If “everyone will be using AI” and it’s not a bad thing, then these big companies should wear it as a badge of honor. The rest of us will buy accordingly.
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“The people who advocate for AI” are literally running around claiming that AI is Jesus and it is sacrilege to stand against it.
And by literally, I mean Peter Thiel is giving talks actually claiming this. This is not an exaggeration, this is not hyperbole.
They are trying to recruit techno-cultists.
Ironically, one of the defining features of the techno-cultists in Warhammer 40k is that they changed the acronym to mean “Abominable Intelligence” and not a single machine runs on anything more advanced than a calculator.
Sci Fi keeps trying to teach us lessons, and instead we keep using it as an instruction manual.
(Except, apparently, whenever it’s on the nose we interpret it as dramatic irony…)
I think the grey area is what if you’re an indie dev and did the entire story line and artwork yourself, but have the ai handle more complex coding.
It is to our eyes entirely original but used AI. Where do you draw the line?
Disclose the AI usage and how it was used. Let people decide. There will always be “no AI at all, ever” types that won’t touch the game, but others will see that it was used as a tool rather than a replacement for creativity and will give it a chance.
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I definitely agree but I think that case would still get caught in the steam AI usage badge?
Recycling sounds suspiciously like what “AAA” studios already do
I wish they’d replace Tim Sweeney with AI. Would genuinely have better takes on most topics, too. Sigh.
Can we get AI version of the old burnout Tim Sweeney? He was as least unintentionally funny.
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.
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. 😕
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.
consumers
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.
The reality is, that it’s often stated that generative AI is an inevitability, that regardless of how people feel about it, it’s going to happen and become ubiquitous in every facet of our lives.
That’s only true if it turns out to be worth it. If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
Those heavily invested in it, ether literally through shares of Nvidia, or figuratively through the potential to deskill and shift power away from skilled workers at their companies don’t want that to be a possibility, they need to prevent consumers from having a choice.
If it was an inevitability in it’s own right, if it was just as good and easily substitutable, why would they care about consumers knowing before they payed for it?
relevant article https://www.theringer.com/2025/11/04/tech/ai-bubble-burst-popping-explained-collapse-or-not-chatgpt
AI storytelling is an amalgam of several different narratives, including:
Inevitability: AI is the future; its eventual supremacy is both imminent and certain, and therefore anyone who doesn’t want to be left behind had better embrace the technology. See Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, insisting earlier this year that every job in the world will be impacted by AI “immediately.”
Functionality: AI performs miracles, and the AI products that have been released to the public wildly outperform the products they aim to replace. To believe this requires us to ignore the evidence obtained with our own eyes and ears, which tells us in many cases that the products barely work at all, but it’s the premise of every TV ad you watch out of the corner of your eye during a sports telecast.
Grandiosity: The world will never be the same; AI will change everything. This is the biggest and most important story AI companies tell, and as with the other two narratives, big tech seems determined to repeat it so insistently that we come to believe it without looking for any evidence that it’s true.
As far as I can make out, the scheme is essentially: Keep the ship floating for as long as possible, keep inhaling as much capital as possible, and maybe the tech will get somewhere that justifies the absurd valuations, or maybe we’ll worm our way so far into the government that it’ll have to bail us out, or maybe some other paradigm-altering development will fall from the sky. And the way to keep the ship floating is to keep peddling the vision and to seem more confident that the dream is inevitable the less it appears to be coming true.
speaking for myself, MS can thank AI for being the thing that made me finally completely ditch windows after using it 30+ years
Don’t forget, “Turns out it was a losing bet to back DEI and Trans people”.
This is something scared, pathetic, loser, feral, spineless, sociopathic, moronic fascists come up with to try to win a crowd larger than an elevator; Assume the outcome as a foregone conclusion and try to talk around it, or claim it’s already happened.
Respond directly. “What? That’s ridiculous. I’ve never even seen ANY AI that I liked. Who told you it was going to pervade everything?”
That reminds me how McDonald’s and other gaat food chains are struggling. People figure it’s too expensive for what you get after prices going up and quality going down for years. They forgot that people buy if the price and quality are good. Same with AI. It’s all fun if it’s free or dirt cheap, but people don’t buy expensive slop.
If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
There’s another scenario: Turns out that if Big AI doesn’t buy up all the available stock of DRAM and GPUs, running local AI models on your own PC will become more realistic.
I run local AI stuff all the time from image generation to code assistance. My GPU fans spin up for a bit as the power consumed by my PC increases but other than that, it’s not much of an impact on anything.
I believe this is the future: Local AI models will eventually take over just like PCs took over from mainframes. There’s a few thresholds that need to be met for that to happen but it seems inevitable. It’s already happening for image generation where the local AI tools are so vastly superior to the cloud stuff there’s no contest.
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.
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 😂
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.
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 🤣
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
It’s all they had to say for me to continue ignoring Epic.
Consumers have a right to be informed of information relevant to them making purchasing decisions. AI is obviously relevant to the consumer and should be disclosed.
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)
Extremely common Valve W
…what calls? No one is calling for this. One dude said it was unnecessary. That’s not a call, it’s an opinion. He’s not out picketing for the end of fucking AI labels.
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Based Ayi Sanchez
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.
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”.
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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”
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.
