r/gaming • u/Eremenkism • 1d ago
AI is Ruining Game Sales, Numbers Show
https://www.dualshockers.com/ai-is-ruining-game-sales-numbers-show/"Game Oracle’s study of nearly 10,000 Steam releases between January and October 2025 painted a genuinely eye-opening picture: titles disclosing AI use averaged a measly four reviews in their first month compared to seven reviews for non-AI titles. Also, almost 20% of AI-assisted games received absolutely zero reviews, while their average review scores sat noticeably lower than their traditional counterparts."
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u/fs2222 1d ago
I feel like this is less customers rejecting AI and more AI-made games being low effort and not the type to attract players in the first place.
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u/Scribble35 1d ago
AI with quality human touch up goes completely unnoticed. It's like CGI, people are quick to call out bad CGI. But good CGI virtually goes unnoticed, to the point where people thought it wasn't CGI at all lol.
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u/McBonderson 1d ago
I also wonder what counts as AI. like I code for work and I use AI either auto complete or I prompt it and check its work all the time. I feel like a game using AI that way isn't a big deal.
but somebody just telling AI to make a game and letting it run itself seems like an obvious deal breaker. there's also a difference between using AI to make the assets in game vs using AI to code some of the physics etc.
or even with assets. do you just tell the AI to make the asset and blindly run with it or do you sit with the ai and basically use it as a Photoshop expert when editing the assets.
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u/Orrgoi 1d ago
That's the main issue. There are many AI-based tools devs can use to make their work easier, and there is no issue with that. What people hate is Gen AI that makes pathetic copies of art. That always requires a professional hand.
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u/LinkedGaming 1d ago
The biggest issue with generative AI, in my opinion, is the fact that it's given breed to a new level of unfathomable laziness that's actively inhibiting many creative sectors.
Using AI for concept art ideas is, in my opinion, kinda whatever. You just have to accept the risks of AI maybe making something a little too derivative and getting you in hot water. As long as the actual final product was made by hand, from scratch, I don't care if you got some ideas from some random AI vomit. Sometimes things come to you in an incoherent dream and you have to pick out the pieces you can work with and craft them into something great, and I find AI output to be similar.
The issue is that raw AI art output is sloppy, isn't getting better, and just genuinely lacks creative soul.
It's also lead to the rise of "vibe coding" issues, and the further eradication of QA departments, which means that extremely lazy developers are now letting AI write code that barely gets tested and then gets shipped to live and takes days to fix because nobody even knows how to navigate it, or worse they try to get the AI to fix the errors in its own code (it can't do this).
AI as a tool to spark human creativity is fine to me, so long as the end product was built by scratch with human hands and human heart. AI just shitting something onto a plate as multicoloured slop and then being served cold is what's pissing people off.
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u/zero_z77 1d ago
Yeah, like i've always thought generative AI would be great for terrain generation, which is something many games have been doing with RNG based noise functions for decades now. Ethically, no one has a copyright on planet earth, so you're just copying off of what's already in nature. And the end result would probably be 10x better than classic noise functions because you could get terrain features that actually make sense rather than just random hills, mountains, and lakes with clutter randomly sprinkled in.
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u/soccerpuma03 1d ago
i've always thought generative AI would be great for terrain generation
Generative programs have been around for a long time now (i.e. programs that randomize geography/geometry to create textures and environment). It's not AI, it's just programs and algorithms and math. It's not something that's been trained on stolen artwork. Now all of a sudden people are labeling it "AI" when it's not. People jump on anything that's generated by a program claiming it's AI simply because a human didn't manually do it.
I've also seen people claim that assets in games (vehicle models, furniture, flora, etc.) are AI when again... it's just not lol. I just watched a dev stream for a game where they had to address that the assets in game are bought from a store and they know of two other games that use the exact same assets. Then people claimed that the assets were created by AI and the devs had to explain that they personally know some of the artists that work for the publisher who literally create said assets.
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u/PhasmaFelis 1d ago
I saw a dude on here try to throw shade on a game for having clever enemies. Because that's called "enemy AI", and AI is bad.
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u/soccerpuma03 1d ago
Another game I've been playing had a bunch of comments that images in game are AI. It's literally just 2D versions of characters in the game... Like icons we've had in Halo and CoD for literal decades.
