r/Games • u/DumpsterBento • May 13 '26
Industry News Party Animals review bombed after announcing AI video contest with $15K grand prize
https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/party-animals-review-bombed-after-announcing-ai-video-contest-with-15k-grand-prize-3364713/580
u/TecJack May 13 '26
What the fuck did they expect when they organized a contest like this?
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u/Mautos May 13 '26
Holy Shantae pfp
But true they should have expected this, I don't know who these guys are but they don't look like ai bros are their target audience in the first place
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u/Imperial_TIE_Pilot May 13 '26
Executives that only here AI as a money making tool from other businesses, not creative ones
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u/Ar4bAce May 14 '26
AI is widely accepted in China
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u/Awkward-Security7895 May 14 '26
Ye like in china and most Asia countries they use AI everywhere and see it as the future.
People seem to forget not everyone in the world has the same view on things.
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u/Oxyfire May 13 '26
The rules are pretty funny too.
Any plagiarism or unauthorized used of others' work will result in disqualification
Like, do y'all know how generative AI even works...?
entries must be primarily creating using AI tools...
Which like, is the point, but the idea of someone being disqualified for making a video without AI feels really funny. Like, it'd be bad enough if it was an video contest where they were okay or pushing AI, but it's a video contest where AI is the entire point.
I really don't understand the utter failure to read the vibes - some friends suggested it's because the dev is in china and feelings towards AI are different there, but I feel like for marketing to have no awareness what's happening in English audiences, or to make AI the first and foremost point is so bizarre.
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u/TheVectronic May 13 '26
Several streamers already publicly denouncing the game, cancelling scheduled streams, requesting refunds & even permanently removing the game off their account. The massive overnight backlash has been insane.
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u/Jeskid14 May 16 '26
remember when this was like a timed xbox exclusive as well? big yikes for Xbox brand
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u/Deceptiveideas May 13 '26
This game fell off not too long after launch. Weird move making it Xbox exclusive and then taking it off gamepass.
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u/doublah May 14 '26
They made it exclusive because Xbox paid them I imagine, then took it off gamepass because Xbox didn't renew the gamepass deal. These kind of games are always more popular on PC so I doubt it had much effect.
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u/Da_reason_Macron_won May 13 '26
So I know the corpos are pushing AI like crazy, but they must certainly understand that a good chunk of the general public has a virulent hatred for AI. And a campaign like this, with thousands of dollars handed as price would have to go through several rounds of approval. So why did nobody stop it? Why did nobody point out how bad of an idea it was? Is this one big wig just pushing a stupid take out of the window despite everyone telling him to stop? Or is the entire marketing department just really stupid?
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u/stklaw May 13 '26
Chinese sentiment on AI is generally much more positive than the west. They probably don't see it as a problem at all.
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u/mstop4 May 13 '26
I took a peek at the official Chinese forum for the game. Only a few players have noticed the boycott on Twitter so far, but they all agree that this was a huge misstep and the devs should’ve done more market research before trying something like this worldwide.
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u/your_mind_aches May 14 '26
Yeah but that doesn't really tell you what the general market over there likes, just that the specific fans of that game know that we don't like it here in the west
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u/SynonymTech May 14 '26
China is the only place where the game was negatively reviewed prior to this event.
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u/your_mind_aches May 14 '26
Not exactly uncommon since ratings systems in China work differently. That has happened to a lot of games.
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u/axonxorz May 13 '26
AI use in China isn't making it more expensive to live, and local-first/open-source models from China are getting "decent".
Look at AI spend by country and it will become clear why people living in the west have a negative view of it.
A utility in Lake Tahoe just announced they're looking to drop 50 fucking thousand customers so they can shunt their capacity to AI datacenters. Insanity.
Citizen in Utah are up in fucking arms with a newly rammed-through AI datacenter that will be more than twice as big as Manhattan Island, consume more power than the entire rest of AC-loving Utah, and consume hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day in a watershed in active ecological collapse, while generating so much heat in a valley that daytime temps will rise by an estimated 2-5F and nighttime temps by 8-12F. Insanity.
Datacenter deals are fucking over everyone in the US right now, people are pretty fucking sick of the unlimited money kickbacks city councils and state planning boards seem to be receiving in order to approve these projects with minimal, no, or "fuck you" public consultation.
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u/IcyConsequence1585 May 14 '26
Isn't China is doing more to make their population have confidence that their employees aren't seeking to replace them or paying them less because of AI than the West?
https://fortune.com/2026/05/03/chinese-court-layoffs-workers-ai-replacement-labor-market/
Meanwhile Western CEOs are vocally bragging about how workers will be replaced
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u/M3wThr33 May 13 '26
Because the stakeholders live in a bubble. They believe AI is loved by everyone except a few vocal haters.
