A year ago, I poked around Steam to see how many game developers were disclosing usage of Generative AI . It was around 1,000, which seemed like a lot to me at the time. If memory serves, that was about 1.1% of the entire Steam library, which has since seen 20,000+ more titles appear. I've been fol
I think when you’ve got a small enough team making something as multifaceted as a video game, there will be parts of it you find boring and relatively unimportant. If you can make it cheaper, you get that much closer to the possibility of breaking even. Parts of this can scale up to larger projects, but in the end, this is a matter of choosing your battles. There’s an adage that’s something like, “Your game is never done; you just stop working on it,” and the sooner you can stop working on it while still delivering a product that people are interested in, the more sustainable the whole endeavor becomes. Chunks of it will be filler or less important than other chunks, always. It’s why there’s a Unity and Unreal asset store; and why you can hear the same sound library used in Devil May Cry, Soul Calibur, and Dark Souls menus. Those parts of the game were less important to be specifically crafted for these games, and they chose other battles to care more about.
Eh, the small team argument doesn’t really carry any water I think. Some of the most beloved indie games of all time have simple, geometric graphics. Thomas Was Alone even managed to tell a tear jerking story between characters who were monotone squares and rectangles.
Using AI to totally gloss over some of your most basic creative questions, such as “what are my capabilities?” And “What can I do given those limitations?” Isn’t going to lead you to a better product. If something is truly that unimportant it can be arranged trivially or cut. Even choosing to cut something is an inherently creative decision; another layer of the process which is lost if you train yourself to reach for AI to implement something that suits your first whim.
The asset store angle is also not really comparable. You’re still collaborating with another artist. We could ride this train all the way down to you didn’t personally mine the silicone for the computer you personally designed if we felt like it. It’s disingenuous and ignores the material differences between these technologies.
In summary, I basically think that you are narratively framing this as something that empowers the little guys, but I disagree that it is actually doing so in practice. It’s a product that’s only on our minds because of a massive concerted effort on the behalf of mega corporations whose explicit goals are to rob and disenfranchise us
It does empower little guys. It empowers everybody, for good or ill. That’s a what a tool is. I can hammer a nail, I can hammer a nail that shouldn’t be there, or I can hammer a person in the face. Is any of that the hammer’s fault?
Gen AI is not a hammer, it is an auto-construction machine that removes you from the process of building. It doesn’t empower people, it sidesteps them.
I’m not a fan of AI; I’m indifferent to it. What your capabilities are will vary based on which tools you’re using, and that can result in a very different scope of game. The part where it’s collaborating with another artist doesn’t matter to me if I can’t tell the difference, as long as the intellectual property rights of how the AI was trained are handled properly. I won’t be able to tell the difference in something like My Summer Car, because the prop artwork hanging in the room isn’t why I would be playing that game. If it has a tangible effect on the quality of the game, and I can tell the product is sub par because of the use of gen AI, that’s when it was the wrong tool for the job, or that it should have been cut. I personally wouldn’t care about how those scientists in Jurassic World look (there’s more important, attention-grabbing stuff in that game), but seemingly, plenty of people do. The reason I brought up small teams in particular is not just because of cost savings but because you’re less likely to have a specialist who excels at or enjoys every single part that makes up a video game.
that can result in a very different scope of game.
That’s exactly the point. Sometimes you shouldn’t even try to do certain things. The 15 minutes you spend shimming your AI assets into the game are ironically stealing your time from the 15 minutes of thoughtful consideration that would have resulted in a manageable project. Again my friend; your first thought for the project is not the point when you have finished the important thinking for your project.
Anyway we can keep going back and forth about your narrative framing of the technology all day, but you say you don’t really care, so why try to justify anything beyond that? If the devs don’t care about the phenomena I’m describing, and neither do their players, then of course it’s a match made in heaven. Please feel free to enjoy your pastimes without any concern for these conversations. People who think like me will occasionally meet you with scrutiny (we obviously think you should care very deeply about the art you choose to fill your life with) but I suspect in time our groups will naturally just see less and less of each other
You’re certainly free to lovingly craft every byte of a game but that doesn’t automatically make it a better product. You’re describing a creative outlet, not something that needs to appeal to some random customer in the 10s they skim your store page.
Regardless of how important it is to your creative vision, there are some boxes you need to check. Visual texture on an otherwise forgettable wall is that exact case. If you need some background wall art your options are:
Spend X units of time putting something together. Most likely a poor use of time unless you’re already proficient
Fundamentally simplify your art style to keep X manageable (your game ends up in the pixel art bin, sales plummet)
Sacrifice other parts of development to free up X time (content, mechanics and other features suffer)
Pay somebody else (literally never in the budget for an indie game)
Gen AI gives something passable in a few minutes
Or everyone could take your advice: if you don’t have the time or money to approach your dream game, don’t even try! In my opinion, more people making their art is a good thing, even if it doesn’t pass everyone’s purity test.
