this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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It's a different story for the more established studios with an existing following and previous titles. Game Oracle found that the use of AI by these studios resulted in a significant 40% to 60% drop in sales.

That's a huge difference. AI stigma seems to hit competent developers with a lot to lose the hardest, and I'm not sure that game studios are ready to accept it.

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[–] DecorativeTarp@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is thoroughly misleading. There’s no apples to apples comparison here, and they’ve instead just found that people are less likely to buy low-effort slop games.

[–] SootySootySoot@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Game Oracle performed a sensitivity analysis to account for unmeasured factors like marketing costs, raw talent, and pure luck.

It was discovered that inexperienced developers with no marketing budget, who likely turned to AI simply because of a lack of other resources, saw hardly any negative impact on sales despite the AI disclosure. These games were almost certainly going to struggle even without the use of AI.

...

It's a different story for the more established studios with an existing following and previous titles. Game Oracle found that the use of AI by these studios resulted in a significant 40% to 60% drop in sales.

Obviously there's no way to objectively measure 'effort' that went into a game. But there is as good an implication as you can get here - that even established studios that are likely to be putting in some comparable amount of 'effort' are selling worse when they utilise AI.

[–] Carl@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

It's interesting to me that the effect seems more pronounced on more established studios. Maybe it's because higher profile games generate larger backlashes, or maybe it's because smaller devs have lower expectations and a more forgiving audience.