> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective.

Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonger, from Bulldog, likewise used fractal generation for its maps.

More recently, the prevalence of procedurally generated rogue-likes and Metroidvanias is another point against. Granted, people have got a bit bored of these now, but that's because there were so many of them, not because they were unsuccessful or "failed to deliver".

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times.

Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written.

This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell her art.

> If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well.

And if you actually read the article, you'd see it addressed that.

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times.

Like a library?

You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.

And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachable.

LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually, I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.

Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already.

Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style.

AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk don't know and for the most part don't care unless someone else tells them to care.

And then they go around blaming EVERYTHING as AI.

If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses this:

> That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are not used to generate content presented to players.

I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.

One the topic procedural generation; rogue likes are all about it and new generation Diablo like games have definitely similar things, well respected new games like Blue Prince. There has never been such as successful period of time for procedural generation in games like now, and all of these are pre-AI. AI powered procedural generation is wet dream of rogue-like lovers

> Spore is well acclaimed.

Its creature creator was, but as a game it was always mediocre to bad. They had to drop something like 90% of the features and extremely dumb down the stages to get it released.

It was also what introduced a lot of us to SecuROM DRM - it bricked my laptop in the middle of a semester.

> No one cares about how the code is written.

I would overstate:

No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the one fixing it or maintaining it.

Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other things.

This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money on developers care, but we have so many examples already of money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this impression.

Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way around is possible.

Games with ai art assets are some of the most popular right now in any case. Arc raiders being a great example where some of the voice assets are AI generated.

Be careful of reading any viewpoint on the internet. Apparently no one used facebook or instagram and everyone boycotts anything with ai in it.

In reality i think you’d be foolish not to make use of the tools available. Arc Raiders did the right thing by completely ignoring those sorts of comments. There may be a market for 100% organic video games but there’s also a market for mainstream ‘uses every ai tool available’ type of games.

Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.

> Spore is well acclaimed.

Spore was fun (IMHO) but at the time of release was considered a disappointment compared to its hype.

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.

I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs.

There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.

Spore was not well-acclaimed precisely because it failed to live up to its promises as a world-builder. Only the 1st two stages were any good.

> Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious.

Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they taste it)

Players are buying your art. They are valuing it based on how you say you made it. They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today, especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.

3/4 pf all code written now is auto-complete. Code was never the hard part.

> Spore is well acclaimed

And yet it also effectively ended Will Wright's career. Rave press reviews are not a good indicator of anything, really.

localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing

Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.

>No one cares about how the code is written.

People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop code for their game.

They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.

At least to some extent, the anti-ai folks don't care about ai assisted programming because they see programmers as the "techbro" boogieman pushing ai into their lives, not fellow creatives who are also at a crossroads.

> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.

People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one.

> Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever.

Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time.

As I see it, it's all a matter of how well it's executed. In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work (in the same way that e.g. renaissance artists didn't make every single brushstroke of their masterpieces themselves).

In the worst (or maybe even average? time will tell) case, there are only minimal human-made artistic decisions flowing into a work and the output is a mediocre average of everything that's already been done before, which is then rightfully perceived as slop.