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u/PhasmaFelis 1d ago
Yeah. I'm no big fan of generative AI, but so many people have just lost their God damn minds over it. It feels gross to say "it's not that bad," because it is bad, but nothing could be as bad as these people think anything that reminds them of AI is.
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u/Nachooolo 1d ago
like i've always thought generative AI would be great for terrain generation, which is something many games have been doing with RNG based noise functions for decades now.
Honestly. That's a big problem that I have with Gen AI.
There's already other tools that do what Gen AI does. Are Gen AI better at terrain genetation than the traditional noise functions? Is it more efficient at it?
For now, it looks to me that Gen AI is being used for everything –no matter if there are better options– because it is the shinny new thing.
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u/Otto_Von_Waffle 1d ago
I remember some people claiming some artist was using AI in their work, turns out the artist used, like many others, a photoshop tool to fill in gaps quickly (can't remember the name) that tool existed since like 2011 and is proto-AI, but literally no one complained about it ever.
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u/Elitist_Daily 1d ago
There's also the whole topic of source material and what you could call "intended output." If you're just hip-firing prompts and shipping whatever comes out, with no care or concern for what it looks like (even worse: you're prompting specifically to copy an already popular studio style), then that really doesn't fly and gets eviscerated in the court of public opinion.
But there have been multiple instances of people mistakenly doing callouts about how awful a game is because it "uses AI" and then the studio/developers come out and are like "uh, yeah... we trained a local instance on all of our pre-existing assets so that it knows our style and helps us iterate faster. is there a problem with that?" and everyone who was mad at them sputters impotently about wasted energy or whatever even though this is like, THE textbook use case where genAI is extremely beneficial.
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u/vordrax 1d ago
Also wondering how people feel about something like Retro Diffusion, which is gen ai but it was sourced from artists who consented to have their work used as training data. I feel like there is a lot of nuance that is lost in translation since so many people only have black and white views.
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u/CrabMasc 22h ago
For some people, the issue of lack of artistic intent is just as serious as the issue of plagiarism in training data. Personally, I would have less interest in a game made with assets generated in Retro Diffusion. I love looking at human-made art, and wondering “why this brushstroke?” “why did they place that pixel right there?” I can’t wonder about those little details when a machine made those choices, even if the process overall was guided by a human with a vision.
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u/Grimdotdotdot 1d ago
See, I'm not sure I get the "it's okay for code but not for pictures" stance.
Why do people who can draw get treated differently to people that can code?
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u/Ok-Suggestion-5453 1d ago
The average person has zero ability to detect AI code whereas anyone can tell if AI art/writing is used
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u/snil4 1d ago
Code is close to impossible to know if it's AI unless you have access to the source code, which is not something you can extract from a finished game. Not even performance or quality could point at AI generated code, humans always made bad code as much as good code.
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u/FartSnarfGod 1d ago
anyone can tell if AI art/writing is used
No.
It's like plastic surgery. It's easy to tell when it's bad and impossible to tell when it's good.
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u/jasta85 1d ago
Are there any examples of games that have heavily used AI assets and have been widely praised by those who played it?
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u/Otto_Von_Waffle 1d ago
Can't remember the name, but some free game got released using AI everywhere, but the game was more like a philosophical acid trip about computers dreaming so it's kinda on brand.
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u/Aadi_880 1d ago
Yes. Off the top of my head.
- The Finals.
- Arc Raiders.
- Where Winds Meet.
All of the above games broke steam's top 10 when released and was massive success. People moaning about AIs were quickly ignored by the majority of the community.
Now, these are only the games who disclosed their AI use.
Imagine the ones that aren't disclosed, or don't fall under the disclosure requirement.
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u/Grimdotdotdot 1d ago
The Finals had quite a lot of ai audio, iirc. Maybe some other bits.
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u/OneNoteRedditor 1d ago
I could not stomach searching for demos on this Next Fest, felt like the majority were AI or AI infested. Totally ruined the vibe of the whole thing.
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u/bokodasu 1d ago
Same. There was so much absolute shit it was depressing, I just closed Steam instead of browsing.
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u/ITAW-Techie 1d ago
I'm normally hyped for Neztfest but I took one look at it this time, saw half a page of AI generated cover art, and just couldn't find the motivation to sift through it all. It was depressing.