If you’re (rightly) worried about the livelihood of the displaced background artist that’s fine, but complain about the economic system and not the tool.
Yeah similar to above my friend, you are simply incorrectly framing the issue rather than exploring reality as it is.
You are merely saying the words “you will either use GenAI or your project will fail, there is NO WAY to economically address any of the problems that crop up during game dev without using it”. This betrays fundamental misunderstanding of what creativity is
It is also ahistorical. What you and seemingly all proponents of the technology seem to forget is the meteoric success of the industry and indie games in particular prior to the AI nonsense.
Finally, I am not even slightly interested in addressing your ridiculous perversions of my previous points. Anyone can easily understand what I’m saying and it’s very telling that you feel the need to misrepresent me so extremely. You may continue arguing with yourself if you wish, I trust that any reader worth reaching will easily be able to distinguish between my words and the strawmen you are compelled to present
I’m not perverting any argument, you’re just arguing something completely orthogonal to the point people above are making. We all understand creativity and that having more control and agency in a project is a good thing.
My argument isn’t framing, it’s reality. Time is a resource and the creative process is irrelevant when you’ve got bills to pay. The vast majority of people don’t have the luxury to maintain a passion project, much less the chance to recoup a portion of what they poured into it.
Yes, in a vacuum with no regard for money or other responsibilities, the creative output is better for working through those problems. There are examples of this: Transport Tycoon, Undertale, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, etc… Usually games made in spare time over years by someone with a well paying tech job or game dev experience.
These indie games having success is very much the exception. The growth of the indie scene came from the wide availability of dev tooling and distribution platforms. Cutting out those hurdles massively expanded the pool of people who could now make games, thus we get more gems.
Not everyone needs to use Unreal Engine or Steam, but having them as an option is the only way that many games get made. That doesn’t have any correlation to quality, they can be masterpieces or shovel ware. Gen Ai is the same, it just lowers another barrier of entry.
The choice isn’t “Gen Ai or flop”. The choice is in how you allocate your limited resources to make your project. It could add no value to a small project or be the key to unlocking a larger project. If your goal is to make some money from your efforts, it can be great at adding that veneer of polish that gets eyes on your game. I’m not one to judge someone for that just because lazy people can also do lazy things with it.
It’s not lol. It’s amazing how many people will argue for AI by listing the merits of actual creative tools, then just try to package AI in there as well.
I believe the massive VC bait marketing push is to blame for this. It’s been fun in real life learning who is and isn’t hooked into the corporate propaganda IV.
I’m not perverting any argument
You continue to pervert in fact, by saying random things and talking to me as if I said them. Like I said, don’t care, go nuts.
It’s not a tool? If I plug it into Blender and get a skeleton of an asset I wouldn’t otherwise be able to make with my resource constraints, that’s not a useful part of the process? Just because it has tradeoffs doesn’t mean it has no applications.
I understand people who argue against it on ethical grounds, but I’ll never understand arguing it always makes everything 100% worse. Telling people “just spend X hours learning to make it” or “just pay someone on fivver” or “restructure your project so you don’t need it” just to protect the sanctity of the artform is thinly veiled elitism.
I’ve personally used Gen AI in projects and found some useful applications. My own personal experience is corporate propoganda? Or am I just a filthy plebeian because I couldn’t dedicate multiple days to learning other tools?
If I followed your advice those projects wouldn’t have been finished. You can scroll up and read your own comments, I was on a shoestring budget and wasn’t willing to cut into other responsibilities or shrink the project into a toy. Or is this just “framing” as you say, when really I shouldn’t have pursued my art at all because I wasn’t willing to risk my paycheck?
These are genuine questions, what should I have done? Why would it have been better to do it another way? I don’t want to make a strawman, I want to know how your pontificating results in anything useful outside of an internet discussion.
Well, AI is largely a solution in search of a problem at this point in time, but I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles, because I don’t think I have it in me to play more than one of those. Fortunately, better tools and options can exist so that there’s not some arbitrary reason to choose to do less when you could have done more. The actual value of gen AI right now is propped up by investments and not actual profitability, so we’ll see where its value falls in the marketplace once gravity pulls it back down. I expect the better option will still often be just the asset store when the dust settles. And this isn’t some total disregard for what art we fill our lives with. There’s art that people care very deeply about in My Summer Car, just not the framed pictures hanging on the wall.
