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.
“The ‘excrement stigma’ is real and severely punishes sandwich shops.” A new study shows how much using excrement in sandwiches hurts sales…
I dunno, guys, have your maybe considered not serving shit sandwiches? But no, I guess “try to use it in ways your customers won’t notice” is the only way forward.
deleted by creator
Yes I have a stigma against idiots who are terminally obsessed with AI, I have it because the only way to stop people ruining everything with AI is endless shame.
It is the same with all forms of fascism.
Social exclusion is evolutionarily the prime way to handle people with problematic tendencies.
I think we all hoped AI would mean more convincing worlds and characters, what we got is effectively the opposite with a nice side dish of job losses and environmental catastrophe.
Games are already rushed and broken on release. Saying you used AI is like saying you rushed faster and broke even more than we thought possible.
deleted by creator
The simple solution would be to stop using it? It’s going to hurt us in the short and long term if we don’t stop.
But that requires too much work! And everyone knows taking part in society and being a human is easy and requires no work at all! /S
Good, good. That makes me happy.
Basically a big studio can hire more people, a solo dev or a very small studio cannot do it, so that’s why people judge harsher the usage of AI on big devs.
Personally I also judge on which areas is used, for a creative part (story, music, art) for me is a big no-no. For development it depends on how it was used, if as a tool to help in code reviews or menial tasks that are easy automated I won’t care as much as if there are vibecoded parts.
You can buy asset packs for couple bucks or even download some for free. Price for freelance from poor country on fiverr or upwork are pennies. The more I think about making game the more I’m convinced to not use AI for it. If you’re big studio and you can’t afford $10-50k for graphic placeholders but you can afford to delegate people to make a AI data pipeline and then spend $100k + on interference than you’re idiots and your company deserves to die.
*The AI Stigma is real and severely punishes “”“developers”“”.
The problem I have is “using AI” could be something as simple as coding autocomplete. Or documentation help. Or scaling sprites. Things like that.
It could be done completely locally.
Hence the term isn’t really fair. It’s not even in the same class as shipping sloppy shovelware, or burning tens of thousands of dollars of tokens making junk, or encountering gross or broken stuff in game.
I think Valve should avoid a term as overloaded as “AI” and more clearly define it as “vibe coding, or gratuitous use of generated assets in game.”
Did anyone ever ask the AI if it wants to create game or play games?
AI stigma seems to hit competent developers with a lot to lose the hardest
No. Competent developers aren’t using AI.
Competent developers don’t use computers either. Nor electricity. The really competent programmers do all their code solely on pencil and paper /s
Right, because anyone who doesn’t use tools that ruin their code with slop is archaic, right?
No, just you. I can tell you make nothing but slop. You wish your code could measure up to first generation LLM output.
