As a CEO you can decide whether to piss off on what your potential consumers demand and don't. Obviously, there's a reason why the EGS is in the shitty place it is and Steam isn't. EGS focuses on developers and publishers even when it means pissing on consumers. Steam might have spearled modern DRM "subscription"-based marketplaces, but they've also continued to cater to consumer demands even when it opposed their interests and they could have chosen to ignore them anyway.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
324 points (96.3% liked)
PC Gaming
12758 readers
1367 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'd argue that it was always in their interest to listen to their customers
Depends on how it's used.
Right now it's used to replace skilled workers, be them artists, actors, or programmers.
I can certainly think of a few good uses for AI in games, but to a Corpo CEO "good use" = wider profit margins at the cost of humanity. And so we need to be informed about such things when we spend money on something that is by all rights an artform.
The problem is that the very capabilities that let a game have "way more of something than it could otherwise have" (say, thousands of unique voices reading context-specific runtime generated text) can be used to reduce the need for workers (so one can just pretty much generate all speech in game by paying a bunch of random people of the street for to come over and read text for 1h and then just clone their voices and used that to generate all in-game speech - the quality way less than pre-prepared lines read by a trained voice actor, but the cost will be a tiny fraction of it).
AI can helps us do things which in practice would otherwise be impossible but many (maybe most) companies are just using it to cut manpower costs even though it delivers inferior results than than trained professionals.
And they'll become cheaper as they undoubtedly sack their talent, right?
I think if I buy a game under the pretext of it being entirely "man-made", in 2026. If it then turns out to have been partially AI produced in 2030, I should have the right to earn a refund, even if I 100% it.
Epic fail
Sweeney is not very smart, is he?
I like AI, and see no issue with disclosing how it is applied. People who are pro-AI would like to further hone their craft, by understanding what workflows and issues are involved. Anti-AI folk can simply avoid what they dislike. Either way, it is win-win.
The main problem I have besides the ethics is that people keep trying to pass off substandard art as non-ai when it still just looks worse.
Well that's probably true
I think it's a case of literal AI-generated assets vs AI assistants used in the process of work.
Except Steam doesn't really enforce any rules around these disclosures. E.g arc raiders having AI voicelines, and their disclosure being something like "we use some AI during development"
Entirely off topic: you can block dataharvesting to the epic store from your hosts file.
Yes but we all know that Tim is a bit of an idiot.
We've all seen AI made games, they are awful. Terrible optimisation (often not optimised at all), programming mistakes that first year junior wouldn't make, glitchy looking art and basic gameplay because AI cannot be original.
Yeah I'm sure they're really going to take off.
Preach!!!
I think I agree. At some point it won't make any difference because it will just be another tool. We can have our knee jerk reactions for now, though. Especially for people like lemmy users.