Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue.

Presumably that's better than no game at all.

> It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "acceptable" level and it was still awful as the whole design was simply flawed.

Doing 2 weeks of fixing might have been hell, but this sounds like it was overall still a great deal for the company.

You're not really selling the "AI is useless story". It might be, but your anecdote seems like just another case of AI being worth it, though obviously flawed.

View on HN

No the game failed because of these non stop issues, it lost all hype and the "fixed" version couldn't sustain itself anymore as it took around a month to fix the remaining issues.

At the 2nd company it wasted thousands of dollars of advertisement because the server could not withstand the load and obviously data loss issues tained the image forever and will likely end up the same way.

Also please don't take this as "AI is useless". I use AI and I use it a lot. It's great and I love it. However, without a good understanding of architecture and general development structure you end up with things that can't scale and fail.

What particularly gets me is if you use AI with a bit of engineering rigor, especially around design and testing my experience is the latest models are great to work with. They can structure performance and stability tests, implement 90%. Humans have to do the hardest and critical 10% of the design. The current tools are good enough to do virtually all of the implementation now if your quality gates are right and your design is good enough, but you absolutely have to design the right things for your scale and reliability needs or very bad things are in store.

If it were really groundbreaking, I imagine it wouldn't have burned out after a little missed hype. See No Man's Sky.

The other way to look at this is, thank goodness we didn't waste months or years on a failed game concept. Instead we got to market and validated (or invalidated) the concept fast.

it's a validated concept with a popular youtuber behind it, tried and true method that worked for years all brought down by game being non functional.

> No the game failed because of these non stop issues

You should've led with that then.

The company is likely to disagree and think it failed for a number of reasons, that only being one of them, and still depending on the cost may be very happy with their decision.

For one, even if it was a complete dumpster fire disaster, that is at least potentially a learning opportunity.

Whether they saw it as one is a different thing entirely.

If they think they can make games for 1/10th the engineering price, they are likely going to try until proven otherwise.

It's harder to convince them, no, it can't be done, just trust me, bro, I know from experience of never even trying.

Well you can still save 10x if you pick the right people instead of picking people that don't have the experience or knowledge to pull something like that off. And the only person learning (or failing to learn) is a developer which the company does not own.

> Well you can still save 10x if you pick the right people instead of picking people that don't have the experience or knowledge to pull something like that off.

That doesn't scale.

Just do better. Just pick better people.

It's not a scalable option.

Everyone wants to do that, regardless if you use LLMs or not...

> Presumably that's better than no game at all.

Wrong.

A bad game can absolutely tank a studio. Shipping a game that has awful reviews will absolutely affect negatively your sales for future games.

Luckily this was minecraft so stakes aren't as high, but it definitely tainted the reputation of the company behind it and youtubers will likely never work with them again.

Why does it “sound” like a good thing for the company?

Unless it’s a mega establishment product people move on and don’t stick with buggy crashing products

This wouldn’t be acceptable for a car safety, well I could like a whole bunch but you should get the idea

Reply on news.ycombinator.com