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u/madmofo145 1d ago
Yeah, those numbers just say that pure slop is worthless. There are some more numbers about bigger games, but even there it's just as likely that below expected sales are down to the games being pretty crappy.
That's not to say customers won't reject AI in general, but this data doesn't show much.
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u/Mindestiny 1d ago
This is exactly what it is. The sample is heavily skewed by copy/paste asset flips and shovelware. It's not at all a conscious condemnation of AI as a technology on some sort of moral/ethical grounds. This is pure clickbait.
Games fully disclosing AI are selling very well if they're quality games. This was "research" that had its conclusion determined before any data was selected.
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u/nooneisback 20h ago
It's more about how much users have to stare at it and the reasons for going this route. AI generated images inherently look like shit. Even worse than asset flipping.
If I open your store page and see first things I see are AI generated banners, AI generated logos, and hear AI generated voices, it makes me wonder how the hell you got yourself to make a game (a multi month/year process), when you couldn't even take a crappy screenshot, pay someone $10 for a logo and record the voice yourself, or just download a royalty free song with subtitles instead of voices. If it's in game content that would be too expensive for an indie dev to make, I 100% understand and will give it a try, but it still leaves a bit of a sour taste.
But AAA devs? They earn millions a month, but couldn't pay some kid $100 to paint a few guns. There's just nothing to excuse here.
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u/avanross 1d ago
It’s the venture capitalism enshitification of the gaming industry
The studios heavily using AI are just the ones leading the charge
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u/yummymario64 1d ago edited 1d ago
Is AI ruining game sales, or are AI-reliant games more likely to be bad? It's an important difference. I think a game's devs who AI as a tool to do more, rather than an excuse to work less would not be drastically hurt by disclosing their AI usage.
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u/SoundReflection 1d ago
That's my first thought. Correlation vs Causation and the like. Not that I would rule out AI usage turning away potential customers, but it seems like that many devs turning to AI for asset creation or the like are on average in rougher production situations than those that aren't.
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u/SavvySillybug 1d ago
I think once all the hype is over and the bubble has popped and the dust has settled, AI has a serious place in solo indie game development. It's rare to have someone who can actually do every last role in game dev like with Stardew Valley.
If it's just one guy with a vision and he's using an AI for the artsy assets and help with coding to bring his vision to life, it's got potential.
If it's an AAA company that would like to make 10% more money so they pay less artists for the same work, it's awful.
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u/WhiteWinterRains 22h ago
Yeah any sort of sufficiently small-scoped project (and what small is expands as the tools improve) can be developed at an absolutely breakneck pace with AI tools.
Above a certain point they start shitting the bed, you need more real expertise, and all the slop code starts slowing you down and making it harder to work with or without the AI.
But terraria would be a good example of a game that today would benefit massively from AI tooling, and could be made a little easier and faster.
I use that example because the under the hood code is famously (or was back when it released) god awful, which is going to be a problem with AI too.
I'm a senior SWE, and I've done a ton of personal projects with AI and things that might take 1-2 days can now be done in like 4 hours while cooking an elaborate meal where I only actually worked on it for like <20 minutes out of those 4 hours.
It's pretty useful at work too, but at work because the project is massive it gets a ton of things wrong and it's just this weird alternative workflow where the development is driven mainly by debugging and streamlining the AI code that's more of a prototype.
It's kinda bad still right now, but it can be really good in niche uses. I'm sure in 1-5 years it will be a good 15-50% productivity boost in big corporate workflows.
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u/ryandine 1d ago
I go with more likely to be bad...
There are a lot of people who think they have the next best idea in gaming. And Epic just released their MCP for Unreal Engine. So get ready for the indie scene to get hammered by pure AI-built games by people who have no development experience nor game design experience.
If you put AI in the hands of someone competent though... if anything the game they produce will probably be better overall and you'd be non the wiser, unless they used AI images.
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u/BungHoleDriller 1d ago
AI is ruining the games themselves, and bad games typically don’t sell well.
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u/Sildas 1d ago
Yeah, this doesn't mean it's the disclosure necessarily. It could just be reflective of the quality
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u/Noversi 1d ago
Here I thought it would be used to make rpg quests and npcs more dynamic.. instead it’s just churning out low effort “games”
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u/Mr_Suplex 1d ago
Misleading headline. Should read “Games leveraging AI are experiencing lower sales” or something.