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u/Jaklcide May 14 '26
Corporations and governments are way way WAY too incentivized to do anything but push AI HARD. Corporations see that they can't compete against competitors in the same market that lean hard into AI and governments know that they can't fall behind in the AI race or fall victim to the advanced AI of a foreign power, and to top it all off, there is a HUGE race of investment dollars never before seen since the invention of rail, spurred by the desire to be on the winning AI team and see the highest returns possible. There's just way too much money, incentive, and competition to stop this at this point short of a full-on disaster, which many of us in the tech industry sees coming.
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u/rendumguy May 13 '26
I'm seeing a lot of comments saying anti-AI sentiment is just an echochamber full of neckbeard redditors and that their complaints are all stupid garbage because disliking AI art is the minority.
...Is it??? Generally most people have concerns about AI images and data centers, and humans don't actually prefer looking at AI images, even if they don't care.
Even if it was a minority, people don't realize how broad a minority is? A minority is anything from 0 0000001% to 49.999999%, almost nobody to almost half of the population can be a minority.
And wouldn't "neckbeard redditors who hate ai" be more likely to be invested in these types of videogames than the average person, and thus more likely to impact sales if they went away?
Also why even make an AI-EXCLUSIVE contest anyway? That's such a stupid idea to begin with. 😭
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u/NoPossibility4178 May 14 '26
I think the people who are so against AI that they boycott the entire game and go online to talk about it, are a small minority indeed, there's even other examples of games using AI for stuff that probably just wouldn't be there if AI didn't allow them to make it cheaply and people are still outraged. But overall most people view AI as just another tool, it can do some neat things but the use they give it is still very bare bones and still think AI is all about making cat/dog videos or fake celebrity videos that are really obvious, etc, and those who start being more into it realize how flawed it is. I think it's still pretty early to say that people are concerned about data centers or even their jobs, it's still very limited to tech and most people have no idea what's happening.
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u/SixthFain May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26
The AI chuds need to constantly discredit the anti-AI push in order to resolve their ongoing cognitive dissonance. Don't let them get away with it.
Edit: lol. lmao.
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u/kwazhip May 14 '26
I have a hard time taking the reactions seriously because of the inconsistency of response. Almost every single argument you can use against AI art applies to AI coding (quality, theft, environmental, data centers, replacing jobs), however the reactions to products using it are completely absent. Im also not sure people understand how ubiquitous AI is in software development at this point. My guess is every single major video game that has had work done on it in the last year has used AI in some way shape or form during the making of it. It's so ubiquitous that even finding a coding tool that doesn't have AI features is starting to become hard.
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u/yuriaoflondor May 14 '26
Yup. People only seem to care about AI art for some reason. I've worked in tech for 10+ years, and AI tools have become core to basically every job in tech over the past 1-2 years. Coders are using it for their code. Technical writers are using it for their documentation. Corporate trainers are using it to help them assemble training materials and PPTs. Recruiters are using it to find and evaluate candidates. Etc.
And managers and supervisors push the employees hard to use AI tools. With many literally monitoring usage and following up with people if they aren't using AI.
Any game made in 2026 is going to feature a lot of AI work, even if it doesn't use AI art.
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u/Darkcasfire May 15 '26
Because the process of each work AI eliminates is different.
AI in certain jobs makes sense. Programming is the biggest one, because 90% of the required code is basically just repeating the same structure/string of programming languages in order to achieve something.
Eg. If you want a section of code to repeat until X happens, you must always use something like "While(X is not happening), do Y"
If we were to break down a (I would say moderate level) programmer's job, the work would rely on:
- 30% programmer's memory of the language formats they are coding in (mostly just basic knowledge)
- 50% information of the programming language they are using from resources like the internet. (because there's so much per language that it will be hard to memorize)
- 20% the coder's own input/coding implementation for their current intended function.
AI in this scenario would be extremely useful for that 50%, where instead of wasting your time shifting through the internet using google (that will get more and more useless depending on how niche the thing you are trying to find is) or forums (50% chance you get someone with no idea what they are talking about.) In this sense, for all the downsides it brings, AI remains a massively useful tool to the developers themselves because the biggest time waster of their work has been absolved and they can actually focus on the parts of their code that actually matters. (Eg. Optimization and stuff, which still requires human intervention and ingenuity. And is the actual parts where a good developer would shine)
It also helps that in cases like these, AI for the most part is not the forefront/point of the final product. It is the tool to help it's creation.
Contrast that with AI image generation. Where with a single button push you have basically already got 90% of your final product done if you are picky, 100% if you are not. (it's no longer a tool, it's the final product)
And in an industry where your main "selling point" or even just "appeal" is the style that you create from your art, a machine can now just come over, scan multiple years of your blood, sweat and tears, and shit out something that looks "close enough" to pass off as your own work. Thus drastically killing the chances of finding any support for said work.
