Angry Gamers Are Forcing Studios To Scrap or Rethink New Releases (msn.com) 71
The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content.
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Sandfall Interactive's "Obscur: Expedition 33" had its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year honor rescinded after the developer said it had considered AI-generated images, even though the final release contained none.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.
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Sandfall Interactive's "Obscur: Expedition 33" had its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year honor rescinded after the developer said it had considered AI-generated images, even though the final release contained none.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.
I think (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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That would be because even some of the worst written fan fiction is, at its core, written from a place of love. Of admiration. This will always shine through in the text, that even if the story doesn't make sense and is really just a vehicle to see two characters get in bed together the author actually *cares*.
No AI is ever going to care.
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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
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There are different kinds of applications that have different requirements. Look at how much charme some SNES games have today, even though the characters are 8x16 pixels. But they have good story telling and working game mechanics. Then look how much some games with the best 3D effects suck.
If you create your main story with current LLMs it will probably suck or be bland. But now think about generating an infinite number of sidequests. Yes, the text quality doesn't look good. But having unique sidequests m
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Let's just hope the procedural generator for the quest and the LLM for the quest text actually agree on what you're supposed to do in this quest.
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That's not the problem. There are quite a few implementations for text based games with quest generation and completion checking. But one needs to add enough input to things, that they do not get repetitive.
People keep parroting something about "LLM are just random generators" but indeed often the problem is more that they are too deterministic for many creative tasks, if you don't add something that gets them off the beaten track, as many of the prefer proven but boring stories over the more experimental o
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If something is truly and obviously utterly background and clearly not supposed to draw attention, perhaps. For example the Clair Obscur textures that had 'no one should care' newsprint generated for a plausible bulletin board, fine (though their custom work looked nicer, and the AI text generation would have been distractingly bad, but in *principle*, that sort of filler I wouldn't begrudge...
For AI dialog in games, no thanks. For plot-pertinent characters, LLM would make it difficult to know if you've a
Re: I think (Score:2)
The same can be said about generative anything. As I see it, AI can be just another kind of procedural generation. Will it be meaningless? Yes, in a sense. But no more meaningless than any other procedural generation. In sandbox games, you supply a lot of the meaning yourself.
There was an obscure genre of games, I don't remember what they're called, but they were text-based "life sims" where you simply were a regular person in some setting, and you got a series of pick-one choices, from a random draw of sit
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Yes, it is analogous to procedural generation and I *hate* procedurally generated content too, same reason, it is mind numbingly boring. LLM adds that and also adds confusion when core elements are buried and mixed in with slop. Also, some demos I've seen have the LLM breaking immersion by essentially going out of character, since the models aren't precisely perfect at staying on the rails.
I'm not one for the genre you described in general, but while your scripted scenarios may be canned and thus limited,
Re: I think (Score:2)
Probably straight up LLM role playing games have come further along than last I tried them with AI Dungeon 6 years ago, but either way, that's a bit too freeform for my taste. There's got to be a game in there too, and object permanence + some stuff elaborated in advance.
Yes, the goal with all procedural generation is to surprise yourself, and give your imagination something to play with. Think of all the wonderful stories which have come out of Dwarf Fortress over the years - or from that matter from Minec
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You're right, gamers have no reason to be pissed off at shitty clone $80 titles that bring nothing new but higher prices.
Getting angry over games is silly. I just don't buy new games anymore and sure as hell don't pre-order. I wait until long after a game is well known to be quality or the usual trash and then buy it, usually for far less on sale than new because it's no longer fotw.
You make the mistake of saying, "there are lots n lots of games! More than ever!" confusing the value of quantity with the
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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
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"You will buy our slop and thank us for it!" is not a great marketing slogan.
ubisoft is in fact not in your house with a gun to you head demanding you play assasins creed 15 but if someone else enjoys the "woke nonsense" who are you to complain, just dont play it, let other people enjoy things, nothing is ruined for you.
its like people complaining about certain genres of music they dont listen to. is it lost on you by saying youre not an entitled gamer you are right now acting like a spoiled entitled gamer baby?
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> 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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> ubisoft is in fact not in your house with a gun to you head demanding you play assasins creed 15 but if someone else enjoys the "woke nonsense" who are you to complain, just dont play it, let other people enjoy things, nothing is ruined for you.
Isn't that exactly what happened?
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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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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.
Re:I think (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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
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I think these complainers are not actually gamers, but mainly people that have made a business out of complaining and claiming the sky is falling. Exp33 and BG3 sold really well. That should tell us what actual gamers think.
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I think these complainers are not actually gamers, but mainly people that have made a business out of complaining and claiming the sky is falling. Exp33 and BG3 sold really well. That should tell us what actual gamers think.
In my case, I stopped because of prices and lock-in. It is possible that I might not be considered an actual gamer because I stopped buying present day games or consoles.
But yeah, it's like many other things. People love to complain.
