Angry Gamers Are Forcing Studios To Scrap or Rethink New Releases (msn.com)
- Reference: 0180659090
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/01/26/1359241/angry-gamers-are-forcing-studios-to-scrap-or-rethink-new-releases
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/gaming/gaming-platforms/angry-gamers-are-forcing-studios-to-scrap-or-rethink-new-releases/ar-AA1UZsMO
Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, recently scrapped a title after players accused its trailer of containing AI-generated graphics. Goonswarm Games, the developer behind the canceled project, subsequently shut down entirely and cited six years of lost work alongside what it described as a flood of threats and accusations.
Sandfall Interactive's "Obscur: Expedition 33" had its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year honor rescinded after the developer said it had considered AI-generated images, even though the final release contained none. Larian Studios, the developer behind Baldur's Gate 3, faced immediate backlash after CEO Swen Vincke mentioned in an interview that the company was using generative AI to "explore ideas" for an upcoming release. Vincke later clarified on X that artists use AI only for reference images the way they would use "art books or Google," and Larian executives eventually stated on Reddit that AI would play no role in final artwork.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/gaming/gaming-platforms/angry-gamers-are-forcing-studios-to-scrap-or-rethink-new-releases/ar-AA1UZsMO
Anti-denuvo needs to be a big thing (Score:3)
Important we keep malware out of games. Raise a fuss, extinguish any hype around games with the Denuvo malware.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing's going to change there until there's legislation about it, or until microsoft decides to stop allowing kernel level malware.
Blame the AI companies and their fans (Score:3)
I feel a bit bad for these developers just trying new tools but also read the room guys, the AI companies making those tools you want to use and the people on social media and working at the companies being the absolute worst representatives of the tech. Feels like for the last 3 years I've just seen them reveling in the fact that these tools will put 'wokey-artist-types' out of business, put developers and coders out of jobs, that they can't wait to inundate everyone with trash art and more advertising.
Like the AI companies have engaged in possibly some of the worst PR in my lifetime for something with actual use cases. As soon as they saw how many of the crtpyo-booster folks had so easily slipped into becoming AI boosters should have been a warning and they should have distanced themselves instead of taking the easy money.
Personally I find this story a bit heartwarming as we see a sustained public backlash to what is in my opinion just awful corporate messaging and behavior. Unfortunate that a place like Larian is swept up in it but try and read the room guys.
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> I feel a bit bad for these developers just trying new tools but also read the room guys
One of them did read the room, and lost a prize as a result. In some cases this is more witch-hunt than anything real. One doesn't even need to include AI in the final game to be called out. Larian is especially bad. They were a darling producer of one of the best games of the decade, a true testament to listening to gamers first with a no non-sense, no bullshit game. To vilify them for daring to use gen AI for internal storyboarding is just fucking stupid and gamers should be ashamed.
That said, I have zero
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah that's why I said it's unfortunate but AI is a hot potato in this area right now and you don't want to be caught holding it.
Should gamers be more discerning and nuanced? For sure but they are a reactive and immature crowd seemingly impossible to please, I have no love for them but this backlash has been building for years, this was entirely predictable.
There's a legit use for AI in storyboarding for sure but I'm only going to blame the public so much for having a first impression to such a thing to as
What companies say (Score:1)
Often has zero bearing on what they actually do. I suspect this is just PR and marketing lies.
They made it political, so now it is. (Score:4, Interesting)
How is this new or surprising? Consumers organizing into consumer protection groups is almost as old as time. And those groups have always had the goal of getting the filthy fat cats to listen.
Now we are protecting the oh so poor good guy billionaires suddenly?
And since the studios tried their hardest to make even the most minuscule and ridiculous decisions into massive political marketing campaigns, now they will have to face the tribal political backlash as well.
I see nothing wrong in this - it is supposed to primarily be entertainment and a good entertainment product, so vote with your wallet and let them face all the backlash for their terrible products.
Sandfall with Exp33 or even embark with ARCRaiders are showing what good, successful and awesome modern gaming built by actually talented teams looks like while so called triple A is in freefall.
A much deserved win for the consumers, and the actually talented teams.
Re: (Score:2)
> How is this new or surprising? Consumers organizing into consumer protection groups is almost as old as time. And those groups have always had the goal of getting the filthy fat cats to listen. Now we are protecting the oh so poor good guy billionaires suddenly?
