t look like AI”. A brutal witch-hunt in the end.
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.
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I heard the new Game of Thrones game is using LLM’s to generate some of its content. Pisses me off.
If that’s true that takes my interest in it into the negatives. ASOIAF has about a million moving parts and very distinct characters with complex backstories, there’s not even a small chance an LLM could come close to imitating that.
It’s just fan speculation at this point, but yeah. I’ll be thinking about it before I buy, if I do.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😕
This is very much a pet peeve, but be careful about how you use “consumer” versus “customer”. They each imply completely different power dynamics.
It’s very much consumer these days, people buy literally anything marketed to them.
Then you should hold yourself to higher standards than “people”.
I like to think I hold myself to a higher standard or at least just a standard. General consumption, I’m not sure, but for video games, people standards have dropped significantly, the masses accept a lot of bullshit and even defend it.
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.
We need laws passed where AI should have to be clearly labeled or the user faces severe fines. Robo calls and AI IVR phone systems should clearly tell you “this is AI”.
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?
Counters calls to scrap disclosures… I don’t follow
Some douche nozzle from epic games said Stream needs to scrap their AI disclosure requirements because soon all games will be AI.
ETA Article link: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/epic-ceo-wants-valve-and-steam-to-stop-requiring-devs-to-disclose-generative-ai-usage
It also confirms what we already thought: these f***bucket big studios already think of gaming as a cheap product to generate money, not as a piece of art and enjoyment in its own right.
Yeah it was hard to parse for me too
“valve ignores requests to remove ai disclosures”
Steam already sells enough slop without AI.
But you know for sure the moment Gaben sees all the money from AI games, that shit will be pushed to the max.
You have no idea why Steam dominates the market if you truly think this.
Aww dude.
Steam was plagued with asset flips for years and refused to do anything about it. Repeatedly saying it was a Unity issue.
Then there’s the slop of shitty “simulator” games
Digital Homicide
Bad Rats
Have we seriously forgotten about Day One: Gary’s Incident
Steam dominates the market because it paid publishers to use them as DRM for physical releases.
So does Nintendo’s estore and they don’t bother to filter or sort the slop out, it’s a worthless store to search through. At least steam filters out the slop trash and allows refunds if you somehow fall for garbage.
What is your point here? Some niche forgotten game from 12 years weighs that heavily on your mind?
Where do you even find asset flip games? I haven’t seen any in 5+ years and that period only existed because malicious people found the angle, which valve plugged.
Steam dominates the market because all my friends are there and we all have a great experience. Sales on PC games are better than physical console games ever get. Customer support and in general user experience has been phenomenal.
You can look past weaknesses that were addressed and solved my guy. Greedy assholes will always try to game the system and valve plugs those quick.
Aww dude? Wake up?
Aww dude.
Good job ignoring Steam’s monopolistic anti consumer practices that caused their dominance.
Good job ignoring Steam’s multiple instances of willingly selling shit because they get paid either way.
Good job ignoring Steam had to be forced to give refunds by the EU.
You’re a good little sheep aren’t you.
You do know it’s a market place lil bro and the best marketplace available in general? The only better one I can think of is Costco and their tech return policies are worse than steam.
You do know DRM isn’t enforced right? You can release without it.
You do know the refund policy is MORE consumer friendly than what the legal obligation from EU requires right?
If calling me a sheep helps you feel better about your poorly researched takes (and incredibly outdated). All the power to you. I’ve said my piece now, I have no further will to continue this fruitless yapping.
Good job completely ignoring what I said about Valve paying publishers to use them as DRM to forced a install base. That’s a good little lamb you are.
It is literally the bare minimum they are required, something they spent years arguing against. And you say I’m making poorly researched takes.
I know it’s hard to come to terms with how you’ve been treated like a fool. But don’t worry, one of these days you’ll see the light.
¯\(°_o)/¯
Baaaaah
Yes, yes, we get it. Everything is bad, nothing is good.
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?
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 😂
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 🤣
It might make players demand lower prices if some cheap AI slop is used in the game. That’s the thing publishers want to avoid. They want to sell cheap slop for full price and pocket the difference. That’s what it’s about in the end.
I haven’t really seen demands for lower prices on AI slop, but I’ve seen a lot of outright refusal to buy at any price, and returns when the disclosure came later.
I don’t think the epic guy is making an argument for slop, he’s just saying that gen ai is at the point where avoiding using it is as much of a choice as deciding to. Generating the basis for digital art using something like flux then converting that into a 3d asset, with or without help from other AIs, would count, but could be made to look just as nice as something that didn’t use those tools, but took significantly longer. I understand that argument. What it fails to understand is that for the foreseeable future that is not how this tech is going to be used. It will be used by relative amateurs who push out garbage as quickly as possible. Maybe in five years there’s an argument to be made here, but even then I doubt it. People just won’t care about good utilization of AI because they’ll never even notice it. They’ll still hate the slop but that will inevitably become less sloppy. They’ll be able to tell the difference just based on the quality of the other aspects of the game.
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.
Disclose the exact uses and let customers decide
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.
Man I use AI a lot and I’m not even going to dispute that lol. It’s absolutely true.
I’m not even opposed to AI in games. I’d love to see more granulated disclosures, but Steam-style disclosure should be the bare minimum.
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.
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.
How would the computer controlled enemies work in a 100% AI free videogame?
I mean, the term “AI” as it’s used in this context refers to output from Large Language Models (or whatever other complex machine learning systems) that scrape the content of the internet and produce images, text, etc. based on the collective artistic/linguistic work of innumerable uncompensated, unaware human contributors.
Algorithms written by programmers that interpret internal variables and react based on that aren’t the kind of “AI” in question.
How stupid are people to believe that fancy auto complete engines are AI?
The thing is that it’s kind of voluntary. Game developers could have use AI to develop the game and if they wouldn’t want to disclose it no one would know.
Unless the use of AI is the very crappy “AI art” that’s easy to notice the rest of uses would be very hard or actually impossible to figure it out to audit the legitimacy of the tag.
And this will end like r/art where the mods deleted a post accusing the artist of using AI when it was not AI and the final mod answer was “change your art style so it doesn’t look like AI”. A brutal witch-hunt in the end.
Extremely cmon Valve W
It’s all they had to say for me to continue ignoring Epic.
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.