Just means more games I won’t buy. Ez pz
You might as well just not buy any software after 2025.
Its unrealistic to have any developer not use ai in any way in 2025. The tool is too useful and has too much power to be ignored. Even if you wanted to, every google search on how to fix some bug comes with an ai summary. Every IDE uses autocomplete. Having an AI review my personal code has had me fix bugs before i even test.
Its true there is alot of AI slop and low effort projects, but how its being used and to what level matter. Its not black and white. Linus Torvald, the creator of linux, one of, if not the smartest programmer on earth is using it.
did you know autocomplete doesn’t have to use ai? we have invented this thing called a language server that can tell us about relevant things to write
I can’t avoid some of my tools or dependencies using AI in their development but I can go as far as possible in not using it when I am making my own stuff. That includes searching only in engines that won’t show me AI summaries.
Linus has been sundowning for awhile. The fact he fell in love with the slop machine that almost makes it feel like he’s in his prime again shouldn’t surprise anybody
Honestly I feel like the games industry has had more of an issue with humanslop from large publishers making live service and derivative stuff over the past few years than indie devs using genAI today.
Because of how genAI works, it can’t simply be the lead creative force for a game or the game will be identical to other games using AI for lead creative. You’d end up with lantern keepers everywhere.
But if genAI would allow for new or displaced devs to compete with the scale and production values of the larger studios for passion projects that take true creative steps forward or risks, then as a gamer it’s a huge win and I’m all for it.
I want to see evolving tech move the medium forward, not just expand profit margins for large publishers with leadership that looks down on their players by downsizing staff and shrinking game scope to chase mobile and micro-transactions.
The industry is dying (without AI as a factor) due to how consolidation happened over the past few decades. Honestly the only possible way I see it getting saved is if something arrives that reduces production costs in a way that allows small independent teams to make games that compete at scale the way studios cropped up earlier on in gaming (1990s-2000s).
And this goes beyond just the development too. Legal, accounting, marketing, etc are all costs that are relatively much smaller for mega corps due to pooled resources than independent studios.
So we can either have: (a) no AI and large publishers buying up great talent to put on derivative BS like every major publisher did for the last decade, or (b) smaller studios that use AI to scale out both dev pipelines and business needs to compete against those large publishers as they prove themselves in the market to secure capital for expansion and future games.
Ultimately the market will decade, but my hopes are on the latter.
I’m going to save so much fucking money.
AI is a tool at the end of the day. Like every tool in the hands of someone who knows that they doing it’s great. But in the hands of a dumbass on the other hand.
Only half, I coulda sworn that number was higher earlier this year. Is it going down?
The novelty of the tech dies, and the ones that survive have to show some level of passion that it can loop back around to being handcrafted arts.
There could be a digital landfill with bad AI ET game packs
It’s called EPIC Store ;)
I hate the phrase “Made with AI” for many nested reasons. Some of which:
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“AI” is a meaningless buzzword now.
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“Made” to what extent? That could be anything line autocompletion to spammy vibecoding, from invisible diffusion prototyping/editing to horrific in-game visuals.
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The tone is “Twitter accusatory.” It ropes in innocent, minimal tool usage with full-on spammers, with zero nuance.
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Its a red herring for the fundamental issue: waves of games being spammy slop, which was a huge issue even before “AI.”
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It also discounts the other ethical issues we were grappling with. If we are going to talk ethics, are we just going to forget what companies like EA or Blizzard and such have done?
This needs to be discussed like a spectrum, and whether the intent is malicious. Not as a purity test of “was any AI used making this game?”
Steam don’t count code generation, it’s mainly the art they flag
I am also very tired of dunking witches to see if they float like ducks because they are made of wood.
Also, do we include dependencies too?
Because if we do… then almost every game is “Made with AI”, given now glibc has AI authored code in it too.
Or the software stacks the gamers are running, for that matter. The APIs, the platforms… as examples, do people really think Valve isn’t using LLMs to develop Steam? Or Nvidia/AMD/Intel/Microsoft for their graphics stacks?
And I don’t mean that as a hostile “you participate in society?” thing, just that it’s inconsistent to judge “AI or no AI” as black and white.
That’s what we call dependencies
I fully support tagging the slop deluge with “Made with AI”.
It helps separate the low effort garbage from the artisan garbage
What is slop, though? What’s your definition?
Copy paste output without validation and/or effort.
That’s a good definition, in fact I am bookmarking that to remember later.
Slop is just low effort in my view.
So if you just generate with ai without any real thought, thats slop because it is low effort.
The people posting just the “never slop” kitto are low effort too.
That seems to leave room for fully vibe coded apps as long as it’s made with real thought and effort. Some of the anti-AI absolutists are going to have a problem with that.
Fuck absolutist in general and under any circumstances.
What does vibe coded mean to you?
As I understand vibe coded means just pressing enter without checking the code and understanding it?
I’ve always interpreted it as not actually typing any of the code yourself. At least that seems to be the way people that are angry about it are using it.