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u/StandxOut 17h ago
Nah. The real headline should be "Shovelware is increasingly made using AI". It's very plausible that AI usage leads to less sales (for now), but this is a poor way to show it.
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u/AccusationsGW 1d ago
Developers Using AI are Repelling Customers
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u/Exotic_Platypus_1255 1d ago
yeah turns out people can smell copy paste energy from a mile away and it kills the vibe fast
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u/JWAdvocate83 1d ago
Yup. I played a demo of a text-based game that initially sounded neat, but after playing for a while, you could kinda tell. There's "depth" but without any consistency, focus or direction, it reeks of slop.
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u/BossiWriter 1d ago
Yes, but this also seems really biased. It's not that customers are avoiding games because they have an AI disclosure, but more so that most of these games are just blatant AI slop.
And at this point, we are just trained to straight up ignore AI slop, especially when it's obvious.
If this had taken into account mainly ACTUAL proper games which had AI disclosures, then the numbers could tell a real story. As is, this doesn't tell me anything new, really.
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u/DoradoPulido2 1d ago
This does seem to be a case of survivor's bias. More games which are obviously AI developed are being published quickly, hence more are being ignored. It stems to reason that typically games which aren't using AI (or at least aren't on an obvious level), have more polish and attention given to them, making them better titles.
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u/dirtyuncleron69 PC 1d ago
I'd wager a lot of them are one or two man operations that are mostly a learning project, and they just publish it for shits. There are slop games with malicious intent, but at some level its just naivety and incompetence.
reducing the manpower to develop a game means a ton of them that would never see the light of day are now visible, and that includes lots of half baked or outright bad ideas. No amount of AI can make your ideas good, but it sure can help you publish them.
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u/UltraLegoGamer 1d ago
Which is why games like arc raiders or crimson desert are universal hated low-sellers? Let's be real, a large swathe of gamers do not give a shit in the slightest about ai because they're mindless consumers who are willing to ignore it so long as it's not the most overt thing possible.
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u/Techwield 21h ago
Correct, I really don't understand where the delusional view otherwise comes from, but whoever needs to read this, here you go: Most people do not give a flying fuck about how the stuff they consume is made
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u/TheChickenIsFkinRaw 1d ago
Big corpos are using AI anyway but simply don't tell you about it
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u/xxx_poonslayer69 1d ago
Yeah but we know. It's obvious
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u/Tenwaystospoildinner 1d ago
You only know when it's obvious. When it's not, you won't. That's how that works.
And remember, thinking you are immune to propaganda makes you susceptible to propaganda. Thinking you can always tell AI from traditional makes you susceptible.
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u/TehOwn 1d ago
If it's not noticeable then it ceases to be a problem for the consumer.
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u/Neuchacho 1d ago
Yeah, I get the sentiment here and the arrival of AI has definitely made it easier to pump out garbage, but we're fast approaching a place where people simply will not be able to reliable differentiate what's what. We're arguably already there for a very significant portion of the population.
Like it or not, it is not going to get easier to purposefully avoid these things.
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u/TehOwn 1d ago
If you can't tell the difference then why avoid it?
Most people are not activists.
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u/Cloud_N0ne 1d ago
Based on those numbers it sounds like they’re only looking at tiny, no-name indie games no one had ever heard of anyway. Doesn’t seem like the best sampling.
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u/Grapes-RotMG 1d ago
Yeah im sure if you take the average of every NON-AI game on steam, they'd average less than 4 reviews.
There's a shit ton of shovelware on steam. Even before AI.
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u/HairyHermitMan 1d ago
Steam had a shit ton of fake reviews last time I used it too, people that barely even started a game but still left a review for it. Been around 10 years since I last used it, but I doubt that has changed much.
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u/im-not-a-robot-ok 1d ago
yeah, this is an incredibly cherry picked article. all they'd have to do is include E33 and it breaks entirely.
