I understand the sentiment, but I feel like not using AI for game dev isn’t going to be economically viable much longer, and I wonder why companies don’t just embrace it while it still gives them an edge.
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.
You're not going to know if they used an LLM to write a better shader or if they copied code from stack overflow like we used to do a few years ago.
I'm so excited that LLMs are great at coding. Most of my problems I have with various games I love is that they're written by people who couldn't write performant code at all but are great at building a world and telling a story.
Just look at Escape from Tarkov. Great game but some of the worst software architecture choices of all time. It used to take 4 minutes to get out of match and often 10-15 minutes to get into one and it was all just because of shitty code / design.
It's been fixed now and I'm sure modern LLMs were the reason.
Many artworks (across mediums) have parts where the artist isn't directing their creative decision-making so much as reaching for the nearest stock asset / procgen tool, or googling "leather texture photoshop trick" instead of carefully studying the usage-appropriate types of leather and looking up authentic period nubuck references and hand-painting it to get it just right, etc. Some "art" assets really are utilitarian and fungible subunits in the context of the full artwork they're used in, just like the code one would LLM. And many games are sprawling works, with that much more room for such.
Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.
There are lots of artists using generative ai in the same way there are artists using photoshop. It’s about control and intent, and it only gets weird with gen ai because you can give away both and still get results. Many people do take the role of a non creative manager, but that doesn’t meant you have to.
The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about. It's possible to write two functions that look different but have identical properties for anything that ends up being perceived by the player. For assets, the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.
Adding to the fact that people who write code are in general much better compensated in most industries than people who produce art, having software replace artists feels like "punching down" in a way that having software replace people who write software doesn't. As a software engineer, Ilif I use AI to write a bunch of code for myself, I'm much better able to understand the tradeoffs to my future employment in a much more visceral way than I ever could for what using AI-generated art might mean for an artist. Even with all of the recent proclamations that code is "solved" and fearful predictions that programming jobs are going to stop being so cushy, the job market for the average software engineer is probably at least an order of magnitude better than it is for the average artist in terms of compensation and job security, and AI or not, I don't see that changing any time soon.
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.
Yeah, I saw an article recently that Blood of the Dawnwalker cost "just" $40 million to create. I thought the phrasing was intended to be ironic, but no apparently that's not even AAA by today's standards. I don't know the exact costs, but my instinct is that quite a lot of it probably went into things that would not have been possible to just automate with AI and end up with the same level of quality.
Everyone can now make games that no one can play because no one can afford to buy gaming machines anymore because everyone can now make games. Great future we've been handed.
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.
>[X] is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at
I'm no longer convinced that this is a particularly safe bet for any value of X. LLMs have absolutely been demonstrated as capable of doing things that they're theoretically the wrong type of model for, like generating images by writing SVGs or simulating brush strokes.
Unfortunately most people vibe coding games are programmers who don't know (nor do they care) about art and design, and so assume that everything but the code is trivial, just colors and patterns for the monkeys to look at as they press their buttons.
And then they wonder why the their ugly-ass game with no consistent art style and no coherent design doesn't take off since it was coded with a superior artificial intelligence, in less time, and must therefore be objectively better.
They don't understand that there's some knowledge that exists within the heads of human beings and their experience that you can't reverse engineer from the human-generated artifacts in the training data. You can't derive Leonardo Da Vinci from a PNG of the Mona Lisa. Am I claiming that all designers are Leonardo Da Vinci? No, so hands off the keyboard. I am saying there are aspects of art that are bound to the human experience in a way that current LLMs aren't capable of, that can't be replicated through the simulation of mechanics alone.
Say that and they'll just think you believe in ghosts, though.
“Hello, it’s me, again, talking about Gen AI, again.
We’re aware of the concerns raised about the Dragon Slayer 2 trailer and have taken it down, while we investigate urgently. This trailer was produced by a trusted external partner who had explicitly confirmed that GenAI would not be used. But, among other things, there’s a sixth finger and, well, that’s pretty hard to explain away. For that we apologise.
Our position is clear at Jagex: we don’t use GenAI to create our games, artwork or creative assets, and will not knowingly allow it to be used on our behalf. This is the second time in quick succession that concerns about generative AI have arisen through partners we trusted, and for us that highlights an issue with our own processes which we must address.
Immediately following RuneFest we’re overhauling our review processes, and we’re going to work with and commission creators from the community to make sure that the story of Dragon Slayer II is told to the standard befitting of such an update.”
Has a viable non-slop game come out yet with AI generated art assets?
I'm kind of looking forward to games that leverage locally generated art/content assets using local large/small language models, as a way to make game content more expansive: you make choices in the game that causes different content to evolve in different ways, everyone's game play is different. I see that as a much harder problem for artists to work on (how do they express the meta art for an expansive experience rather than concrete art for a fixed one). I haven't seen anything like this yet, but I'm sure we will see it eventually.