I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles
You and I both are limited in what we are capable of appreciating. The limiting factor is our taste. My hope for everyone is that we always continue to see the value in developing our taste, because the art we engage with affects who we become
I think when you’ve got a small enough team making something as multifaceted as a video game, there will be parts of it you find boring and relatively unimportant. If you can make it cheaper, you get that much closer to the possibility of breaking even. Parts of this can scale up to larger projects, but in the end, this is a matter of choosing your battles. There’s an adage that’s something like, “Your game is never done; you just stop working on it,” and the sooner you can stop working on it while still delivering a product that people are interested in, the more sustainable the whole endeavor becomes. Chunks of it will be filler or less important than other chunks, always. It’s why there’s a Unity and Unreal asset store; and why you can hear the same sound library used in Devil May Cry, Soul Calibur, and Dark Souls menus. Those parts of the game were less important to be specifically crafted for these games, and they chose other battles to care more about.
Eh, the small team argument doesn’t really carry any water I think. Some of the most beloved indie games of all time have simple, geometric graphics. Thomas Was Alone even managed to tell a tear jerking story between characters who were monotone squares and rectangles.
Using AI to totally gloss over some of your most basic creative questions, such as “what are my capabilities?” And “What can I do given those limitations?” Isn’t going to lead you to a better product. If something is truly that unimportant it can be arranged trivially or cut. Even choosing to cut something is an inherently creative decision; another layer of the process which is lost if you train yourself to reach for AI to implement something that suits your first whim.
The asset store angle is also not really comparable. You’re still collaborating with another artist. We could ride this train all the way down to you didn’t personally mine the silicone for the computer you personally designed if we felt like it. It’s disingenuous and ignores the material differences between these technologies.
In summary, I basically think that you are narratively framing this as something that empowers the little guys, but I disagree that it is actually doing so in practice. It’s a product that’s only on our minds because of a massive concerted effort on the behalf of mega corporations whose explicit goals are to rob and disenfranchise us
It does empower little guys. It empowers everybody, for good or ill. That’s a what a tool is. I can hammer a nail, I can hammer a nail that shouldn’t be there, or I can hammer a person in the face. Is any of that the hammer’s fault?
Gen AI is not a hammer, it is an auto-construction machine that removes you from the process of building. It doesn’t empower people, it sidesteps them.
I’m not a fan of AI; I’m indifferent to it. What your capabilities are will vary based on which tools you’re using, and that can result in a very different scope of game. The part where it’s collaborating with another artist doesn’t matter to me if I can’t tell the difference, as long as the intellectual property rights of how the AI was trained are handled properly. I won’t be able to tell the difference in something like My Summer Car, because the prop artwork hanging in the room isn’t why I would be playing that game. If it has a tangible effect on the quality of the game, and I can tell the product is sub par because of the use of gen AI, that’s when it was the wrong tool for the job, or that it should have been cut. I personally wouldn’t care about how those scientists in Jurassic World look (there’s more important, attention-grabbing stuff in that game), but seemingly, plenty of people do. The reason I brought up small teams in particular is not just because of cost savings but because you’re less likely to have a specialist who excels at or enjoys every single part that makes up a video game.
That’s exactly the point. Sometimes you shouldn’t even try to do certain things. The 15 minutes you spend shimming your AI assets into the game are ironically stealing your time from the 15 minutes of thoughtful consideration that would have resulted in a manageable project. Again my friend; your first thought for the project is not the point when you have finished the important thinking for your project.
Anyway we can keep going back and forth about your narrative framing of the technology all day, but you say you don’t really care, so why try to justify anything beyond that? If the devs don’t care about the phenomena I’m describing, and neither do their players, then of course it’s a match made in heaven. Please feel free to enjoy your pastimes without any concern for these conversations. People who think like me will occasionally meet you with scrutiny (we obviously think you should care very deeply about the art you choose to fill your life with) but I suspect in time our groups will naturally just see less and less of each other
You’re certainly free to lovingly craft every byte of a game but that doesn’t automatically make it a better product. You’re describing a creative outlet, not something that needs to appeal to some random customer in the 10s they skim your store page.
Regardless of how important it is to your creative vision, there are some boxes you need to check. Visual texture on an otherwise forgettable wall is that exact case. If you need some background wall art your options are:
Or everyone could take your advice: if you don’t have the time or money to approach your dream game, don’t even try! In my opinion, more people making their art is a good thing, even if it doesn’t pass everyone’s purity test.
If you’re (rightly) worried about the livelihood of the displaced background artist that’s fine, but complain about the economic system and not the tool.