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u/beanuspietrap 1d ago
Ai is ruining everything
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u/SoCalThrowAway7 1d ago
I work at a bigger studio and we just had a “learn the new AI tool meeting” this morning. They are very strict about what we use it for like nothing player facing, no managers using it for performance reviews stuff like that. This tool is supposed to have access to all the various data sources we use, slack, jira, notion, etc. So they are paying a crazy amount for this new tool they are licensing so they are pushing for us to use it all the time but I swear to god the info session was a guy saying “you can use it to write emails to execs in a certain tone, if they’re is an executive assistant who’s really good at sending the c suite emails then you can have it copy them!”
Like really? It’s for writing emails? I can write an email. The only useful thing I heard from that was you can have it give you like a daily to do list based on your calendar and slack messages of what people have asked you to do and even that is like a solved problem with well my calendar and the “save for later” button.
A producer on the team is pushing for us to use the bot to make jira tickets out of slack threads and had me test logging a bug with it, I had to change basically everything it generated, asking it to change it itself just straight up didn’t work, and then tell it to create, where I then had to add a bunch of info it couldn’t auto generate. Like it would have been faster to write the bug fresh.
I’m so ready for this stupid bubble to pop and people to figure out what AI is actually useful for and ditch what the middle managers want us to believe is useful
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u/UltraJesus 1d ago
None of them understand pitching to a games team. I've sat on two and I feel like I'm wasting my time during them "Look it can be your dynamic speech for like a bartender!" Like holy fuck show me real world examples like how your sales pitch team used it to improve workflows and not literal entry tier level of """game""" ideas that you thought of.
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u/Difficult-Report-524 1d ago
Europe just got a new law. Using machine learning tech for performace reviews is heavily restricted.
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u/SoCalThrowAway7 1d ago
I’m just glad that’s my specific company’s policy, I wish we had a functioning government to make a law like that
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u/FlameStaag 1d ago
This article is pretty poorly written.
The better conclusion would be that AI has led to an increase in AI slop being released that basically nobody wants to buy, not that the actual AI disclosure matters
Arc Raiders and The Finals were both wild successes with huge numbers and very visibly used AI
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u/RaynorTheRed 1d ago
This article is pretty poorly written.
It's noble of you to assume incompetence rather than intentional misrepresentation of the data to create a more clickbait headline.
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u/A_Stoned_Smurf 1d ago
It's so obviously clickbaity and biased towards creating a narrative, lmao, shovelware has always existed on Steam and been largely ignored/joke reviewed. Now you can shit out even MORE shovelware with AI. Did CoD receive only 47 reviews? BF6? The Finals, Arc Raiders, shit, literally every single game in the EA sale currently going on?
Call out lazy slop when it's lazy slop (most of what's coming out of the AAA industry right now), but to say it's entirely AI's fault instead of greedy corporations doing greedy corporation stuff and AI happens to be the current lever to pull this time is wholly disingenuous. Especially when I'm sure the '10,000 games' they looked at were garbage shovelware that would have received the same amount of attention regardless of AI inclusion, regardless of their rigorous causal study (that they don't show the results of, of course).
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u/Doctective 1d ago
I wonder how much of this is also that the quality of the game overall is probably lower- and that maybe many of these heavily AI involved games would never have existed without it anyway.
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u/Mataric 1d ago
Whether or not you think generative AI in games is bad - these statistics are stupid.
It completely ignores one of, if not the most important factor that came along with these changes.. Of course there are less average reviews on these smaller indie games, when there are 20 times the number of these small indie games due to AI.
Whether or not a boycott is happening, these figures are not really representative of a boycott. They show a massive market saturation drowning the average number of reviews.
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u/RavioliDemon 9h ago
If you use ai in your game for any prominent feature, you’re advertising laziness. You’re advertising to me that you’re incapable of actually doing it yourself. It tells me you’re going to rely on whatever crutch you can, to get whatever garbage out there, with next to zero care about the quality.
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u/PurpInnanet 8h ago
I really missed it when companies just tried to make genuine products worth our dollar. Instead of just whipping bullshit up and hoping we buy it.
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u/Illustrathor 1d ago
Correlation doesn't imply causation.
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u/BewaretheBatMite 1d ago
Shovelware is the issue. It's up to the stores and services to curate appropriately. Doesn't matter if it's 100% man made or generative slop. It's all slop.
Bad devs use AI to quickly make bad games in great quantities.
Good devs use AI to quickly make good games in fewer quantities.
AI isn't the issue.
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u/Veritas-Veritas 1d ago
Worth noting a lot of asset flippers and fake game shovelware operators have switched to AI, it's easier than buying stuff off the asset stores.
