Always hear about how theres to much competition to make an indie game, but when at least half of them are obviously trite it starts to paint a different picture.
I noticed my interest in new games was rapidly declining and it correlates with the rise of AI, even if its not a direct cause and effect relationship.
So I really wouldn’t say my interest in gaming is subsiding. It just shifted in a very specific way and if it were up to me AAA gaming and games with use of AI would die.
I think it means that you’ll have to be annoyingly extra aware of how AI is used and what’s generative AI bullshit slop and what’s not. Not dissimilar to the asset flipping bullshit was even more prevalent a few years ago.
Already? Hard to believe
…is it? I found it incredibly easy to believe.
Been using steam for more than a decade, the catalogue has always been huge and growing, how long this ai trend has been going on? No more than 2years i assume , how many games can be made that quick to fill up half of steam catalogue with ai slop? Thats what came to mind.
Gotta reread the post. Half of all new games are ai
Half of new games
Most games being released were always slop. This changes nothing.
It reflects steam’s value, aka money.
Just means more games I won’t buy. Ez pz
You might as well just not buy any software after 2025.
Its unrealistic to have any developer not use ai in any way in 2025. The tool is too useful and has too much power to be ignored. Even if you wanted to, every google search on how to fix some bug comes with an ai summary. Every IDE uses autocomplete. Having an AI review my personal code has had me fix bugs before i even test.
Its true there is alot of AI slop and low effort projects, but how its being used and to what level matter. Its not black and white. Linus Torvald, the creator of linux, one of, if not the smartest programmer on earth is using it.
Its true there is alot of AI slop and low effort projects, but how its being used and to what level matter. Its not black and white. Linus Torvald, the creator of linux, one of, if not the smartest programmer on earth is using it.
That’s a great appeal to authority.
did you know autocomplete doesn’t have to use ai? we have invented this thing called a language server that can tell us about relevant things to write
I can’t avoid some of my tools or dependencies using AI in their development but I can go as far as possible in not using it when I am making my own stuff. That includes searching only in engines that won’t show me AI summaries.
Linus has been sundowning for awhile. The fact he fell in love with the slop machine that almost makes it feel like he’s in his prime again shouldn’t surprise anybody
Honestly I feel like the games industry has had more of an issue with humanslop from large publishers making live service and derivative stuff over the past few years than indie devs using genAI today.
Because of how genAI works, it can’t simply be the lead creative force for a game or the game will be identical to other games using AI for lead creative. You’d end up with lantern keepers everywhere.
But if genAI would allow for new or displaced devs to compete with the scale and production values of the larger studios for passion projects that take true creative steps forward or risks, then as a gamer it’s a huge win and I’m all for it.
I want to see evolving tech move the medium forward, not just expand profit margins for large publishers with leadership that looks down on their players by downsizing staff and shrinking game scope to chase mobile and micro-transactions.
The industry is dying (without AI as a factor) due to how consolidation happened over the past few decades. Honestly the only possible way I see it getting saved is if something arrives that reduces production costs in a way that allows small independent teams to make games that compete at scale the way studios cropped up earlier on in gaming (1990s-2000s).
And this goes beyond just the development too. Legal, accounting, marketing, etc are all costs that are relatively much smaller for mega corps due to pooled resources than independent studios.
So we can either have: (a) no AI and large publishers buying up great talent to put on derivative BS like every major publisher did for the last decade, or (b) smaller studios that use AI to scale out both dev pipelines and business needs to compete against those large publishers as they prove themselves in the market to secure capital for expansion and future games.
Ultimately the market will decade, but my hopes are on the latter.
I think surgical use of it on small indie teams is going to be a game changer going forward.
Those teams will still need to be pushed forward by a strong creative vision, and integrity though. Artistic assets, UI, character models, geometry, gameplay etc, will all need to be carefully curated and developed by human hands, because people can and will sniff out lazy development practices with AI, just as they already have with AAA studios pumping out garbage and cash grabs.
Games are a creative medium, and to be truly successful, developers will still need to be innovative and know their shit.
I don’t like AI currently, since it’s source is centralized and controlled mainly by large corporations with morally dubious intentions like replacing regular working people and tossing them to the curb.
But, I can’t deny that decentralized models going forward will be invaluable tools. Just think about how tedious the process of retopography is in order to optimize animation rigs.
Having an “AI” tool that does this optimally will be helpful for artists and animators to spend more time on things that players will notice, and also result in better optimized games IF developers don’t just use the tool to cut corners.
The whole topic has a lot of nuance, and I honestly understand the angles for and against it
The cat’s out of the bag, can’t put it back in. Now we see how it plays out, but while I listed some reasons for its use, I can’t help but worry that it will just be used to displace actual creatives and just pump out the same shit over and over again.
AI is a tool at the end of the day. Like every tool in the hands of someone who knows that they doing it’s great. But in the hands of a dumbass on the other hand.
