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Comment by retrac98 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Strong evidence for this: the cottage industry of reusable gadgets in every creative field. Presets and sample packs in music[0], brushes and textures for illustration, models and rigs and so on for 3D. You could go on forever listing it.

[0] And library music for games, which I'm getting into making: https://clubhouse.kyefox.com/posts/2016-2026-162342979

Sometimes the sense of satisfaction in creating a piece of art is that it exists at all as an identifiable representation of the original intention. I don't buy these purity tests that disqualify art based on arbitrary measures of craft. That went down the urinal with Duchamp's Fountain.

That is orthogonal to the issue of game developers exploiting technology to disenfranchise labor and produce a shoddy product. There certainly should be economic breathing room in the richest societies on the planet in the wealthiest era of human history for artists to spend time crafting work how they like.

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.

That's not true though. Bad code will manifest in a lot of ways. Affecting players and how they perceive the game. See Cyberpunk 2077, the art is pretty good, but the game is extremely buggy. I stopped playing because of that

Sure, I don't disagree with bugs being problematic. As your example indicates though, games that came out well before LLM coding was a thing still could have buggy code. My point is that the actual behavior of the game's code is what players care about, not the code itself. The code is a process rather than the output, and players care about the output rather than the process used to produce it. Art assets are the output the player looks at directly, so it's not crazy that they might care more about it.

> 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.

But a line of buggy code will be substantially more impactful than a poorly drawn model. An extra finger on a model doesn’t cause your save to be corrupted or a quest to hard lock.

Buggy code, yes, but that's not what I said. Players never look at the code directly, only the end product, whereas they do look directly at the assets. My point is that the scrutiny likely is (and should be, IMO) on the direct player experience, and that ends up meaning that the code itself being sloppy is only indirectly relevant, compared to the assets that they see directly. The comparable output of the code is the behavior, which is possible to scrutinize more directly in most cases.

But the comparison to code isn’t dead code (that would be akin to what? Idk, maybe excess triangles in a mesh that didn’t need them).

But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.

The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.

A standard mind you that very few hold the code to.

> The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about

I don't think that's true, I could mention a few examples, the cliché of the Unreal Engine hair style or lights and on the other side of the spectrum, the custom made engine which made TinyGlade what it is.

Game development iterates with what's brought from the coding side.

My point is that the code only affects the experience indirectly because they interact with the output of it rather than looking at it directly. The assets aren't as much of a process as the output themselves.

I’d go a step further. The game code is the game. Everything else is there in service of the interactive experience.

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.

Oh absolutely, I don't have a magic way of detecting these things, but I do what I can. I would greatly prefer the best efforts of a person, regardless of how it turns out, to anything from generative ai. Everyone else can do as they wish, I'm not out to change anyone's mind :)

"Best effort" except when it includes using competent tools. Then you just want mediocre effort

why are you begging someone to buy gen ai games lmao

Fair enough. Cheers

Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts.

I'd bet 500 thousand dollars that this sentiment goes away as fast as they were rerunning cold and flu medicine commercials after everyone was sick of giving a shit about COVID.

Too many people fall into the trap of black and white thinking, as if the only way to use gen AI is to type into ChatGPT "make a fun game that makes loads of money plz."

I'm sure there are, but for me this isn't some reactionary mistake. I understand the technology and I thought about it carefully and made a call based on how I understand the ethics of the situation.

I was recently working on audio code, and I needed a function that produced a fast approximation of a sine wave. I asked chatgpt about common techniques, did some experiments to figure out the right performance/accuracy tradeoff, and finally asked chatgpt to help me optimize the function to use SIMD instructions.

If this code made it into a game, at what point did I do something wrong?

I mean, I'd never try to tell you what to do, but as you asked, what you're talking about is the base of the pyramid, that holds up and normalizes the system that's putting artists out of work and enshittifying everything. These companies stole literally everything and used it to build a tool whose economic end goal is to put everyone out of a job. I'm not down with that, but you do you.

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.

Expedition 33 was made in ~4 years and was known to have used AI assets as placeholders during development (even left some in for the final build). It also used Unreal Engine's Metahuman for facial animation which uses ML. It was 2025 Game of the year.

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 are beyond current LLMs, that can't be replicated through the simulation of mechanics alone.

Say that and they'll just think you believe in ghosts, though.

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.

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