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I have to agree. I don't think we've seen a game that definitively failed due to using AI. Deciding not to release a game due to "backlash" isn't the same thing as releasing it and watching it fail. (Although maybe the linked article lists games that released and failed due to use of generative AI. I don't know: it's one of those articles that will only load the first three sentences and blocks reader mode.)
What I've noticed is that more and more games are attempting to enter the whole "continuous revenue s
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To some extent that is true, but Sandfall interactive wasn't doing any of the other usually bad stuff in the industry and *still* got huge blowback over some placeholder environmental textures that got replaced.
People are very specifically on edge and repulsed by AI slop.
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To some extent that is true, but Sandfall interactive wasn't doing any of the other usually bad stuff in the industry and *still* got huge blowback over some placeholder environmental textures that got replaced.
People are very specifically on edge and repulsed by AI slop.
What you are describing is how after people get pissed off, and after a certain point, it hard to get them back - they are sensitized, and become hard to please.
Anti-denuvo needs to be a big thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Important we keep malware out of games. Raise a fuss, extinguish any hype around games with the Denuvo malware.
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Nothing's going to change there until there's legislation about it, or until microsoft decides to stop allowing kernel level malware.
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My stance is simple: If it has Denuvo, I do not buy. Fortunately, it needs to be declared by law, at least in Europe. And I am one of these older games with a pretty nice entertainment budget.
Blame the AI companies and their fans (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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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)
They made it political, so now it is. (Score:5, 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.
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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
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Yep. Let those "gamers" push their narratives. Actually good games still sell well. The typical "AAA" trash does have problems though.
Why? (Score:3)
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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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There are easy solutions to the problem you brought up.
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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.
Then you just get an inbred Habsburg copy-of-a-copy-of-an-ai-generated-copy-of-an-ai-generated-copy of the original. These models need incredibly massive training data sets to produce anything even remotely passable (not good, passable). That's why they wholesale steal whatever's not nailed down on the internet. Since all they can do is mimic (badly) what humans have already created, you need actual humans to feed it training data if you aren't going to steal it. At that point, just pay the artists to ma
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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
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AI ought to massively increase productivity.
Evidence so far says the effects are actually minor, with them sometimes being negative. On productivity, that is. Quality effects are still under research, but early results are not good. An example is that AI very likely makes for really insecure and really hard to maintain code.
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An NPC spewing GenAI dialog would be obnoxious. You wouldn't have any way of knowing if you actually gleaned what you were *supposed* to find out from them.
GenAI expanded level designs similarly obnoxious. There is a small 'meat' of intent and the rest is just boringly 'big'
AI playtesting... maybe, but don't skimp on the human testing.
AI skyboxes/background textures... again maybe but expect a better experience over something with more specific intent behind it.
Especially as I've grown up, I don't have ti
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An AI providing more generic talk and background talk about things happening in the game world is alot better then the 'If player level is greater than 10 then have guards say I got an arrow in my knee'
Thank you Gamers! (Score:2, Interesting)
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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.
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Sloppy sloppy slop (Score:2)
No slop for me, please
How dare you! (Score:1)
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:3)
So why is code-writing AI or secretarial AI that generates summaries and fills in boilerplate on reports generally seen as a useful tool, while artistic AI is seen as an existential threat? I suppose one difference is that in art, you can create a personal style, which is less possible with writing code. (Unless your personal style is unreadably terse or annoyingly verbose maybe...) But how much individual style can graphic artists inject into a game? The leads will set the overall art style, and the people in the trenches work to fit that.
Go woke, go broke. See Ubisoft for details. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 the gaming medium to screw things up epic stye and have that large publisher go the way of the Dodo.
There's no such thing as woke, only good/bad (Score:3)
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.
You clearly got "the message" from your Right Wing talking point channels as you're faithfully repeating them for reasons that don't seem relevant. Politics don't matter in entertainment. Nearly every genre of entertainment is insanely Right Wing. The entire genre of action, western and most of sci fi and horror. John Wick might as well be an ad for the NRA and everyone, including Democratic voters, loves it...same with borderlands and every shooter. You literally go around collecting guns all day. Th
The examples given are flawed (Score:2)
Expedition 33 and BG3 were stellar successes and really good games. That causes a lot of envy and a lot of crappy people to try to shit on them. Just look at at the Steam forums some time. If a game gets a lot of really negative comments, chances are it is really good.
Not saying the effect is not real, but you cannot use these two games as evidence.
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E33 also barely used AI. I think like one AI-generatred texture made it into the released game and it was quickly patched out when it was discovered. But I also don't have a problem with a niche indie game award drawing a bright line around something like that. The game's hugely successful so it's not like this will hurt them, and it's generating some meaningful dialog on the subject because it is such a high profile indie game.
As for the Larian CEO - well, CEOs are there to take flack on behalf of the c
Stop listening. (Score:2)