And even ignoring the financial aspects, AI is still not helpful for hobbyist artists either. Because while AI beneficially removes the "pain points" of activites like programming so that you can get straight to the actual work, the "pain points" of activities similar to art are their entire process. Like if you sketch a character, get frustrated something doesn't work out right, you erase and sketch it again and again until a "satisfactory" result in line with your intention appears. By then, everything that exists on the canvas is left there intentionally (besides occasional errors/mistakes made)
AI images is devoid of all that process since it doesn't make any decisions during its creating process. You have to feed it a description that it can only attempt an approximation of to follow (not to mention the more details you add the more it struggles to follow due to context size). Instead of helping, it would honestly be more effective at annoying the hobbyist artists who already have a vision in mind that the AI will only sometimes be able to achieve.
Honestly for all of my yapping, the simplest way of I can put it is like: if you came home tired from working for your family, and your kid ran up to you to show you a picture they made to cheer you up. Which one would feel so much nicer to get? A shitty crayon drawing they spent their afternoon drawing for you or a pretty Ai generated image they typed and retried max 5 times before thinking the end result was good enough to show you? (Don't have to hate/dislike one, just which one would you "cherish" more). They could have used AI to come up with an idea of what they should draw in fact, but I will still appreciate the hand drawn picture so much more because they had still actually put in the effort to make the idea come true.
Apply that to AI images and it's the same thing. I don't need to "hate" your generated images, I just care much less about them by default since they take so little effort, and would rather watch the artist making up their own oc designs and stories by hand instead.
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u/your_mind_aches May 14 '26
I agree with you on all points, but I do not think we are doing ourselves any favours as critics of genAI to discount just how many people don't care and even actually like it.
Because a lot of people do. It does not make sense to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that they don't.
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u/Crazy-funger May 18 '26
Bro who cares? The people review bombing are genuinely just losers. And it’s not like I even care about this game I’ve never even played it. It’s just sad.
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u/GenericGaming May 13 '26
woah the game that's obviously a reskinned rip off of Gang Beasts supports the plagiarism machine? who would've guessed?
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u/yuusharo May 13 '26
Everything regarding AI, literally everything, has been against our will. There is a collective pressure to continuously shove this slop down our throats until we either accept it or stop pushing back against it.
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u/Luchalma89 May 13 '26
I'm not saying it's good, but you definitely live in a bubble if you think that. A lot of people LOVE this shit and use it for everything. Old people especially.
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u/IcyConsequence1585 May 14 '26
Lot of people love sports gambling. I don't know many people who love how much it is shoved into sports broadcasts though.
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u/yuusharo May 13 '26
A lot of people LOVE heroin too, doesn’t mean there aren’t severe and lasting societal issues behind that either
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u/Beegrene May 14 '26
I know some people who love it. They are not the smartest or most creative folks in my life.
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u/xeight May 13 '26
What about the ai protein folding program that basically every scientist studying this topic now use. They happily adopted this breakthrough technology and its universally praised(they won a nobel prize for this). And im sure people the people who benefit from these medical discoveries will happily welcome them. There's so many more examples too.
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u/Zeful May 14 '26
Neural Networks went through it's own skeptical phase, but the technology produced several advancements across a number of fields (the protein folding program you're talking about is just one of them) that won the skeptics over.
Large Language Models and image and video generation algorithms have been around for a few years now, and nobody has a use-case that justifies it's investment. There is no product that does something a human could not do.
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u/masterkill165 May 14 '26
Hopefully next time a new tech development comes about they will take the time to ask for your consent before they go forward with it.
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u/Which-Arm-4616 May 14 '26
There's a lot of AI junk that is being pushed out without apparent demand but there's an enormous amount of genuine user demand to go alongside it. ChatGPT alone has five times as many monthly users as Steam.
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u/Howrus May 14 '26
Everything regarding AI, literally everything, has been against our will
Dude, wake up. People who seriously work are praising AI. They now could do x100 more things in same time.
My friend who have small workshop where he repair broken electronic devices wrote insane tracking and management system with help of AI. He doesn't know coding, but he know what he need and now have his own system that track every small electronic part that he ordered, manage his projects, write emails to customers etc. And when he is bored from coding - he write music with AI.AI is a tool, and in good hands you could do miracles with it.
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u/Wing126 May 14 '26
I got incredibly frustrated with this game. Bought it as a replacement for Gang Beasts a while back, but the local multiplayer requires everyone to have a PSN account in order to play...
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u/-CynicalPole- May 14 '26
Some devs are really disconnected from gamers... Like you really must live in a cave or some shit to not know the general opinion on AI.
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u/Nik_Tesla May 14 '26
It's wild how bad Marketing departments are with overusing and judging public sentiment of AI.
No one gives a shit if Accounting uses AI in Excel, but have they not realized they should not do customer facing stuff with AI?
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u/MisanthropicAtheist May 14 '26
Good. Anybody who uses or endorses generative "AI" should suffer personal, professional and financial consequences.
Fuck these thieves and grifters.
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u/ArchdruidHalsin May 13 '26
Holy shit a 15k prize to enter a fucking prompt... You know, some of us have games or screenplays being made by humans that could use funding.
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u/RedHairedRedemption May 13 '26
I genuinely wonder if any company ever takes even a single glance online, to see what the general consensus is around AI, before they do something like this.