Multiple genres of games are about doing mass killings for fun.
You know that bit when you get bored playing some open world game, go around killing everyone, then reload? Postal is That: The Game. Just without the reloading.
the developers write that “our studio was mistakenly accused of using AI-generated art in our games, and every attempt to clarify our work only escalated the situation”. They say they’ve received a lot of insults and threats as a consequence.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that many AAA games out over the past 2 years had AI generated elements. Though finding these is not plausible. Telling about separate grass or tile textures if they are AI generated or taken from the asset store, or god forgive Ai generated assets taken from the asset store is basically impossible.
Alternatively imagine if an artist draws a concept art of an in game item & then uses image generation for creating the actual game assets. How will anyone find out?
I sincerely hope that Grand theft Auto 6 ships and people find generative AI elements in it. I hope it’s one of those games that’s so Blockbuster it tells you you’re going to either eat your morals or you’re not going to get that thing you want.
Just to clarify a little bit (I was a little confused myself):
Postal was developed by the studio Goonswarm. The publisher Running With Scissors cancelled their games release because of the AI claims, and in response the developers have closed their studio, probably due to the financial strain of having your game completely cancelled by your publisher.
“After revealing POSTAL: Bullet Paradise, a title Running With Scissors was planning on publishing but not developing, we’ve been overwhelmed with negative responses from our concerned POSTAL Community,” reads a statement from Running With Scissors founder Vince Desi, emailed to RPS this afternoon. "The strong feedback from them is that elements of the game are very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.
“We’ve always been, and will always be, transparent with our community,” Desi continues. "Our trust in the development team is broken; therefore, we’ve killed the project. We have a lot of good things coming (some you know and some you don’t).
“Since forming Running With Scissors in 1996, we’ve always said that our fans are part of the team,” it concludes. “Our priority is to always do right by the millions who support the POSTAL franchise. We are grateful for the opportunity to make the games we want to play, and will continue to focus on our new projects and updates coming in 2026 and beyond. We can’t wait to share more!”
Postal: Bullet Paradise was once “a timeline-hopping, dystopian bullet heaven first-person shooter with POSTAL’s signature darkly humorous personality”. The project is “no longer available” on Steam, though it still has a page as of writing.
Desi’s statement doesn’t mention which elements of the game may have been AI-generated, or whether they’ve taken any steps to confirm this with Goonswarm.
It seems like the publisher hasn’t done much to work with the devs, finding the true story instead of reacting to knee-jerk public opinions, and has just pulled the rug out from under them to protect themselves instead.
The devs have adamantly insisted there is no AI in their work; and if true, this really really sucks.
This really comes off as a knee-jerk reaction by RWS. I get they’ve been burned in the past by shit like Postal 3, and Postal is about all they have, but this should have been handled much better.
Delay things, verify there is no generative AI used, at worst replace assets that are deemed questionable.
RWS saying they “don’t trust the developers” anymore is a bizarre thing to talk about in public so quickly.
If I were a part of the development team I’d be thinking “ok, don’t ever work with a company with a name like ‘running with scissors’ ever again,” they don’t make good decisions.
Even in that case, they were quick to cut ties and not mention it to the public in the announcement, which doesn’t make them look any better.
I say this as a long time Postal fan girl, I can ever get a slight kick out of 3 as terrible as it is. Either way, RWS doesn’t look good right now. They were either aware of generative AI being used and refused to declare it, or they decided a bit of public backlash was worth tanking a studio over without verification.
they could also have not liked the way that the project was going and just used this as an excuse to fire the developer. not defending RWS, as it looks pretty shitty with the little context that we have
I’m not defending Valve here they need to have more values, but realistically this game was never going to be available for sale in Russia. No matter what they did.
I strongly disagree, the Workers & Resource DLC link can provide some insights on this; russian language reviews talk about “getting salo for the Ukrainians” and whataboutism about Palestine (like they care about Palestine, if anything most russians tend to support Israel). There is lots of anti-Ukrainian, pro-invasion russian language commentary on Steam.
We’ve lived in russia as an expat family for many years, we left as soon as our finances allowed us to (this was was before the russians invaded Georgia in 2008).
Then there is broader research on russian support for the full scale invasion; even using demographic splits (e.g. people aged 18 to 24, highly educated russians, high income russians), all demographic segments show at least majority support for the full scale invasion (with almost all segment groups showing at strong majority support and very commonly overwhelming majority support).
