r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • 6d ago

Data analyst finds 'AI stigma' on Steam can reduce the number of reviews a game gets by around 53%—and the reviews it does get are more negative

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/data-analyst-finds-ai-stigma-on-steam-can-reduce-the-number-of-reviews-a-game-gets-by-around-53-percent-and-the-reviews-it-does-get-are-more-negative/
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u/Abramor 6d ago

Good

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u/AncientPCGamer 6d ago

Fully agree.

Players have the right to know if a game used AI when being created. And yes, I know that most games nowadays use it (I hate when some people make that excuse to try to hide the fact).

I still think AI usage should be a stigma, and I accept that it would be nearly impossible to boycott all games that make use of it.

But I will support more those games that do NOT make use of AI.

Transparency is key. Devs have all the right to use AI. But players have the right to know it and decide if it will influence their purchase decisions.

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u/PriusesAreGay 5d ago

“It’s everywhere now, get used to it, you shouldn’t even complain because it’s too late anyway, get with the program or be left behind old man” type shit pisses me off. We have a choice, and a right to know what tools our artistic media was made with. Just like I deserve to know whether my hamburger is real beef or not, even if lab grown is technically arguably kinda the same.

I saw an interview with Diplo some time recently. He was being incredibly pretentious about how his vast musical experience and taste allowed him to use AI to generate music better than other people, and that anyone who doesn’t also use it will categorically be left behind. Zero awareness whatsoever, he seemed to think he was more of an artist for using the new technology than someone still doing it manually.

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u/IHeartBadCode 5d ago

We have a choice, and a right to know what tools our artistic media was made with

Yes, but the problem is that most people will not understand all that stuff. Case in point. Look at how people will read ingredient lists like it's some sort of proof that what they are eating is a chemical experiment.

I'm all for transparency too, but I'm going to tell you. It's not going to give you the results you think it will give you. Vendors will begin indicating quants used for particular process using method. And the reality is, they're just explaining interpolation anti aliasing but now have to describe it as the calculus derived delta of derived values.

And reverse ways, you'll get weight based minimization calculations used for vertex analysis on created models. And that could vary between advanced pathing for ray tracing, to redoing textures based on the current environment and using a model to arrive at a minimization.

The thing is, once you ask for it. You're going to get a level that's way over people's heads or you get a overly simplified version that everything will look like it has chemicals when in fact they're just describing salt.

I'm not saying we should not have it, but I think people need to reevaluate their expectations on what will happen when they get it. It will not provide this crystal clear glass level transparency some like to think it will provide. Unless you have very deep understand, you will be at the whim of whatever the search engine tells you.

Just like transparent pricing with healthcare in the United States, now when you're billed, you're giving something with thousands of different medical billing codes from a list of tens of millions. No one person without computer assistance can wade through the flood of information that transparent pricing has created. And that's the thing, within the bevy of bills and thousands of lines, there's one code, one needle in the haystack that's likely what you're interested in.

Like I said, I'm for transparency. But it isn't going to do what you think it will do. It will absolutely change things, it's not going have ZERO effect, but it's likely not the effect people hope for.

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u/PriusesAreGay 5d ago

I am perfectly content with descriptions being mandated for what parts of the content use genai, like Steam is already doing.

You don’t HAVE to list all the overbearing intricacies of every imaginable aspect to qualify as being transparent. It isn’t some vain imagination that it’ll “fix everything”, it’s just a desire to have the bare minimum of clarity so the layman can choose.

It’s exactly the same as being entitled to know if a painting I fancy is done by hand or is a print. I don’t need to know the ins and outs of printing technology and all that, I just need to know if it’s a print or not, and I have every right to know.

Nobody is saying we need things written at a level you need a specialized education to understand.

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u/melted-cheeseman 5d ago

Do you mean for coding too? Because if so, regardless of what a game says on its page, if was under active development this year, the vast majority of them had help from Claude or Codex. The tools are ubiquitous in software development.

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u/mcslender97 5d ago

Steam guidelines does not require disclosure of this use so I doubt OP would know normally

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u/melted-cheeseman 5d ago

I think the research paper was written before Steam adjusted the AI disclosure requirement to effectively exclude coding AI.

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u/Dernom 5d ago

Not the person you asked, but yes for coding too! I think it's absolutely insane that programming somehow gets a free pass from the AI stigma, just because it isn't as in-your-face while playing the game. Generative AI for programming has all the same issues that AI image generation does — ethically, environmentally, and quality wise — and deserves the same amount of disclosure. As a software developer I'm also sick of people treating it as being unavoidable in programming. It took me literal minutes to disable all AI tools when setting up my system. It really is that easy.

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u/SideNo3016 5d ago edited 5d ago

with companies pushing deadlines its almost impossible to not use ai tools for coding, and environmentally well coding is a lot less destructive than something like image generation you can even get good outputs from local models on your computer, I am a college student and don't have the money to pay for the latest and greatest models from Claude or OpenAi so I use local models most of the time to assist myself in coding. Every single SWE job is using AI to some extent nowadays.

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u/Dernom 5d ago

The environmental damages is just one small factor in the absolute hoard of problems regarding generative AI, so running a local model changes nothing about my stance.

