The glory days of Epic Games are long gone and Tim Sweeney is a god damn moron.
Sweeney has Steam living rent free in his head. Whining about Monopoly
Meanwhile, Epic Games already has something resembling a monopoly with the unreal engine, its buggy and resource hungry as fuck, and just seems to be getting worse. Necessitating an arms race of computer upgrades just to run the newest games on their obtuse engine thats being used for everything now. Epic certainly isnt doing anything about it. Its just a money printer for Tim’s legal battles.
Sigh.
I swear, Epic would probably have a decent reputation (and storefront) if Sweeney would just shut his trap and delete all his social media.
If that actually happens and the label becomes redundant, then we can talk about removing it.
Or better, inverting it to a “No AI” label for the people like me who will still care.
Tech bros always act like this : they don’t want to actually win by making a good solution. Instead they try to make you feel like their solution is inevitable and they have already won…
For a group of people who claim to be all about meritocracy and the “marketplace of ideas”, they sure like to short circuit those whenever possible…
If the developer puts shampoo in the game box, I’d probably want to know that before opening it.
This sounds like “If we let men marry men, what’s next? Men marrying goats?”
It does make sense, because I’ll boycott nearly all future productions.
Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself
He’s right though it’s not a very useful label in general. The AI process is unavoidable as you can use it as a coop tool or inspiration or thousand different ways where AI is not a direct generator.
Personal anecdote: I do quite a bit of visual design these days and always start with some ai prompt to give me some inspiration as subjects I work with are highly corporate and unheard to me. The final product is made by me in Inkscape with some parts being manual traces of AI generated images but it would be dienginous to say that I didn’t use AI here and silly to say that it some “mindless slop”.
Your anecdote isn’t as against expectations as you seem to think. People just also think that what you’re doing is grody.
If you traced a design you found from a Google result, people would object to you saying it was “your” creation. In the ai case, it just also isn’t anyone else’s.
People used to do your job by learning a bit about what they were designing and applying some creativity. You’re quite literally describing the AI enabling you to be less informed and creative as a creative worker.
No one much cares when the button layout for an accounting firms CRM is rote, but people do care when they hear that the designers for the game they’re playing kinda phoned in the art design and it’s significantly a mathematical approximation of other designs.
Fuck that. I’ll delete my Epic account
Funny he thinks that, I think that Tim Sweeny should stfu.
Epic is on track to becoming a google play store
He’s right IMHO.
You can make hundreds of AI slop games in the time you can make one game that is a creative work of art.
It would be waaay easier to police 100 games with a “No AI” label, than making sure 10000 slop games have a “Made by AI” label.
Maybe you think something like “but the ratio SHOULD be the other way around”, but to that you honestly have to deal with the answer “should could woulda”.
That’s not his argument, tho. He’s saying all games will be using the slop machine. And hopefully he’s wrong, but if not, there’s plenty of already-made games to go through.
If Sweeney can read this, I just want to tell him something. As someone who made games with ZZT as a kid and thought it was the best thing ever, you need to understand that no AI could make something like that, even if as a kid using copied and ‘inspired’ code from other games (and learned how to hexedit out the protections from other ZZT worlds so I can see how they worked) the cycle of just working through a rudimentary coding language was the reward in and of it self even if I never did finish the game I had in mind.
BTW, that game just involved an adventurer in a kingdom that is being troubled by… Hitler’s ghost, and your objective was to send his ass back to hell. I found a boss fight in another ZZT world that I thought was too cool not to reuse for that purpose, too. But sadly it was never finished.
That being said, we DO need ‘AI generated’ or ‘AI assisted’ as a tag. There isn’t anything weird or wrong with that. In online art spaces like deviant art you can tag stuff as ‘traditional’ art (meaning done on paper/canvas with whatever media you used, like pencils, various paints, etc) or digital or a combination thereof, like a hand drawn sketch that was completed and colored with photoshop. Why the fuck would anyone be against telling people what tools were used?
Sounds like Epic needs to try to make a online game store to compete with Steam, but filled with AI slopware.
I like how he’s basically admitting that it’s a negative that would hurt the game sales. Because consumers don’t want it.
Man… the future is going to be BLEAK.
Are you kidding? I might actually stop buying new games and make it through my backlog now! This is great!
