Valve now allows the "vast majority" of AI-powered games on Steam
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Now that costs and barriers to creating what might at first glance pass as a "game" is nearing zero there's a lot of money to be made if you can trick a enough gamers into buying your low-priced trash titles because you can bet that some percentage of those players won't bother requesting a refund and may not even play the game. I myself have a huge amount of cheap games I've paid for, but haven't gotten around to.
Even developers that won't just be spamming out as many garbage-tier games as possible will probably be using AI extensively. Maybe one day, in the distant future, AI will be good enough that it won't matter and AI could even become a good thing, but in the meantime we should expect steam to become a minefield where every other game on the platform is filled with terrible AI generated graphics, terrible AI writing, and "live" AI features shoehorned in because it's easier than creating actual content and allows for new kinds of data collection.
A prompt along the lines of character card, available actions, story so far, what player said, response text, response action. Actions still limited to what the game can actually do of course, but it would already be far more varied than strictly defined trees. Shame that local llms are so crap at function calling for the actions part, but it might stil work with an ad hoc model and extensive grammar restrictions.
Only if those dialogues lead to something real. Just doing small talk with NPCs is easy to accomplish, but integrating it into the world, where depending on the dialoge you get new quest relevant information - or have to fight the NPC if you insult them too much or say the wrong thing - is way harder.
Cheap AI-generated features will fill every game, of course. It's inevitable and will soon pass, just like every trend - bloom shaders, piss filters, cloning minecraft and battle royale, etc. Some of it will stay, like hiding the lack of developer-hours behind the low-res pixelart. Some of it will be even good!
My game has a few elements which I used AI for, but I don't think that it's particularly obvious which. Here's a screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yM_3Ih40breLznsqy7wrA0y7_iF...
That was only true before you could tell an AI to make a game for you while having zero programing skills, zero artistic skills, and zero writing skills. The better AI game generators get at creating whole games from nothing more than descriptions the worse things will get.
Here's one from 2022 https://andrewmayne.com/2022/03/17/building-games-and-apps-e...
Here's another: https://nitter.cz/ammaar/status/1635754631228952576?lang=en
sites like this show where things are heading: https://www.rosebud.ai/ai-game-creator
The human still has to provide the creative input - the concept of the game, the rules, and multiple steps of guidance to get anywhere (when it works).
The code is sometimes generated correctly, but only if a) it's fairly trivial and b) the model can generalise from something else it's seen. There's squillions of maze examples out there so models build slight variations on this easily enough, but as soon as you inject some originality, the model flounders.
https://www.techspot.com/news/100718-someone-created-video-g...
Play it yourself here: https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html
This is exactly the kind of crap I expect to see on steam
Have you not seen mobile app stores?
In this article a developer made a completely automatic game generator for Android. A terrible slot machine game with graphics pulled from an image search, generated names, sound is text-to-speech, etc... Even the application process was automated. In the end, they published 1500 apps at a rate of 15/day, the maximum allowed by the Play Store. They are now all dead, but in the meantime, they made $50k.
How is this different than the floods of human generated trash that shows up from time?
The only thing that will change is that it will be little harder to detect if the game is just asset flip or something more.
Not sure how it is implemented but for now crappy games are not even visible on the main page (even on the new games list or soon to release list), you need to expand those sections to really see every game.
Even if literally nobody loses money, it's adding noise to signal.
I don't think paying artists for their work is gonna go away any time soon, there's just so much that can't be done well by AI right now (UI, rigging, animation, particle effects). However I think allowing AI assets will enable many new types of games to be financially viable. Yes, that will include low effort asset flips, but I think it will also include unique games made by developers with a powerful, singular vision.
So instead I recently started learning Blender, texturing, drawing and while it takes time to get to where I want, I'm passionate enough to learn the craft instead of "cheating", as I unfortunately see it.
EDIT: To add, I don't put games which revolve around AI as a mechanic to this same category. They're a new thing and they're cool for exploring the frontiers.
It comes down to the question of how much you value the amount of human work in an art piece. When something is easy to do automagically, it loses some part of its value - to me at least, and I know I'm not alone in this.