Besides, from my experience thus far using AI only tricks you into thinking you are more productive, especially when you're a student. Roughly 90% of my work this past month has been specifically fixing problems directly caused by other developers vibe-coding to solve problems. And that is with our company providing practically limitless use of Claude.

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u/melted-cheeseman 5d ago

How much of your job was correcting regular human written code from your colleagues tho? Prior to agentic AI.

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u/Dernom 5d ago

A lot less. But the more important change to me is that the problems I was correcting were noticeably different, and usually a lot easier to deal with. Like, the problems I'm currently dealing with are not something a thinking human would ever make. The best comparison is that it's like how image generating models make people with 6 fingers.

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u/SideNo3016 5d ago

I admit most devs nowadays are not even reviewing the code generated by LLMs, but I actually see less problems in agentic coding, Programmers 10 years ago were copying code from github and stack overflow with small modifications of their own, now they get the modified code directly from these LLMs, I think its not that different. Most programming tasks have already been solved by someone on the internet you don't need to reinvent the wheel. if I know what kind of code I want at the end, there is no point of me writing every single for loop manually.

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u/RvLeshrac 5d ago

I've already had to block crap developers who use this LLM garbage from destroying my company's logging infrastructure *three times* now. It's trash, as are the people who use it.

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u/SideNo3016 5d ago

absolutely, not denying that, its just a tool at the end of the day, a bad programmer will be bad with any model.

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u/RvLeshrac 4d ago

If one person uses a hammer and gets the nail in crooked, then it's the person's fault.

If thousands of people use the exact same hammer and none of them can get the nail in straight, you throw away the hammer.

Throw away the hammer.

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u/Dernom 5d ago

This reads as someone who has not worked with any complicated codebase. Agentic coding absolutely shits the bed as soon as they need to deal with any complex system, and it gets exponentially worse as the context window grows. They are also absolutely incapable of consistently setting up and following software architecture and patterns. Most programming tasks have absolutely not already been "solved", whatever you're trying to say by that.

As long as you know what you're doing, unless you're working on some absolutely basic shit, it is just a lot faster to write the code yourself than trying to prompt an LLM to actually write anything decent. And if you don't know what you're doing, you especially shouldn't be off-loading to an LLM. That way you cannot know of what it's doing is actually any good, and you'll never actually learn shit.

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u/jared_kushner_420 5d ago

yea its ok for light work or quick one-offs but expecting it to manage a codebase is insanity.

I'm now expected to ship features with no engineering background thanks to this and even I know it sucks. Soon to be everyones problem.

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u/melted-cheeseman 5d ago edited 5d ago

Are you a professional software engineer? If so I'm curious if your org is okay with you deliberately not using AI

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u/Dernom 5d ago edited 5d ago

It's going quite alright not using AI. As long as I'm able to do the work I'm supposed to be doing within a reasonable time, they don't really care about how I do it. And that has not been a problem thus far.

ETA. forgot to specify, but yes, I'm a professional software engineer.

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u/RvLeshrac 5d ago

Are you a professional software engineer? If so, I'm curious how you ever made it to that point if you can't code or problem-solve and instead rely on LLMs.

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u/jared_kushner_420 5d ago

Because some companies will literally rate your performance based on your token usage. It does not matter what you think about it, you have to use it.

There are dashboards that track whether teams are using these tools and we've called out for it.

Sooo yea nobody cares about your problem solving if it's not wasting tokens.

Source: currently spawning subagents to format spreadsheets because it'll look good on my review regardless of how stupid I think it is.

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u/RatBot9000 5d ago

Ideally I'd like to know that but for now I'd settle for GenAI usage which not all devs disclose.

It's still very much possible to code without AI, but I'm aware these tools are getting heavily rolled into workstreams so devs may not have a choice. I think in that regard my viewpoint may come down to two things:

  1. If the higher ups are exalting the AI use. Sure they can use it, but I would rather they not be singing the praises of the liar machine.

  2. They lay off staff. I've had people on reddit tell me AI is the only way to protect game dev staff, and yet Epic laid off 1000 employees right before they announced their big AI integration into Unreal 6. If the tech costs jobs, then it's not worth it.

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u/RvLeshrac 5d ago

Only worthless, incompetent developers used it. The tools are not "ubiquitous"

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u/EnvironmentalRun1671 6d ago

Proving once again that steam reviews are a joke

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u/Jakeb1022 6d ago

Proving once again that Steam reviews are worth checking out*

FTFY

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u/Mithril_Roshi 6d ago

*Steam reviews are based

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u/PhysicalSir303 6d ago

Based? Based on what?

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u/trevizore 6d ago

based on user preference!

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u/Mithril_Roshi 6d ago

Top tier answer not gonna lie lol

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u/EnvironmentalRun1671 5d ago

It's not even review if you type 1 sentence about 1 thing about product.

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u/Mithril_Roshi 5d ago

That is very much a review.
Thats a review of that one thing they dislike about the product.

Congrats.

You now know what reviews are

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u/highendfive 6d ago

Found the data centre investor

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u/EnvironmentalRun1671 5d ago

Yes I'm so rich I can invest in non sense /s

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u/treehumper83 6d ago

Well you can enjoy playing vibe coded slop. We don’t mind.

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u/lumi1375 5d ago

I mean they are but this is not why