I would never respond to social media drama in their position.
Based
I love how Valve’s strategy is basically just ‘don’t piss off the customers and occasionally do something super fucking cool’, while everyone else in the space seems to be cutting off their nose to spite their face
Valve also gutted their LGBTQIA+ content a few months back. And they have had a MASSIVE nazi infestation basically since they set up message boards because Gabe Newell is infamously libertarian.
So… chill a bit with the glazing. They are better in a lot of ways but they are not our friends.
You are were the game removals are due to MasterCard and Visa right?
At best you can argue that Valve will not protect you. Hence, not your friend.
They also let your children gamble, so that’s cool too
As we all did when we were young playing pokemon, Mario, Mario party, marbles, mighty beans, hot wheels, etc
Yeah but it feels a little more scummy when it’s Visa, Mastercard and American Express
I don’t remember playing with real money doing any of that or international crime and extortion rings developing around them.
Benefits of not beinp publicly traded.
Exactly, just what I wanted to say
don’t piss off the customers
Unless it’s their UI, they love to do pointless changes nowadays. On top of the stuff mentioned by other replies
Epic Games CEO and Fortnite boss Tim Sweeney:
everyone will have to 'fess up to using it eventually as AI will become “involved in nearly all future production.”
Once again Epic games act like the moronic villains they are.
everyone will have to 'fess up to using it eventually as AI will become "involved in nearly all future production.
True enough! No reason not to say it up front, right?
Look y’all, not 1-in-20 people give a flying fuck about AI like we do on here.
It’s sad how huge companies are basically their CEO. CEO makes decisions and talks - that’s the company. Even if the hundreds and thousands of workers below them [largely] disagree and would do differently.
This is especially bad in USA, but usually a bit better in European countries that have representation of the unions on the board.
You can tell most everything you need to know about a company by looking at the CEO. That’s because they’re the leader, they set the tone, contrary to lemmy beliefs. Happy or unhappy employees? Look to the CEO. Solid earnings, year after year after year? CEO. I ask at every interview, “What’s the CEO like?” BUT…
A) Ultimately, CEOs do what the fucking board of directors wants, or they get fired, hence, the golden parachute. Would you take a monster job knowing that you could be forced to fuck your industry reputation and not hedge that bet? Nah. Force me to do something stupid yet needful? I want paid when you fire me on purpose for doing what you said.
B) I think you are in an echo chamber around here. Most CEOs are great folks, you only hear about the major fuck ups at the major companies. Also, the decisions the big dogs make that lemmy tells you are unpopular, really aren’t unpopular in the wider world. EA Games still exists after all.
“Calls.”
There’s only one call, and it’s coming from Tim Sweeny at Epic. It’s just more of his usual yelling at clouds, because he’s got a pathological hate-on for anyone else who runs a storefont, including Apple and Google but especially Valve. He hasn’t made any positive contribution to the world since about 1998, and at this point we can all safely discard his opinion with nothing of value being lost. He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform because he thinks it’ll make him free money, but maybe he ought to worry about the smell coming from his own house before he goes around trying to dictate at others how they should run theirs.
He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform
Don’t forget the
blatant scams calledcrypto games! He proudly announced Epic Games Store would happily sell games centered around NFTs and crypto after Valve said they wouldn’t allow it.It’s so unfunny that the only one to contest Valve on PC monopoly is Tim Fortnite, who seemingly does the worst job everywhere yet still can still afford it. It’s almost like Gaben himself created a perfect villain for his company, so it’d never be criticized.
Gog (and to an extent, itch) are also competing with steam but while they might not be coming close to their market share they don’t draw anywhere near the ire that epic does and just similarly just rely on their strengths.
Your comment just made me realize I did a kind of GOG holiday sale shopping spree this year after having not done a steam holiday sale purchase in like a decade.
And the majority of it was having cheap easy drm-free access to some very good and very old games. Like yeah I know I have my ISO of the TIE Fighter collector’s cd-rom somewhere around here, but if I can permanently have legit drm-free access to all versions of the game for just a few dollars, then supporting the business enabling that is a no brainer.
Yeah. GoG and Humble (as well as many MUCH smaller stores) have very much criticized the de facto Valve monopoly over the years (… decades?). As have many devs who have criticized just how much of a percentage Valve takes (and how they reduce that for the big games). They just generally are smart enough to say it VERY obliquely because they know they don’t want to antagonize a rabid userbase.
Epic… Epic increasingly are poised to “not need” PC gamers as it were. Fortnite is its own platform and Unreal Engine is increasingly used by film and industry. So they are much more willing to criticize Valve (and only occasionally remember EGS is sort of a thing…) which… tends to highlight why nobody else does.
It’s literally a plagiarism machine, so I completely agree with them.
