I think a lot of studios use it for code already, and I also don’t think that’s the contentious part.

Games are art, and the people who make them are by and large: artists. Why would artists want to use generative AI?

I wouldn't buy a game that used generative ai and would refund one that I later discovered had. A quick straw poll of the gaming channels I'm in shows a lot of agreement amongst my friends.

I agree that blanket GenAI bans won't be viable much longer, as competition will move much faster.

But also, game development economics are very different from SaaS products. You can't spend a ton of money in tokens per month and expect that the gains from selling those features will support the cost of building them. Game dev margins are already slim-to-negative for most independent studios.

Contemporary AI is not very good at the parts of game dev that are genuinely difficult.

It is fantastic at the code. Monobehaviors are completely solved. I ~never have to look at c# code or shaders again if I choose not to. However, this was like 5% of the problem.

Composing a three-dimensional scene graph in a way that is compelling to a human observer is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at. I worry about those who are in the midst of conflating the capabilities of diffusion models with those of "world" models. The former make it seem as if we are "so close". The latter are more or less non-existent.

For as long as there is a customer base that's influential, loud, and (based on the comment I see on HN) much larger than you expected, there will be an economically viable path for slop-less video games.

The moment hints of AI generated content can be found, large amounts of people dismiss products in an instant. That group will only grow as the AI industry keeps making the hardware you need for video games more expensive and bringing it further out of reach of normal people. Mybae in 2030, when hardware is hopefully affordable again, you can ignore these people, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

I think one of the reasons that Jagex is getting so much pushback on AI is because it goes in the face of all that runescape is about. People spend hundreds and thousands of hours clicking on the same things again and again just to level up a digital skill, when bots have existed since just about the beginning of runescape. I think it reminds all those people that they are wasting their lives away and everything around them is constantly reminding them of it.

I refuse to play any game that uses generative AI for art. Part of playing a game is enjoying effort that the artists and programmers put into it.

Silicon Valley seems to have zero idea what art is and is about. It's probably because they all have absolutely zero artistic talent and are completely deluded into thinking their AI slop is just as good and meaningful as a way to cope.

The whole industry functioned before the clankers and now you suddenly need them?

If you have a subscriber base at $X in 2022 and are profitable, you will still be profitable in 2026 if the subscribers stay.

Gamers generally don't want even want slop.

It's so obvious that I wondered if someone had done it as a joke (that obviously didn't land).

Still happens on modern models like ChatGPT Image and Qwen 2.1. It's extremely rare in Gemini since nano banana's release. I work with people who generate 1,000's of images a week and it'll happen. There is a slack channel for it where you tag the model.

Several indies have, but with big league studio games requiring development times on the order of 4-6 years, I wouldn't expect major titles with considerable AI generated content before the end of the decade. I'm also willing to bet that AI art won't make development times for these titles shorter, but simply lead to even more densely packed content.

I agree. It does make me think these tools need an irrevocable signature on the files, if that’s even possible. You can ask someone you’re commissioning if they use AI, and they can just lie.

Now should have Jagex reviewed it? Of course. However, there’s just this mistrust in art now. I’ve commissioned two things from artists. I asked both, as for my work I want to fund actual artists. However as these tools get better, I’m concerned that trust won’t be good enough.

Fake edit: “Well if it’s so good you can’t tell the difference then why’s it matter” completely misses the point so let’s not bother with that.

I wonder if it’s a more western thing. Like the remake of Yo-kai Watch 2 was revealed a couple of weeks ago in the latest Nintendo Direct and the trailer is obviously gen AI yet… no one seems to care about that. Especially not on the japanese and asian social media https://youtu.be/76L1JKQWB8w

otoh I would put the Runescape community and people who play Yo-kai Watch games as far away as possible from each other

Why is it unrealistic? We have decades that prove people can make games without AI. Is the unrealistic part just expecting people to be honest about whether they used it or not? We somehow manage to have the food industry mostly honest about what they put in.

The context is that the company posted a trailer video that was very obviously AI generated art (6 fingers, Nike shoes in a fantasy setting). The pushback is entirely focused on using the slop machine to make slop art and writing.

> I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games

I'll define "human" as "person with six fingers". Here's my disertation about why they keep complaining about the glove industry.

Billions of people spend money on games. You're picking a ridiculously small subsection of the gamer populace, pinning all kinds of assumption on them, and then judging them for it. This is barely even a strawman argument, it's what strawmen dream about (or more likely, rant about on LinkedIn).

> I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games, and probably overlaps significantly with streamer consumption.

Does anyone else in the world share this definition? This seems very contrived because the vast majority of people who care a lot about games are not going to be putting a full time job's worth of time into it. It's like defining being employed as working over 70 hours per week.

The only reason I can see for jacking the requirement up so high is to try to narrow your scope so you can merge people into one group and define a single average 'gamer' opinion that everyone apparently has, so you can then come in and demonstrate their insane hypocrisy.

Would you be surprised if I said that the person complaining about $400 special editions is actually less likely to buy it? Gaming is mainstream. When you're talking about controversies in games with millions of users, there will always be a proportion of people who really care about it, but in spite of that there are always many thousands of people who won't, and will keep buying the thing they like without much thought given to it.

> They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.

If the chef brings you a meal that tastes horrible, should you be shunned for complaining about it? You've never made something 1/10th of that level of culinary sophistication. Even if you're the one paying for it.

What's even funnier is that in this case, 'the world' means 'making games the exact same way they've already been made for over 40 years to enormous success'. And the developer says "Yes, we will continue to do what has been successful for us for decades". If even the developer agrees and you still find an issue with it, it seems that the real problem for you isn't that gamers are demanding something of developers, it's that the developers aren't using the big new thing you really like. Which is immediately proven by your next sentence.

> Personally, it makes no sense to build a game without AI. A lot of code is needed and you need to iterate on it, perfect use case for AI.

Again, games have been built without AI for decades. Some of the best gaming experiences have been created in that way. And yet, genAI comes along, and after a brief few years it's suddenly unthinkable that anything good can be created the old way? And besides, if we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater - where are those AI-first masterpieces that top the old games? Where are the games with loads of AI code and assets that people love and regard as highly-polished, one of a kind experiences?

From a technical standpoint, AI is a less good fit for games anyway. We have basically solved 95% of all products people would ever need to put out on the web. For any problem you have, there is probably already a combination of high-quality solutions someone has made. AI has vast amounts of training data on web stuff and will probably produce something that doesn't stand out from the pack. But games are highly variable, have very unique problems, are very sensitive to optimization and can involve some of the most complex fields of computer science. Simple games may fare better, but anything large or really unique needs a solution made with purpose. Something that's just 'almost good enough' and not 'good enough' in a high-quality game will be immediately noticeable, especially in terms of gameplay.