This isn't consumer protection, this is witch-hunts which share more in common with clueless vigilantes than anything else. The examples in TFS have fucking nothing to do with billionaires. They aren't going after EA or Microsoft, they are vilifying small independent studios in some cases when AI wasn't even included in the final product. In one case from a studio who was objectively one of the most gamer friendly and gamer focused (DRM free, paid content free, decent price, providing lots of feature update
Why? (Score:2)
I view AI as a huge opportunity for game companies. I *want* AI content. Sure, checked by people for quality, but AI ought to massively increase productivity. Let AI create graphics, then check then and fix as needed. Give NPCs a personality - let a simple AI talk for them within defined limits, instead of having fixed responses. Have AI check all the paths through a game, to ensure they all work - for complex games a very difficult task for people.
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> Let AI create graphics, then check then and fix as needed.
AI doesn't create - it wholesale steals and then mass generates derivative works. It's a fancy probabilistic token generator that gets its p-values by mass ingesting artists' works without permission. The fact that those tokens can be either pixels or words doesn't matter, the AI doesn't even understand the difference.
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Okay, so train the texture generator for Fallout 5 with the textures from every previous Fallout game. Do the same for the next Assassins Creed, CoD, whatever. Use public domain photos of brick walls to train your brick wall generator.
There are easy solutions to the problem you brought up.
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All artists just steal and generate derivative works. In any given culture, the state of art is an accumulated product created by a community over the span of often centuries. I think what irks me about "creatives" that want to dip into AI revenue directly is that they aren't giving credit to the fact their art, too, was based on inspiration from the community they're a part of. The AI isn't really "stealing" from an individual artist, it's really large-scale "cultural appropriation" of a dramatic kind. Thu
Re: Why? (Score:1)
You want meaningful human connection. To this,
AI is cheap, uncanny sugar. You may argue that it has its useless (and it does) or that it can be used cleverly to unlock new play experience (and it can), but overall AI will simply poison everything from your video games to your customer support experiences to your medical diagnoses.
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As a gamer and a game developer, let me comment on your points
> Checked by people for quality
You're suggesting that artists will now do art evaluation instead of art? Or Non-artists will do that? Or do you think companies will only hire art directors? If they do so, how would an artists live until they become a director? So, it's both boring and unsustainable
> Give NPCs a personality - let a simple AI talk for them within defined limits, instead of having fixed responses
It's a game, not a reality simulator. How do you know some information is important for gamey game purposes if you keep reading slop that is slightly different, meandering, and infin
Thank you Gamers! (Score:2, Interesting)
Your frivolous pastime pushed GPU development that enabled the AI revolution we have today! The greatest technological revolution in human history will lead to a post-scarcity society. The transition will suck and it is unfortunate for those artists at the leading edge. But like pulling a Band-Aid off, it is better to do it faster than than slower. To reach post-scarcity everything must be automated; for those with jobs will fight against the transition - oppose things like UBI or sovereign wealth funds.
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You think that if AI or automation advance to the level where we have vast automated factories and build and repair themselves, that the people (or AI) that control these things will happily share ownership of it with everyone? You're delusional. Once the average person is deemed to be more trouble than they're worth in productivity and output, they'll be left to rot at best, and exterminated at worst. Whoever controls the technology will have zero incentive to do anything else. The only reason the mass
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
These people literally believe that billionaires are evil but also that those evil billionaires will pay them to sit around doing nothing once all production is automated.
Sloppy sloppy slop (Score:2)
No slop for me, please
How dare you! (Score:2)
Use computer generated graphics to create the computer generated graphics I watch while playing.
What? Do you think they use live actors? Or even pen and ink to hand draw the animation cells you see? You gamers wanted a world of unreality to entertain you. This is what you asked for.
AI art, writing, or code? (Score:2)
On the one hand, thank you gaming community for pushing back against AI. But as far as I can tell, this kind of backlash is only in regards to "creative" AI, i.e. art and writing. But I would be shocked if every single dev writing code for any game these days isn't using AI tools to do so. Why is one OK and not the other? Do AI coding tools put more people out of work than artistic AI tools? Are they any less guilty of copyright infringement? Sure, everything on stackoverflow is freely available, but it's l
Go woke, go broke. See Ubisoft for details. (Score:2)
Poisoning a work of art or entertain ment by emphasizing The Message(TM) - or any other political message - never goes well. What is surprising is how consistently Hollywood and Game developers continue to fall into this trap these days despite projects built and run that way regularly lose hundreds of millions and are clearly not what the audience wants.
Ubisoft f.e. just went belly-up because of this sh*t. And they've been around for a looooong time, but it only took a few years of dimwits unfamiliar with
I think (Score:4, Insightful)
That trying to blame this all on AI is kind of specious. Gamers have a lot to be pissed about. Maybe AI was the trigger, but Companies involved in gaming have been treating gamers like shit in recent years. I think it is more like the crows coming home to roost.