I want to know if AI was used or not to make a game; it’s a deciding factor for me, as I will not buy anything built with AI. No matter if it’s a placeholder or not, as “AI” is an ethical and environmental concern for me, every prompt, and usage makes things worse. For me, I don’t want to send a message that using “AI” is okay for a dev studio by buying the product. I’ll exclude them my purchasing choices to send the right message.
I want to know if AI was used or not to make a game; it’s a deciding factor for me, as I will not buy anything built with AI. No matter if it’s a placeholder or not
Same. Once they dipped into the convenience, I can’t believe they wouldn’t use it again when they’re in a rush, crunching, etc.
I don’t even touch games with AI-generated store assets, they just feel so cringeworthy. If you can’t afford an artist, just use assets from the game ffs.
I’m pretty on-record as being resistant to LLMs, but I’m OK wiþ asset generation. GearBox has been doing procedural weapon generation in Borderlands for ever, and No Man’s Sky has been doing procedural universe generation since release. In boþ cases, artists have been involved in core asset component creation, but procedural game content generation has been a þing for years, and getting LLMs involved is a very small incremental step. I suppose þere must be a line; textures must be human created, not generated from countless oþer preceding textures, but - again - game artists have been buying and using asset libraries forever.
Yeah. Þere’s a line in þere, somewhere. LLM model builders aren’t paying for þe libraries þey’re learning from, unlike game artists. But games have been teetering on generated assets and environments for a long time; it’s a much more gray area þan, say, voice actors. If an asset/environment engine was e.g. trained entirely on scans of real-life objects, like þe multitude of handguns and rifles, and used to generate in-game weapons, þe objection would be reduced to one you could level at games like NMS: instead of paying humans to manually generate þe nearly infinite worlds, þey’ve been using code which is wiþin spitting distance of a deep learning algorithm. And nobody’s complained about it until now.
You and I are 1-in-50 purchasers, if that. Nobody gives a shit if AI is in the game.
Go grab a random dude on the street,
“Hey! Just one question? If you’re considering buying a video game, is the fact they used AI in making it a deal breaker?”
Nobody cares. I’m with ya. Don’t fucking buy it, I won’t. But enough other people will that it won’t make a difference.
That needs just two words:
Thank you.
Slopification
LOL This is gonna catch on. I’ve seen things that this describes.
It is a fools errand and I do not understand why the smart people at Valve do not understand this. First…it relies on the developer to add the tag. Second the developer may not even know an asset they bought used AI in its creation. Most AI researchers agree that it will become near impossible to determine if an asset was generated with AI, and even using AI to detect will just mean when it does detect, it now knows how to create one that cannot be detected and we end up in a cat and mouse race that humans have no ability to play in.
We already have tools to rank titles and if it is AI slop, a low effort copycat game, the ratings will reflect this regardless of the tech that may or may not have been used.
I would hazard to guess that are countless titles that used some AI in its development, perhaps unbeknownst to the developer. Plus, what if a developer made everything from scratch themselves but used AI on one texture to upscale it…does this get an AI label even though it amounts to something like 0.00001% do the title? AI labels are a fools errand and we all need to just rely on the rating system and judge titles on their merits not the tools that made them as like I said, it will become into know AI was used.
We already have tools to rank titles and if it is AI slop, a low effort copycat game, the ratings will reflect this regardless of the tech that may or may not have been used.
It is not enough for me. I want to know if AI was involved so that I can avoid it even if it is good.
A game could be good and yet contain media created with AI generation - high rating + AI tag covers that case.
Most AI use will be slop, but as you say some could be an accident. How the dev responds to users finding out will inform users how to rate the dev team themselves.
Gabe wins the internet once again.
Wasn’t Gabe, but it was an artist for Valve.
A king’s victory is won by his soldiers
(/j they’re not monolithic or synonymous)
A smart consumer will pick the cheapest one that does the job at the best quality.
There is no such thing as ethical capitalism and fuck loyalty to brand trademarks.
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Cool.
Maybe they can also stop forcing updates that break my game, too?
Fortunately, GOG exists. Which proves that Steam doesn’t need to force the updates on us, but chooses to.
If your games are breaking on update, isn’t that the game devs’ faults?
It varies.
There are definitely cases where the latest update outright breaks the game and that is bad QC.
But what people generally refer to here are games with a modding scene. A vocal part of the userbase rely heavily on mods and/or custom DLLs. So when the game updates, all of those break until the modders and tool writers are able to catch up.
There are a lot of implications to this for games with (meaningful) online components. But for predominantly SP games? It is a fun time when you sit down to play a game in the evening and see it was updated and know you can’t go back to that save/game for at least a few days. And there very much SHOULD be a way to opt out or freeze a version for those.
Devs are able to include the ability to run past versions of the game. If they push an update that breaks mods without doing that, I feel like thats their own fault.
Also, even if the dev doesnt do this, there are ways to download previous versions of the game using the steam console.