Think how easy it is to create renaissance style paintings now with AI. Do you value those as much as the original ones? It's also part of the reason why traditional film photography has started to trend again, because there are people who value the amount of human work that goes into framing and compositing when they can't be easily fixed in post process.
You might think different and it's ok, just wanted to understand your reasoning.
Traditional film photography involved a lot of darkroom tricks! You can definitely reframe a shot with an enlarger, and it's also where "dodging" and "burning" effects/tools got their names. And of course, photography itself has been thought of as cheating - "real artists paint".
I think using tools in general is OK, and we already seem to draw a line between art (the creativity) and craft (technically perfect oil painting) so that seems consistent with mainstream opinion. Using "AI" for stuff currently feels a lot more like curating than making though.
Thanks for bringing the distinction between art and craft, it's a good way to rephrase my points. My point indeed is in valuing the craftmanship in addition to the art. And with current AI generators, seeing "AI used" label in a product immediately lowers my expectations towards the craftmanship of that product.
Also I'm building a traditional game with some new mechanics, so knowing that there are shortcuts now to building games like these makes me uneasy, as the craft of what was once appreciated can now be undervalued. Though I probably just need to swallow the truth.
On that note, the plan is to make certain icons & portraits on my own, in a consistent artstyle that's easy enough for me. Some assets will be purchased from traditional asset stores, while critical pieces of artwork such as the Steam capsule art will be commissioned. Chiefly I wanna use image generation for background images & pictures describing events - arguably not that important or up-front, so not a great use of artist time.
> How do you justify using AI for your game art? I have thought about this, and couldn't justify it. I also know that I hold on to morals almost to a stubborn degree.
different from
> How do you justify using Blender for your game art? I have thought about this, and couldn't justify it. I also know that I hold on to morals almost to a stubborn degree.
Aside from a vague implication that it is immoral to use an AI tool instead of <some other tool> to generate your own game art?
The distinction is that it's a widely accepted tool, and you still need to devote time to learn to use it good enough for you to be able to make satisfying art. It's like a brush for a traditional painter, only in 3d. In another comment below I explained a bit more why I value the amount of work seen in art.
On the other side, you have the modeler who barely sticks six rectangles together as a “human” and the AI art prompter who ships the first image they get back.
To me, neither is a moral issue. They both require using tools effectively.
This is the product of the time. I'm old enough to remember digital painting, 3D CGI, and digital matte painting/photobashing being fought and ridiculed as cheating or impure. Not old enough to remember this about cameras, audio recording, and synths, but you can be sure they also were met with this.
> I recently started learning Blender, texturing, drawing
You make the end result, not the tool. Your message and rigorous execution is what matters. Of course you'll need the skill in visual arts and enough discipline for the attention to detail to be able to make something worthy, the tool alone won't supply all that for you, but diving into the established area helps a lot. As well as having the message to tell.
And of course you won't be able to create anything interesting using AI alone, just yet - it doesn't pass the quality bar, you'll be using it as a shortcut in certain steps.
Very good point, thanks. I need to think on this more.
I think instead of crusading for/against the technology, you should look at what it can/can not do for you and then make a rational decision. For example, I regularly use AI to generate boilerplate. Not because I can't write it myself but because I've done it thousands of times already. On the other hand, I hardly ever use AI when dealing with obscure libs, because it's easier to just read the documentation than trying to debug hallucinations.
However, at some point there are people who really master the new tool and open up an entirely new range of possibilities because of what it can do. The value of craftsmanship just changes as the tools develop, it doesn't end. I don't know what new things will become possible with AI, but I'm confident that there are people with vision out there who will raise the bar on what can be created now that it's a thing.
Considering it was just yesterday we learned how trivial it can be to "jailbreak" most of the models we have today [1], I can't imagine any possible path forward to allowing AI live-generated sexual content ... pretty much ever.
It'll be literally hours or days from the moment they allow such a thing that we'll learn about the ingenious ways folks are "jailbreaking" game models to enable all manner of rape fantasy, child abuse, and everything in between by simply punching in the LLM equivalent of the Konami code when they're prompted to name their rival Gary (or ... their Charmander ... oh god....)
Automobiles are used to transport kidnapped kids. Kidnapping kids is bad. But that doesn’t mean we have to restrict autos because of their very rare use for illegal and immoral things.