Interesting read, but this sort of framing is so common and self-deluding-
> At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.”
What a laughable, ridiculous non-sequitur (the casual, slop correlation between AI and the quality problem), and you see this same hilariously broken logic here on HN all the time, where people imagine some pre-AI era of only goodness and greatness.
Steam was absolutely swamped with low quality garbage long before AI tools. You could as easily, if not more accurately, blame more accessible game development tools like Unity for broadening the ability of people to get into game development. Steam was more curated in earlier years, as well, and the move to basically letting anyone publish on it flooded the space.
It's so astonishingly lazy for so many to use AI as their boogeyman for everything now (ironically...the AI is to blame rhetoric is such low effort slop). The world was filled with low-skill, low-effort, low-value garbage and dreck before AI.
And FWIW, in many ways it's an ideal market being flooded for every wild niche or need. If your game is good do a bit of advertising and get word of mouth and you're the next Balatro. But people pushing weak offerings hoped limited choice and a captive audience would be their win.
If someone makes a machine that produces CO2 in great quantities, I dont think pointing out that people have been exhaling for millennia is a reason to accept the machine.
A more apt analogy is trying to pin global warming on e-scooters. I mean, look at all the e-scooters. And man, they sure are annoying, and e-scooters also use electricity which is sometimes created by non-renewables, ergo ipso facto sum.
Using an AI disclosure count as an indication of anything is already laughably stupid, but just hand waving it as meaningful is basically playing on the stupidity of the audience, and look, it works on some...
> At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.”
What a laughable, ridiculous non-sequitur (the casual, slop correlation between AI and the quality problem), and you see this same hilariously broken logic here on HN all the time, where people imagine some pre-AI era of only goodness and greatness.
Steam was absolutely swamped with low quality garbage long before AI tools. You could as easily, if not more accurately, blame more accessible game development tools like Unity for broadening the ability of people to get into game development. Steam was more curated in earlier years, as well, and the move to basically letting anyone publish on it flooded the space.
It's so astonishingly lazy for so many to use AI as their boogeyman for everything now (ironically...the AI is to blame rhetoric is such low effort slop). The world was filled with low-skill, low-effort, low-value garbage and dreck before AI.
And FWIW, in many ways it's an ideal market being flooded for every wild niche or need. If your game is good do a bit of advertising and get word of mouth and you're the next Balatro. But people pushing weak offerings hoped limited choice and a captive audience would be their win.