AI generated content has a lot of unanswered legal questions around it which can lead to a lot of headache with moderation and possibility of illegal content showing up (remember that not only “well meaning” devs will use these tools). It’s seems reasonable for a company to try minimize the risk.
There were never any unanswered legal questions would prevent you from being able to use generated assets in a game. That’s why Valve’s old stance was so odd. I’m not sure what you mean by the possibility for illegal content, can you elaborate?
Pretty cool. I almost had to start liking Epic Store for not having such a dumb stance. The disclaimer on games using generative content is weird, but it’s a solid step forward.
The rest of the soundtrack is great too, It was my favorite gacha I played, probably because it was the least exploitative gacha I’ve ever played. Sadly, it wasn’t doing too well and shut down in 2020 as development for Final Fantasy VII Remake was ramping up, and they need all hands on deck in Business Division 1.
It’s wild, but these days this is adventurous, even for Sqaure-Enix. The trend with their AAA games has been not turn based RPG for more than a decade. More big companies might decide to release more modest size games that play to their heritage and strengths.
Some people consider releasing new RPG IPs pitching your money right in the trash. That’s pretty adventurous to me. Even if it doesn’t cause a drastic branching out, more companies dipping their toes might make quite the ripple.
I was never arguing that it would be effortless, but easier. I also feel like the marketing budgets are kind of beside the point here of development costs, but hey, generative AI might help with that too.
Even your examples of it being done different are still the highest profile releases from that company, not some quirky novel idea. They were betting big on FFXV when they released that, and they are doing this for FFVII these times.
I don’t know, they also released Diofield Chronicle, Triangle Tactics, and Octopath Traveler were smaller budget games with no pre-existing IP that were also pretty experimental. What they make may not be your “psychological surreal point-and-click adventure game”, but it might be something just as adventurous.
I never meant small in terms of profits, I only ever meant in terms of development resources, that’s what generative AI will impact. The most humble games can become huge hits, see: Stardew Valley. With a better cost proposition, we might just see those psychological surreal point-and-click adventure games.
Also do mind that Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition isn’t a gacha, it’s a scaled down port of the game of the same name that’s divided into ten chapters; the first one’s free, but the other nine will cost you. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis, a free-to-play port of Final Fantasy VII too will be episodic, but it will have a gacha for weapons and costumes.
Did you know that mobile freemium games already surpassed console games in revenue? Sure they may be cheaper to produce, but they are not niche or low in Return of Investment, much the opposite. This does not even vaguely correlate with a total indie market takeover.
You’re moving the goalposts here, your original comment asserted that large companies only bet on larger and larger games, and when you have this many mobile games out at once, a lot of them are going to be pretty niche. Currently, gacha is the go-to for small development for large companies, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for lower costs to lead to more traditional games to me.
However many examples you may pick, it still doesn’t make the tech able to make works exactly as the user envisions, and it isn’t based on their own internalized inspirations and personality the same way. If anything, using established popular characters and styles as an example indicates that you aren’t quite grasping what I’m getting at, about the unique characteristics that each artist puts in their work, sometimes even unwittingly. I don’t doubt that AI could perfectly make infinite Mickeys. This isn’t about making more Mickeys. So to speak, it’s about making less Mickeys and more of something entirely new. If you tell me what you want to see, I can probably find it.
I’m not sure what you believe generative tools are supposed to do. This is just one tool in a chest of many, it isn’t going to pop out fully finished work. You need to work with what you make. It also isn’t a requirement to use established characters, I picked things with distinctive characteristics, the characters are just a touchstone for people to evaluate how well those characteristics are transferred. This can work just as well for anyone, I’ve seen people fine tune with just nine images.
I’m not usually this radical, but putting it bluntly, either AI or Capitalism has to go. If not like this, I wouldn’t see any issue with this easier way to get some form of guided aid for artistic expression, leaving aside its limitations and the matter of scraping for a moment. Both of them together, we’ll see artists and game developers driven out of their industries, not to mention all the other artistic, customer service and intelectual jobs that will soon be replaced to optimize profits for executives and investors. None of this would be a concern if everyone could just work on their passion projects and have a guaranteed livelihood, but that’s not how it works as it is.
This is pure speculation, and a very iffy one at that. Large game companies keep betting on larger and larger projects, distancing themselves from niche genres. It’s a huge leap to go from “maybe they will try to make smaller games with AI”, which is already speculation, to “indie devs won’t be able to survive if they don’t use AI too”.
Square Enix, one of the biggest game publishers in the world, has several divisions that make gacha games for mobile platforms. These games are very profitable, and almost every one of them is developed in house. These games don’t compete with or replace their AAA games, and they keep on making them, so it must be good enough. It’s almost a requirement for there to be a mobile game of the latest Square-Enix game.
The tablet can be a neutral medium, an AI is trying to condense the outwardly obvious stylistic choices of countless other artists, without an understanding of the underlying ideas that guided them, while you are trying to wrestle something somewhat close to your vision out of it. I suppose that’s like being a director, but it inherently means the result less personal. What decided the shapes and colors? What decided the wording and tone? Who can say.
I’d say today there are easy enough tools that getting started is fairly easy, but there’s some merit to that. Still… that bumps with the uncomfortable possibility that if AI is widely adopted, there will be less game developer and artist jobs available. Sure, more people could get their start, but could they actually get any further than that?
That I can’t say, but I hate that this tool with boundless potential to revolutionize the way we communicate, inspire, create, and connect with each other out of the gate has people attacking it with saws trying to get it to fit into the curtain rod shaped box of capitalism. It’s a sorry state. Maybe more people will follow cottage creators with a vision they find appealing, like on OnlyFans and Patreon? We’re social creatures, we like having shared experiences in that way. Hell, maybe collaborative projects like SCP in the future.
There was never anything stopping them from doing that without AI. They don’t do it because their executives and investors want the large Return on Investment that they can only get with big blockbusters. They don’t care to take over the indie scene because it’s often focused on titles that are niche and risky.
There’s a possibility the profit margins could just get that juicy. You could have a skeleton crew work on a game for a shorter amount of time and get it out there making money.
Really, I’m not entirely opposed to AI but the mindset here is definitely one I cannot gel with, one that making more, larger, faster art is more worthwhile than making it yourself. Even if AI could make whole characters and settings in someone’s style, the people working on it often want to make it themselves. An AI can’t condense all your inspirations and personality and the meaning you would put into a work for you. AI does not even truly understand what it does, it’s only providing a statistics-based output. Even the best, most complex, most truly intelligent AI imaginable is not replacement for an artist, because it isn’t that artist.
AI can’t create anything itself, it’s a tool to help artists create explore, expedite, and improve. An AI can’t condense all of your inspirations and personality and meaning in the same way a drawing tablet can’t. It’s all in how you use it. You can infuse it with your learned experiences at training, guidance, inference, and post-processing to make it more closely adhere to your statistics.
Ultimately AI still seems to serve better to expansive games that need to be filled with a lot of content than small works of passion.
We’ve been talking about indie game devs this whole time, but we haven’t even touched on amateur games devs. For small scale, I think this is where we’ll see the biggest impact. People with fewer or no skills might get the helping hand they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and get started.