For me it doesn’t matter if you type it as long as you understand it and it makes sense how it is written.
Thanks for contributing nothing to the discussion. At this point LLMs are more insightful than you are.
…U mad bro?
I mean yeah, the person you’re replying to made it pretty clear they resent you
Which I agree with, you might as well be a bot
Thanks for contributing nothing to the discussion. At this point LLMs are more insightful than you are.
Someone PWEASE think of the clankers’ feelings PWEEEEEASE 🥺
FWIW it wasted a few moments of my time wondering what point they were trying to make.
This reply is time well spent, that’s totally different.
Some shitposting will be easy to catch, funny, digestible & smart while being absolute worthless.
Some shitposting will be bad, some will be good.
But if anything, we can always count on it being shit 🫡
U mad bro?
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if you’re a single dev working on a game there’s likely some gap in your skill set that can be filled with AI. “made with ai = bad” is a very short sighted way to look at things that lacks any nuance.
Badly.
Does this address if the number of new games on steam has doubled or even tripped? My guess is that vibe coded slop games are skewing the stat quite a bit
Yeah I suspect the actual number of games people care about has stayed largely the same, there’s just a torrent of slop that’s skewing the numbers. It’s easy to hit 50% when you more than double the number of games being submitted by spewing even more garbage than there already was. It’s so bad Valve is actually having to adjust their store algorithms and systems to try to keep the slop tsunami from drowning out the good indy devs.
was already an issuw before AI, much worse as it’s taken off. not really sure what the answer is from valve tbh…outside of maybe jacking up the deposit to submit a again (and increasing threshold to get deposit back)?
I would also be interested to know how many were developers using ai and how many were people who think ai makes them a programmer
AAA companies like EA are in massive debt, a reflection of their inability to make profit with these mass-appeal, minimally original titles over and over. AI is a reflection of that too. People are correct to think AI can do this too, but they miss the fact nobody wants to play mass-appeal, low effort games. The industry is turning over for sure, but only to turn it’s back on a bunch of useless bullshit that’s only ever been pushed by tools, to useful idiots who don’t know any better.
The game market is already supersaturated.
Even triple A games have a smaller market. I won’t live long enough to play through all the games in my steam library. And my nieces and nephew won’t in their lifetime as well. That’s why steam doesn’t want you to pass down your account. Same with requiring an internet connection for everything. Shutting servers down to push another game. Looks like it’s time to have to buy COD 999…
That problem will fix itself once the extant GPUs give up the ghost. It’s not like anybody can afford a new graphics card. Ironic, really.
Yep, and memory+storage is getting there. Soon nobody will care about game quality anymore as nobody will have a decent computer anymore to play them with.
Don’t worry - there’s a cloud gaming subscription solution for that.
Yeah if anything the inability for the average person to buy a GPU is a good thing for these companies because if people want to play games they have to buy a subscription for the game as well as a subscription to the service that lets them play the game
It isn’t the industry that is currently pouring out AI slop. It WILL be though. Right now its indie / AI script kid slop. Wait till the Call of Duty made with AI comes out.
There is a place for AI in things - I think it will accelerate the current studio collapse. House after house is getting bought out and stripped. They all need to fall and then we can start getting games created by people who love to play them again.
CALL OF DUTY has already used AI tonnes of times for stupid operator designs and also for shitload of art in game for years
Didn’t know - I’ve been out of COD since modern warfare.
Every AAA game that was in development in 2026 has AI used in some part. Almost all of 2025 games in development did as well. 2024 was probably the last year where any significant fraction of games didn’t have AI at some level.
In some part yes, 95% not yet. I guess I haven’t gotten a AAA game since this all started.
I have made a couple of games with AI. My kid was in hospital, I couldn’t sleep. I had a couple of massive projects running that I absolutely could not hold focus on, and so I knocked up a reimagining of an old Amiga game called ECO, and a RPG shooter that has a few nods to Dragon Heroes: Shooter RPG. Had a few people play it and they think I should sell it, but I’m very aware it’s just two more data points in a sea of “slop”. Does it matter they were made with love? They were therapeutic and got me through a rough time? Does it matter that they were both games I missed, not because they were good exactly, but their mechanisms were different and not well covered by modern games, so I tweaked and I poked and I can’t draw for shit or compose so I let the AI do that. So, no matter how much I care, they are worthless in the eyes of a lot of folks here - I can code a bit, I absolutely couldn’t have done these without AI. I’m not going to sell them - but if you think me resurrecting long dead concepts with the shit bits taken out to bring a smile to me and my kids is some crime against joy, and identical to massive studios that put profits before the enjoyment of the very people they are supposed to serve - you can fuck right off. I will take a shitty, cobbled together indie concept riddled with AI and heart over some of the most (hand made), cynical profiteering shit that the AAAs were pumping out a couple of years ago, and will continue to pump out but with AI added.
The thing that reflects on the gaming industry is the big guys keep forgetting about the game.