Yeah similar to above my friend, you are simply incorrectly framing the issue rather than exploring reality as it is.
You are merely saying the words “you will either use GenAI or your project will fail, there is NO WAY to economically address any of the problems that crop up during game dev without using it”. This betrays fundamental misunderstanding of what creativity is
It is also ahistorical. What you and seemingly all proponents of the technology seem to forget is the meteoric success of the industry and indie games in particular prior to the AI nonsense.
Finally, I am not even slightly interested in addressing your ridiculous perversions of my previous points. Anyone can easily understand what I’m saying and it’s very telling that you feel the need to misrepresent me so extremely. You may continue arguing with yourself if you wish, I trust that any reader worth reaching will easily be able to distinguish between my words and the strawmen you are compelled to present
I’m not perverting any argument, you’re just arguing something completely orthogonal to the point people above are making. We all understand creativity and that having more control and agency in a project is a good thing.
My argument isn’t framing, it’s reality. Time is a resource and the creative process is irrelevant when you’ve got bills to pay. The vast majority of people don’t have the luxury to maintain a passion project, much less the chance to recoup a portion of what they poured into it.
Yes, in a vacuum with no regard for money or other responsibilities, the creative output is better for working through those problems. There are examples of this: Transport Tycoon, Undertale, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, etc… Usually games made in spare time over years by someone with a well paying tech job or game dev experience.
These indie games having success is very much the exception. The growth of the indie scene came from the wide availability of dev tooling and distribution platforms. Cutting out those hurdles massively expanded the pool of people who could now make games, thus we get more gems.
Not everyone needs to use Unreal Engine or Steam, but having them as an option is the only way that many games get made. That doesn’t have any correlation to quality, they can be masterpieces or shovel ware. Gen Ai is the same, it just lowers another barrier of entry.
The choice isn’t “Gen Ai or flop”. The choice is in how you allocate your limited resources to make your project. It could add no value to a small project or be the key to unlocking a larger project. If your goal is to make some money from your efforts, it can be great at adding that veneer of polish that gets eyes on your game. I’m not one to judge someone for that just because lazy people can also do lazy things with it.
It’s not lol. It’s amazing how many people will argue for AI by listing the merits of actual creative tools, then just try to package AI in there as well.
I believe the massive VC bait marketing push is to blame for this. It’s been fun in real life learning who is and isn’t hooked into the corporate propaganda IV.
You continue to pervert in fact, by saying random things and talking to me as if I said them. Like I said, don’t care, go nuts.
It’s not a tool? If I plug it into Blender and get a skeleton of an asset I wouldn’t otherwise be able to make with my resource constraints, that’s not a useful part of the process? Just because it has tradeoffs doesn’t mean it has no applications.
I understand people who argue against it on ethical grounds, but I’ll never understand arguing it always makes everything 100% worse. Telling people “just spend X hours learning to make it” or “just pay someone on fivver” or “restructure your project so you don’t need it” just to protect the sanctity of the artform is thinly veiled elitism.
I’ve personally used Gen AI in projects and found some useful applications. My own personal experience is corporate propoganda? Or am I just a filthy plebeian because I couldn’t dedicate multiple days to learning other tools?
If I followed your advice those projects wouldn’t have been finished. You can scroll up and read your own comments, I was on a shoestring budget and wasn’t willing to cut into other responsibilities or shrink the project into a toy. Or is this just “framing” as you say, when really I shouldn’t have pursued my art at all because I wasn’t willing to risk my paycheck?
These are genuine questions, what should I have done? Why would it have been better to do it another way? I don’t want to make a strawman, I want to know how your pontificating results in anything useful outside of an internet discussion.
This is some luddite logic. If man were meant to fly God would have gave us wings.
Ridiculous and obvious mischaracterization of the point. I’m not gonna waste my time arguing with the random ideas you invent
Icarus flew too close to the sun, you know.
Well, AI is largely a solution in search of a problem at this point in time, but I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles, because I don’t think I have it in me to play more than one of those. Fortunately, better tools and options can exist so that there’s not some arbitrary reason to choose to do less when you could have done more. The actual value of gen AI right now is propped up by investments and not actual profitability, so we’ll see where its value falls in the marketplace once gravity pulls it back down. I expect the better option will still often be just the asset store when the dust settles. And this isn’t some total disregard for what art we fill our lives with. There’s art that people care very deeply about in My Summer Car, just not the framed pictures hanging on the wall.
You and I both are limited in what we are capable of appreciating. The limiting factor is our taste. My hope for everyone is that we always continue to see the value in developing our taste, because the art we engage with affects who we become
That’s exactly how I grew a sixth finger!