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.
Gamers have to be one of the most interesting groups of people. I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games, and probably overlaps significantly with streamer consumption.
Extremely needy, demanding, and simultaneously spineless.
Riot releases a $500 skin and make a million dollars, GTA6 has a $400 edition that doesn't include the game, and of course the OG horse armor.
Outrage after outrage, yet they keep on buying.
Additionally, 99% of them have no clue how hard it is to build a game, at any scale really. They don't understand where corners have been cut, and that it's possible to use AI without cutting corners.
They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.
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.
Art, buttons, sprites, and models, often need rounds of iteration, why not start with a basic set and work on it?
There's nothing wrong with iterating, there is plenty wrong with slop (like the 6 fingers in the trailer). So let's be mad at the slop, not the AI itself.
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.
There's a lot of anti-AI warriors on Reddit in the game development space. I dislike lazy AI slop use in games as much as anyone else, but I also dislike the lack of nuance in these positions. They think it's gotta be all or nothing. It will become increasingly unrealistic to expect game developers to not use AI in some part of their process, especially code development, but such use does not automatically make it slop.
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
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.
It is, but the statement goes further than that and says they use no gen ai at all in making their games. Which feels unnecessary, unless they mean just in the art and writing, which feels misleading
Which is fine. RuneScape has been in development since the early 2000s, long before GenAI even existed. They got along before GenAI and they can continue to not use it.
People may be forgetting the game has 20 years of content already, why do they need to make more faster with GenAI? Its already a massive piece of software.
Runescape is quite literally a dinner table name it is that famous. Their only true competition is probably World of Warcraft. The community is already huge. What competitive advantages are they going to lose? Likely none.
I understand the sentiment, but I feel like not using AI for game dev isn’t going to be economically viable much longer, and I wonder why companies don’t just embrace it while it still gives them an edge.
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.
You're not going to know if they used an LLM to write a better shader or if they copied code from stack overflow like we used to do a few years ago.
I'm so excited that LLMs are great at coding. Most of my problems I have with various games I love is that they're written by people who couldn't write performant code at all but are great at building a world and telling a story.
Just look at Escape from Tarkov. Great game but some of the worst software architecture choices of all time. It used to take 4 minutes to get out of match and often 10-15 minutes to get into one and it was all just because of shitty code / design.
It's been fixed now and I'm sure modern LLMs were the reason.
John Carmack is the exception not the rule.
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?
Many artworks (across mediums) have parts where the artist isn't directing their creative decision-making so much as reaching for the nearest stock asset / procgen tool, or googling "leather texture photoshop trick" instead of carefully studying the usage-appropriate types of leather and looking up authentic period nubuck references and hand-painting it to get it just right, etc. Some "art" assets really are utilitarian and fungible subunits in the context of the full artwork they're used in, just like the code one would LLM. And many games are sprawling works, with that much more room for such.
Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.
There are lots of artists using generative ai in the same way there are artists using photoshop. It’s about control and intent, and it only gets weird with gen ai because you can give away both and still get results. Many people do take the role of a non creative manager, but that doesn’t meant you have to.
Game code is also art, it defines the game as much as the assets. I don't know why the game industry has such a contempt for the coding side.
The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about. It's possible to write two functions that look different but have identical properties for anything that ends up being perceived by the player. For assets, the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.
Adding to the fact that people who write code are in general much better compensated in most industries than people who produce art, having software replace artists feels like "punching down" in a way that having software replace people who write software doesn't. As a software engineer, Ilif I use AI to write a bunch of code for myself, I'm much better able to understand the tradeoffs to my future employment in a much more visceral way than I ever could for what using AI-generated art might mean for an artist. Even with all of the recent proclamations that code is "solved" and fearful predictions that programming jobs are going to stop being so cushy, the job market for the average software engineer is probably at least an order of magnitude better than it is for the average artist in terms of compensation and job security, and AI or not, I don't see that changing any time soon.
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.
Oh yeah, where are the super secret fast moving games? They don't exist. Marketing bullshit juts like the Mythos marketing that blew up this week.
Yeah, I saw an article recently that Blood of the Dawnwalker cost "just" $40 million to create. I thought the phrasing was intended to be ironic, but no apparently that's not even AAA by today's standards. I don't know the exact costs, but my instinct is that quite a lot of it probably went into things that would not have been possible to just automate with AI and end up with the same level of quality.
I mean they definitely exist, just look at Steam. 10s of 1000s of shovelware games that no one wants or buys or plays.