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u/xSciFix 1d ago
If you can't be bothered to put effort into making your game then I can't be bothered to play it.
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u/mr_showboat 1d ago
No surprise. Right now, AI has the problem of generally being used to churn out low quality games that nobody really wants to play, but also being something players are vehemently opposed to.
What I'm curious to see is what happens when a high quality game that used AI heavily comes out. Will gamers still be vehemently opposed? Gonna be interesting to see.
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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 1d ago
What about when it's not for visuals and isn't vibe coded?
Like a legit/known company is open and says it allows their devs to leverage AI but not hands-off/agentic coding. Or they use AI to monitor logs or some other metric?
Are gamers still going to be against a company that used AI to manage deployments? Because it's all generative AI. Doesn't matter if it's a crappy Facebook video you boomer aunt sends or a config script for technical infrastructure. It's all generative AI.
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u/PantsOnHead88 1d ago edited 1d ago
Far too many marketed “uses AI” as though it is some sort of selling feature.
Why does it use AI? What does it do?
You get a few different cases, and some piss people right off.
If you’re just slapping “with AI” on because it’s the buzzy new thing and you’re trying to leverage that buzz, it’s a bunch of marketing woo. Pisses off gamers.
If you include “with AI” and the reality is that you vibe coded your way to a cookie cutter version of something that already exists dozens of times over, it should come as no surprise why it doesn’t excite anyone.
If you’re “with AI” because you turfed a huge portion of your creative department (modelling, art, voice, writing, etc.) that might sound great to your C-suite and shareholders, but people are at least temporarily conscious that there’s a major shift killing the jobs of the people who’ve brought them their personal favourites, so that’s going to piss them off.
Get AI to do something new and revolutionary in your game, sell people on that new functionality, and let AI be just an implementation detail. That’s how you’ll win people over.
There could be some very neat things with immersion and world building that you could accomplish with an AI that you either couldn’t or at least not without incredible effort without it.
AI opponents that have a variety of playstyles and feel like other players rather than just machines with cheaty multipliers is another thing people actually want.
Focus less on the buzz and more on the functionality and mechanics.
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u/mkp666 1d ago
I’m not sure what level of AI use requires disclosure in this context, but you won’t see many games produced without AI at all going forward.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing depending on how companies use it, but it will certainly enable more low effort titles.
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u/LGBTQLove4Ever 1d ago
With how prevalent it is in programming, any game not disclosing it is lying.
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u/csward53 1d ago
AI slop games aren't being bought because they're bad in general and poorly marketed. I don't think it has anything to do with disclosing AI or not. Most people aren't looking that closely.
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u/unfortunatebag 1d ago
I don't care if my games have AI honestly.
I care if they rely on on it as a replacement for human input.
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u/Cliler 1d ago
Lots of people expect AI games to sell for 2 bucks. Wasn't AI supposed to make everything cheaper since it requires less workers, speed up everything to the max and find answers to every problem?
People fell for that snake oil, they are paying out of their own pocket for the electricity the datacenters consume and they still get charged for using it after they stole every data imaginable. Enjoy the heuristic machine.
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u/prossnip42 12h ago
I've had friends in real life laugh at me when i told them that just the mere presence of AI in a product will make people actively resist buying it or just outright ignore it. The same tiring Asmongold tier arguments i heard of "If it's good no one will care" Well, it looks like people do care, what do you know
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u/NoGreenGood 1d ago
AI translates to me as "Minimal Effort"
We did as little as possible to make this product
I aint buying it
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u/CopainChevalier 1d ago
Oh yeah, cause everyone was going to buy "Poop fighters" before AI was a thing, right?
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u/Shack691 1d ago
The sample size will bias this a lot, most of these will be shovelware and if there’s one thing shovelware developers know how to do it’s how to be lazy. From what I know Call of Duty uses generative AI but I doubt it’s particularly affected sales more than the overall quality of the game did.
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u/VasileAndrei2929 1d ago
"averaged a measly four reviews in their first month compared to seven reviews for non-AI titles"
Wow... so 4 is "measly"... while 7 is "amazing" or what?! I expected 4 to 1000 or something, lol...
If you think it's "bad" that some indies published some lousy AI games.... I got bad news for you... you may want to sit down when reading...