With respect to arguments that “people are afraid to show their true views”; there are multiple research pieces that specifically account for preference falsification. Some russians do hide their preferences, but this group is so small that even with preference falsification adjustments you have a strong majority support (65%+) for the full scale invasion. That’s specifically the full scale invasion (i.e. 2022), with respect to the annexation of Crimea, preference falsification was found to be not statistically significant with the respect to the baseline ~85% support for the annexation of Crimea.
The level of support for the Russian armed forces has not changed significantly since the beginning of the conflict – the majority of respondents (76%) support the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine, including 48% “definitely support” and another 28% “rather support” the action of Russian army. 16% are against.
Research with preference falsification adjustments with respect to support for the full scale invasion:
The vast majority of Russians (86%) consistently support the accession of Crimea to Russia – this indicator has fluctuated slightly since 2014. 9% do not support the accession.
Research with preference falsification adjustments with respect to support for annexation of Crimea:
Using the list-experiment technique, Timothy Frye and others showed that Putin's approval rating after the annexation of Crimea was actually high, at around 80%. In their study, they made a list of famous Russian politicians and had respondents answer how many of these politicians they supported. They then estimated Putin's approval rating by adding the name "Putin" to the list for only one group[*]3 and thus concluded that the high approval ratings after the annexation of Crimea were not very different from the findings of opinion pollsters.
A high level overview of russian support for the invasion of Ukraine (a summary, but with links to relevant research, albeit some sources will be in russian):
Younger people still support the war in high numbers, though their support is lower than that of the older generation: 75–80 percent of people fifty-five and older support the Russian army’s actions in Ukraine, while 61 percent of young respondents in Levada polls share this sentiment.
I understand. This is a forum, so I am not going to add expansive footnotes to my posts, but I am happy to cite the research I have read if asked. FWIW, I have also read counter argument for approaches used by the research I have cited (which I don’t find convincing).
Just pointing out that I am not randomly making stuff up.
Steam always chose the path of least resistance when it comes to dealing with law maker demands even when there were more consumer friendly ways available. This is not surprising at all.
You ask an excellent question, one that I feel you already know the answer to. From my understanding, the term is unfortunately broadly overused for any procedurally generated game, to the point where the original meaning has been lost to time.
Man I wish we had better terminology for this type of game. Roguelike and roguelite give the same energy as “Doom-clone” for every fps in the 90s. Later we called them FPS games. That genre has since been refined into tactical shooters, arcade shooters, milsim, etc. Meanwhile, we’re still stuck calling all games that have randomized runs “rogue-likes”. Being pedantic about the definition doesn’t make this situation better.
Most modern roguelikes tend to only have the first two of these, tho. But those are the 4 main elements of the original game for which the genre derives its own, Rogue.
And Rogue-lites tend to make progression persist after death, at least partially. Such as with the unlockable weapons and things in Hades, while the boons and other abilities are pick ups you only have until death untill you pick them up again the next run.
I don’t really know why they feel they need to Cave to Russian pressure here. They have all the cards. Russia will never ever stop Steam from running in Russia. If they try to cut off Counter-Strike the entire country would collapse immediately. I’m 100% serious that is not sarcasm at all.
I mean, there’s DRM but that hasn’t stopped them ever before…
Do they stand to lose something if they switch? I don’t understand CS:GO economics, maybe there is a sanction-evading money flow via weapon and skin trading on Valve’s servers?
Unlikely? There are 3rd party websites that allow liquidation, but that’s all outside of Valve’s sites. The closest you can get to liquidation officially is buying Valve hardware like a Steam Deck with your store credit, but they don’t ship steam hardware to russia.
I wasn’t saying the exchange for money happens on Valve’s servers, but it’s Valve who oversees everyone’s inventory. You could hack the game and run a third party account server and give yourself all the knives but they would not be recognized by Valve and thus worthless, unless you convince exchanges that your server is trustworthy and has assets behind it.
Ah in terms of the Steam inventory API, it’s completely unregulated. All purchases are steam platform only, but trades between players are unmonitored (with the exception of requiring both sides to authenticate the trade).
The popularity is because they are easy to pick up and put down. If I want to go back to an RPG that I haven’t touched on months I need to try to remember where I was going, what my build was doing, and how to deal with the things I was fighting. If I want to go back to FTL that I haven’t played on years I just start a new run anyways, and all my ship unlocks are there if I want them.
I would argue that a substantial reason for their popularity is also just that devs have fun when developing them.
With most other genres, you’ve seen the story a gazillion times, you’ve done each quest a thousand times etc… It just gets boring to test the game and it becomes really difficult to gauge whether it still is fun to someone who isn’t tired of it.
Meanwhile with roguelikes, the random generation means that each run is fresh and interesting. And if you’re not having fun on your trillionth run, that’s a real indicator that something needs to be added or improved.
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