Everyone can now make games that no one can play because no one can afford to buy gaming machines anymore because everyone can now make games. Great future we've been handed.
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.
I'm against the use of AI for creative work, but
>[X] is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at
I'm no longer convinced that this is a particularly safe bet for any value of X. LLMs have absolutely been demonstrated as capable of doing things that they're theoretically the wrong type of model for, like generating images by writing SVGs or simulating brush strokes.
Unfortunately most people vibe coding games are programmers who don't know (nor do they care) about art and design, and so assume that everything but the code is trivial, just colors and patterns for the monkeys to look at as they press their buttons.
And then they wonder why the their ugly-ass game with no consistent art style and no coherent design doesn't take off since it was coded with a superior artificial intelligence, in less time, and must therefore be objectively better.
They don't understand that there's some knowledge that exists within the heads of human beings and their experience that you can't reverse engineer from the human-generated artifacts in the training data. You can't derive Leonardo Da Vinci from a PNG of the Mona Lisa. Am I claiming that all designers are Leonardo Da Vinci? No, so hands off the keyboard. I am saying there are aspects of art that are bound to the human experience in a way that current LLMs aren't capable of, that can't be replicated through the simulation of mechanics alone.
Say that and they'll just think you believe in ghosts, though.
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.
r/2007scape • u/JagexSween [Mod Sween] • 3h ago:
“Hello, it’s me, again, talking about Gen AI, again.
We’re aware of the concerns raised about the Dragon Slayer 2 trailer and have taken it down, while we investigate urgently. This trailer was produced by a trusted external partner who had explicitly confirmed that GenAI would not be used. But, among other things, there’s a sixth finger and, well, that’s pretty hard to explain away. For that we apologise.
Our position is clear at Jagex: we don’t use GenAI to create our games, artwork or creative assets, and will not knowingly allow it to be used on our behalf. This is the second time in quick succession that concerns about generative AI have arisen through partners we trusted, and for us that highlights an issue with our own processes which we must address.
Immediately following RuneFest we’re overhauling our review processes, and we’re going to work with and commission creators from the community to make sure that the story of Dragon Slayer II is told to the standard befitting of such an update.”
What ancient model did they use that it couldn't get the fingers right?
One of the most wild things is how actual lazy this image gen was. Hands have been solved on all frontier models, so what did their partner even use?
It's so obvious that I wondered if someone had done it as a joke (that obviously didn't land).
Has a viable non-slop game come out yet with AI generated art assets?
I'm kind of looking forward to games that leverage locally generated art/content assets using local large/small language models, as a way to make game content more expansive: you make choices in the game that causes different content to evolve in different ways, everyone's game play is different. I see that as a much harder problem for artists to work on (how do they express the meta art for an expansive experience rather than concrete art for a fixed one). I haven't seen anything like this yet, but I'm sure we will see it eventually.
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.
Gamers have to be one of the most interesting groups of people. I'll define "gamers" as people who spend more than 40 hours a week playing games, and probably overlaps significantly with streamer consumption.
Extremely needy, demanding, and simultaneously spineless.
Riot releases a $500 skin and make a million dollars, GTA6 has a $400 edition that doesn't include the game, and of course the OG horse armor.
Outrage after outrage, yet they keep on buying.
Additionally, 99% of them have no clue how hard it is to build a game, at any scale really. They don't understand where corners have been cut, and that it's possible to use AI without cutting corners.
They quite literally demand the world despite having never created a single thing themselves, blindly consuming, never producing.
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.
Art, buttons, sprites, and models, often need rounds of iteration, why not start with a basic set and work on it?
There's nothing wrong with iterating, there is plenty wrong with slop (like the 6 fingers in the trailer). So let's be mad at the slop, not the AI itself.
Seems like a perfectly good response to me.
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.
There's a lot of anti-AI warriors on Reddit in the game development space. I dislike lazy AI slop use in games as much as anyone else, but I also dislike the lack of nuance in these positions. They think it's gotta be all or nothing. It will become increasingly unrealistic to expect game developers to not use AI in some part of their process, especially code development, but such use does not automatically make it slop.
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
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.
It is, but the statement goes further than that and says they use no gen ai at all in making their games. Which feels unnecessary, unless they mean just in the art and writing, which feels misleading
In particular, it would mean their software engineers are not allowed to use Claude/Codex etc, in contrast to common industry practice.
Which is fine. RuneScape has been in development since the early 2000s, long before GenAI even existed. They got along before GenAI and they can continue to not use it.
People may be forgetting the game has 20 years of content already, why do they need to make more faster with GenAI? Its already a massive piece of software.
Runescape is quite literally a dinner table name it is that famous. Their only true competition is probably World of Warcraft. The community is already huge. What competitive advantages are they going to lose? Likely none.