The issue is that the tool enables those dumbasses to get considerably farther in the development process. Meaning now the near endless masses of dumbasses can flood the market with low quality garbage. There’s a reason a barrier to entry has value. For every diamond in the rough indie developer there are now a thousand slop generators just as capable of releasing a game.
By that logic, we should be moving back to assembly.
I’m going to save so much fucking money.
There could be a digital landfill with bad AI ET game packs
It’s called EPIC Store ;)
I hate the phrase “Made with AI” for many nested reasons. Some of which:
-
“AI” is a meaningless buzzword now.
-
“Made” to what extent? That could be anything line autocompletion to spammy vibecoding, from invisible diffusion prototyping/editing to horrific in-game visuals.
-
The tone is “Twitter accusatory.” It ropes in innocent, minimal tool usage with full-on spammers, with zero nuance.
-
Its a red herring for the fundamental issue: waves of games being spammy slop, which was a huge issue even before “AI.”
-
It also discounts the other ethical issues we were grappling with. If we are going to talk ethics, are we just going to forget what companies like EA or Blizzard and such have done?
This needs to be discussed like a spectrum, and whether the intent is malicious. Not as a purity test of “was any AI used making this game?”
It also discounts the other ethical issues we were grappling with. If we are going to talk ethics, are we just going to forget what companies like EA or Blizzard and such have done?
Lost me on the last bullet point. Saying we can’t address any issue without addressing every issue is an effective way of getting nothing addressed.
It’s like saying “all lives matter”. Yes, all issues matter, but this just derails the conversation instead of letting them have their own space to be discussed.
Steam don’t count code generation, it’s mainly the art they flag
I am also very tired of dunking witches to see if they float like ducks because they are made of wood.
Also, do we include dependencies too?
Because if we do… then almost every game is “Made with AI”, given now glibc has AI authored code in it too.
Or the software stacks the gamers are running, for that matter. The APIs, the platforms… as examples, do people really think Valve isn’t using LLMs to develop Steam? Or Nvidia/AMD/Intel/Microsoft for their graphics stacks?
And I don’t mean that as a hostile “you participate in society?” thing, just that it’s inconsistent to judge “AI or no AI” as black and white.
That’s what we call dependencies
I fully support tagging the slop deluge with “Made with AI”.
It helps separate the low effort garbage from the artisan garbage
What is slop, though? What’s your definition?
If they didn’t hire someone to generate code or art, then it’s slop.
Copy paste output without validation and/or effort.
That’s a good definition, in fact I am bookmarking that to remember later.
Slop is just low effort in my view.
So if you just generate with ai without any real thought, thats slop because it is low effort.
The people posting just the “never slop” kitto are low effort too.
That seems to leave room for fully vibe coded apps as long as it’s made with real thought and effort. Some of the anti-AI absolutists are going to have a problem with that.
Fuck absolutist in general and under any circumstances.
What does vibe coded mean to you?
As I understand vibe coded means just pressing enter without checking the code and understanding it?
I’ve always interpreted it as not actually typing any of the code yourself. At least that seems to be the way people that are angry about it are using it.
For me it doesn’t matter if you type it as long as you understand it and it makes sense how it is written.
Thanks for contributing nothing to the discussion. At this point LLMs are more insightful than you are.
…U mad bro?
I mean yeah, the person you’re replying to made it pretty clear they resent you
Which I agree with, you might as well be a bot
Thanks for contributing nothing to the discussion. At this point LLMs are more insightful than you are.
Someone PWEASE think of the clankers’ feelings PWEEEEEASE 🥺
FWIW it wasted a few moments of my time wondering what point they were trying to make.
This reply is time well spent, that’s totally different.
Some shitposting will be easy to catch, funny, digestible & smart while being absolute worthless.
Some shitposting will be bad, some will be good.
But if anything, we can always count on it being shit 🫡
U mad bro?
-
Only half, I coulda sworn that number was higher earlier this year. Is it going down?
The novelty of the tech dies, and the ones that survive have to show some level of passion that it can loop back around to being handcrafted arts.
if you’re a single dev working on a game there’s likely some gap in your skill set that can be filled with AI. “made with ai = bad” is a very short sighted way to look at things that lacks any nuance.
Your point seems valid up until you realize that 99% of the developers this scenario matches are just making clones and games that they will never get beyond early release. To me the issue is less the tool they use and more the tool they are.
Does this address if the number of new games on steam has doubled or even tripped? My guess is that vibe coded slop games are skewing the stat quite a bit
Yeah I suspect the actual number of games people care about has stayed largely the same, there’s just a torrent of slop that’s skewing the numbers. It’s easy to hit 50% when you more than double the number of games being submitted by spewing even more garbage than there already was. It’s so bad Valve is actually having to adjust their store algorithms and systems to try to keep the slop tsunami from drowning out the good indy devs.
was already an issuw before AI, much worse as it’s taken off. not really sure what the answer is from valve tbh…outside of maybe jacking up the deposit to submit a again (and increasing threshold to get deposit back)?
I would also be interested to know how many were developers using ai and how many were people who think ai makes them a programmer
