Jeffool

Here, have it in video/audio form!

https://youtube.com/shorts/d8gzPyOBKcI

Consensus in the original thread is reasonable, chalking the drop in major game stocks not to the advancement of AI, but to an over-excitement in AI. But then, a lot of people feel that way about AI in a lot of industries. But it's real money and jobs being affected.

This makes sense to me. A hybrid would be nice. Have a calendar or some art while it's "off". But then, that's probably pretty expensive. (Not that I've looked, I'm just assuming.)

Honestly I think people would unironically that as an option.

Gaming is my big issue. But now that my quality gaming time with family has gone from Warzone to ARC Raiders, it's a far less daunting concern. I'll probably wait and see if DMZ 2 supports Linux, which sadly I doubt, and if that game will cost

I completely agree that huge teams aren't needed. That said I think at least some of that is exactly because smaller studios full of expert talent were getting funded for several years, because those big studios weren't making the games developers wanted to make. And those devs understood that "fun" wasn't the same as "top of the line presentation".

ARC Raiders' Embark Studios has a lot of people from DICE. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Sandfall Interactive has a lot of people from Ubisoft. Even Dispatch's Ad Hoc is a lot of Telltale people (at least some of them by way of Ubisoft.) They knew a lot about their process, but their big companies weren't making the games they were interested in. So they got funding elsewhere (and famously Ad Hpc's funding dried up mid-development.)

I'm curious about Wikipedia's sourcing here. Granted there's the Balatros and Stardew Valleys of the world, and Helldivers did well. But do smaller games really make up half? Year after year the big ones are usually COD, two big sports game, a Nintendo game, another big fps, a big action game, and a few others.

Again I agree with you when it comes to good games. But man, those big ones are huge sellers. I just wish we had clear insight into sales. But that's been a thing for a long time now.

Investment money is not as plentiful as it was several years ago. I've heard it in several interviews with developers or devs themselves. (Game Maker's Notebook, Mike and Rami are Still Here, and a few devs on YouTube come to mind.)

That they're curtailing gamedev in lieu of putting more weight on Luna is wild to me. Does anyone use Luna?

I may be wrong as I don't really play the genre, but I think Marvel Rivals is kinda the king of the hero shooter genre right now.

But that said I generally do agree that "another live service game that doesn't clear a very high bar" is the issue. The recent success of ARC Raiders despite social media telling me people "don't want extraction shooters and to give it up" really drives home the point of "if it's good enough... It'll probably do well."

(And I realize those two are third person games, so not "first person shooters", but I'd still consider them competition for them.)

And with the economy the way it is, yeah, money matters a lot more. People are more likely to dedicate their time to one big game, and sometimes a couple of smaller ones. It makes things an "all or nothing" proposition. And most games don't look like "all".

AI in games (using code for entities to make non-player decisions) is about being good enough, cheap enough. It's just like how games determine their physics. The existence of large scale "black box" AI like OpenAI does not reflect what's good or cheap. It can't play chess. You think it's going to understand The Sims and make reasonable choices in that system?

They've already created well tuned system to give your Sims in obtaining their needs. It leads to you having to manage the chaos, and that's what the fun is. To better hone that is to have the AI play the game for you. And even that, if efficiency of play is the goal, is better done by TASbot and machine learning.

That generic black box style of AI like popular LLMS is like creating a hammer. Now everyone is treating every problem like nails. AI decisions making in games is like washing windows; don't use a hammer.

The problem is that "AI" is a poorly defined, very vague, and widely used term. Most people here have assumed you meant LLMs because everyone pitches those as ways to solve everything. "Oh, irer up an agent, give it instructions, and let it make requests that are context dependent". Then, like everyone says here, that usually turns into people testing boundaries and breaking your game. So that makes it both "not good enough" and "not cheap enough".

Now, look at AI with the term "machine learning" in mind and it's different. Games like ARC Raiders use machine learning to teach NPCs movement behavior, and to train AI voices like Siri so they can't add things without further paying people. They think that up-front investment is worthwhile. But those are both far cries from "uploading it to Claude or ChatGPT and see what happens". Especially when you would have to teach that black box AI your system anyway, for it to use it. And you're already doing that with current "good enough, cheap enough" bespoke methods, for much cheaper, and they're good enough.

Yeah it’s become less believable as time has gone on, but it’s still a fun ride.

Yeah, at this point I'm so locked in, I'm willing to go along for whatever shenanigans they're up to.

Wait, what part of it feels like AI?