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Mike Rose, founder of indie publisher No More Robots, which is perhaps best known for the likes of Yes, Your Grace and Descenders, likens the spread of generative AI use in games to the opening of Pandora's box. Simply put, we ain't getting the lid back on the box.
"From a publisher perspective specifically, it's mega annoying," Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse. "If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it's just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!" Publishing lead John Buckley of Palworld developer Pocketpair called out the same AI trend in the latest Steam Next Fest.
Steam, as a focal point for the more open PC gaming market, is the clearest barometer for the rising quantity of games, with over 20,000 releases fighting for space every year. Even with Valve sticking to AI content disclosures for games listed on Steam, the rise of AI tools will only contribute to the torrent of content flooding the platform as games – or at least AI-made things game-shaped enough to be sold – become easier to produce.
AI-generated art is an especially visible, especially sticky sticking point for Rose. "Honestly, don't you think it's just so gross-looking?" he says. "Kinda gives me the ick to look at genAI art. I'd rather not, thanks."
Across the industry, generative AI art has regularly been treated as a black spot on a game's record, even for well-liked games. Crimson Desert rushed to replace AI-generated assets purportedly left in by accident, much like GOTY baron Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did last year. People most certainly can spot gen AI art, and a lot of people don't want to see it in their games at all. Just look at the player and developer backlash to Nvidia's DLSS 5 AI filter. This kind of response suggests that the lid to Pandora's box might at least be closed a little bit.
I've been speaking with dozens of folks around the games industry for an upcoming story on generative AI in games and in game development. One thing I've been asking is how people want to see gen AI be treated in this space. On this point, Rose focuses on "the elephant in the room" here: "It's probably never going away again."
"People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy," he reasons. "I don't even mean that as an insult! We just are. So for a lot of people, if there's a choice between 'spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,' vs 'type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly' – the average person is going to pick the latter.
"And that's the thing really: Our feelings on it don't matter. It doesn't matter that a bunch of us don't like genAI. It's gonna get used now, and it'll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked."
I reached out to Rose following a new episode of his podcast, featuring co-host and indie veteran Rami Ismail and, as a guest, fellow indie veteran Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn. Pope said he's no longer comfortable talking about or showing unreleased games publicly because "it's getting slurped up by AI or people are gonna copy it, or something else like that."