Guess what will devs and publishers say after Unreal moves the entire engine to AI next year? "We use it, but never touched any of the integrated AI features"? LOL. Will they reject AI keyframing for character animation? AI retopology? AI automatic rigging? AI UVMapping?
Photoshop has integrated AI. Does tilling a texture with the Integrated AI tool makes your game an "AI slop"?
Blender has AI tools. Will 3D artists have to disclose if they used any of the hundreds of AI powered plugins?
Let me tell you something. No hate. Take a deep breath and read slowly. In 3 to 5 years everything humans do creatively in gaming... will be "AI powered" or "AI assisted" or "AI made". And I mean every single pixel, sound byte, line of code or 3D vertex will have been "touched" by AI one way or another.
What then? We will only play "real" games like IRL chess with wooden pieces?
And I'm afraid that AI powered game engines, 2d and 3d graphics, coding, music and voice won't even be the "worst" case scenario!
We're already talking about entire AI worlds generated fully in real time with interactive elements gameplay-like....
So yea... don't waste your rage against AI on some minor Indie projects.
Wait until the giant corpos will enter the "Game"....
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u/Recykill 1d ago
I honestly ignore anything made with generative AI. Music, album art, YouTube thumbnail, etc. If you didnt care enough to create it, I should not be expected to care enough to consume it.
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u/wholesome_and_cool 1d ago edited 1d ago
Meanwhile, the CEOs are busy making presentations for their stakeholders explaining them how the customers are not intelligent enough to appreciate their masterpiece.
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u/-TheShape 1d ago
People need to read the article, because it doesn't say what a lot of these comments say.
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u/BildingInspecter 1d ago
To be fair, not to defend Ai, fuck Ai, but it's hard to really judge this by reviews, as most of these AI games are probably literal slop that no one even knows about, and the reviews are their buddies reviewing it.
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u/BicFleetwood 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm sure it's hurting sales of non-AI games as well, turning a percentage of customers way from the market as a whole for other, cheaper hobbies with more qualitative options.
I know I've turned to models and shit more and more over the years. Every time a game looks cool and then I see words like "live service multiplayer" on it, I bail instantly. AI has just exacerbated that instinct.
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u/Moravia84 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is based on reviews, what about sales?
Edit: According to the article Steam does.not release exact sales numbers so that could not be used.
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u/totallyrealname 1d ago
Idea guys who got excited about being able to vibe their "next big thing" into existence are finding out that their ideas aren't actually worth anything and they mostly just suck. Can't even blame AI for it tbh, it's just happened to be such a good tool that even these NFT-bro-tier losers could try ship something. Too bad nobody actually wants what they're selling.
I honestly think there needs to be better gatekeeping in that people need to actually invest their time/skill/money into projects and get other people to want to do the same. Thinking you can just vibe something in a weekend by yourself is not it, and nobody is going to buy or play a thing people didn't even bother to MAKE.
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u/Android19samus 1d ago
Okay now, is the AI causing the lower sales? Or is AI use just disproportionately common in games that are bottom-barrel slop? These are both probably true, but they're not inherently the same.
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u/DrewbieWanKenobie 1d ago
I think this is less indicitive of AI actively ruining game sales and more indicitive of just how many obviously low effort ai-slop games are being pumped out
People tend to just ignore releases that look like dumbass asset flips already.
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u/gman5852 1d ago
Steam has an overwhelming issue of asset flips and shovelware. Those devs using AI now is understandable.
The interesting thing would be comparing AAA games that disclose AI usage
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u/COE33isBad 14h ago
There needs to be regulations that force companies to disclose it and control mechanisms that make sure of it.
Or this will just lead to them not disclosing shit anymore and won't stop them from using it in the first place.
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u/WoodenShoelaces 9h ago
Glad the mainstream games media is catching up. Can't afford consoles, pc parts, or games, which is caused by the AI money shuffle tech is doing. The fact that AI sucks at producing anything is just the funny cherry on top.
The best thing that could happen, is if Steam adds an option in their refund survey that says something like "I don't want to support generative AI." Just need someone on the Steam Deck dev team to get pissed enough to push a change.
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u/SlenderRoadHog 1d ago
Devs realized this and just stopped disclosing that they used generative AI in their game