Re: I think (Score:2)
Nah, as a gamer, I feel this is legit. The audience is already sensitive to seeing cut corners, filler content, misleading trailers, lack of QA and optimisation, derivative content designed by a commity, etc. AI is just a big, easy red flag to point to. We already have slop. If studios can't afford to put time and effort into images, text, voices, it's pretty obvious they'll try to cut playtest, iteration, innovation. And the more slop we have, the harder it is to notice something new and interesting.
Re: I think (Score:2)
I wouldn't mind AI in a lot of games. There are a lot of games where the stock assets, the quick and dirty pixel art, or even the 5-minutes-in-a-DAW music could benefit from AI replacement. Anything that isn't the selling point of the game anyway.
There is also a huge potential for AI IN games. I like narrative games, I also like open world games, why can't I have both at the same time?
But there's also the thing about quality signals. The best games in the world aren't worth anything if I'll never hear about
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> There is also a huge potential for AI IN games. I like narrative games, I also like open world games, why can't I have both at the same time?
No thanks. I've seen AI writing. I go out of my way to avoid that stuff. It's not even as good as derivative fan fiction on you'd find on a Star Wars forum. I'd rather have less story content that content authored by an AI, especially one pulling stuff out of thin air on the fly with no human guiding the prompting. If you want to use an AI-generated algorithm to handle crown dynamics or something, then sure, but keep it out of anything with narrative or artistic significance.
Re: I think (Score:1)
The Roblox games my daughter plays have AI generated music and a lot of it is really good.
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I have a bunch of songs on my phone that I bought on iTues after hearing them on a Youtube channel, and I have no idea whether they're "real" or AI. They're good either way.
I also know someone who used to be a moderately-successful musician in the 90s and now makes a side income from AI music. He writes the songs, gets the AI to produce the music and (usually) the vocals and pays someone to do a proper mix before releasing it. He's much happier and more productive now he doesn't need a music company or doze
Re: I think (Score:2)
If AI generated text in-game floats your boat, there might be a market for it. My problem is that I feel too much of the text in-game is already subpar filler written to tick a box somewhere. Playing FF16 here and honestly wish the side quests would just skip the generic fetch quest drivel. Even a lot of the main story text is formulaic and could've been written with a prompt.
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How about price? I'm caring less and less about AI generated assets as this goes on and find myself thinking more and more about what BS the prices of AAA games are experiencing. I find myself wondering why I should care at all.
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> gamers suck, the worst and most annoying and most entitled group of fans who never know what they want and demand everything.
While I'm no fan of the people whining about AI-generated content in games, game companies hating their customers is exactly the reason why games are flopping.
"You will buy our slop and thank us for it!" is not a great marketing slogan.
I don't remember the last time I bought an "AAA" game. I buy indie games from developers who provide what their customers want and don't try to fi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> is it lost on you by saying youre not an entitled gamer you are right now acting like a spoiled entitled gamer baby?
Again, calling me "a spoiled entitled gamer baby" is not a good marketing strategy. It's typical of the people who are making big-name games today, but then they whine about why their games flop because those entitled gamer babies won't buy their slop.
> if someone else enjoys the "woke nonsense" who are you to complain, just dont play it
If you'd read my post, you'd see that's literally
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> gamers suck, the worst and most annoying and most entitled group of fans who never know what they want and demand everything
The customer is always right.
It's not a monolithic group. Almost 50% belong to it. The gaming marketplace has a lot of choice. So studios actually have to compete. They should be glad that their customers are letting them know exactly what they want and if they can't, they will lose business to someone who can. That's the essence of a free market, no?
> all they demand is whatev
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Of course gamers are entitled, they're the ones spending the money. You don't get to milk them without giving them a compelling product in return - and like you said, there's plenty to choose from so the bar is high.
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I would say it's the straw that broke the camel's back. It's also likely the one everyone is focusing on the most because it has the largest cross-demographic appeal, even among people who previously had mocked and scorned gamers when they spoke out about corporate abuses and the degradation of property rights and basic truth in advertising.
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It's not like PC gamers can afford to upgrade their hardware to play the new titles anyway. Thanks to Rampopolypse, memory and storage upgrades cost over twice as much as they did a year ago.
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> That trying to blame this all on AI is kind of specious. Gamers have a lot to be pissed about. Maybe AI was the trigger, but Companies involved in gaming have been treating gamers like shit in recent years. I think it is more like the crows coming home to roost.
AI can be blamed on two aspects. First is the replacing humans part. That's the obvious one. The other one is the fact that AI is the latest reason GPUs, RAM and SSDs are expensive because Nvidia decided to prioritize AI over gamers and not producing