AI as a technology at its core is fine, what is at issue here is the unnecessary scaling up of AI. There were great strides being made in making models as small and efficient as possible before OpenAI fucked up the entire market by becoming a for-profit company. They literally can’t scale the models much further no matter how much data and compute they throw at them nowadays, and the money faucet still hasn’t been turned off to disastrous consequences.

My issue is that people jumped to harrassing these people before they knew that and then used that newfound knowledge to justify said harrassment.

You can be in a non-monogamous marriage. Quite common, actually.

Dumb and annoying is worse.

I mean, some of the most experienced and successful devs in the world are telling you (some random guy) these things bluntly in the article, and you are proving their point for them by acting how you’re acting.

Congrats on being a sentient stereotype with a keyboard and access to the internet, I guess?

AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. Every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told by everyone to keep their game scope small. Not saying these kinds of games shouldn’t improve, but it’s not as trivial as it might appearr.

gamedev be like

Relevant.

I agree with you, but I’d also like to add the caveat that even with commonly-used engines shit can still be incredibly complex.

UI is incredibly complex under the hood. Cryengine is also difficult to work in. There are tons of reasons games with distinct outstanding features don’t switch engines, though, and it’s usually due to the specific features said engine provides, no matter how difficult it becomes to work with as a legacy system over the years.

You say that, but…

Yeah, you’re probably right, the video game you personally made is probably better and we’re just lazy. BTW I demand 20 hours of brand-new content to be released next week, and it better be cutting-edge, uniquely interesting and creative, bug-free and $4.99, or else you’re a lazy dev, too.

It’s genuinely funny watching these people learn absolutely nothing when slapped in the face with hard facts.

Gamer who doesn’t understand how gamedev works gets mad at guy telling them they don’t get how gamedev works, demanding their treats get here, right now anyway after being told it actually takes a bit to make. News at 11.

Correct. Once again, Gamers take developers for granted because something LOOKS like it’s simple, but it rarely ever is. It’s hella frustrating to deal with this every day as a dev, but I guess that’s what you sign up for in this line of work.

No.

AAA dev here; it’s not that. It’s that attempting to standardize development in a highly fluid and innovative sector can kill your competitiveness as a studio if you’re not careful. That being said, unionization is also desperately needed. Blizzard recently unionized across their while studio, which is probably the best model out there right now; allow companies of a certain scale to unionize so that positive and competitive aspects of company culture/organizational structure can be maintained/improved while ensuring worker’s rights against exploitation from the top-down and abused of shareholders/management. Games, and by extension their studios, are intended to be things greater than the sum of their parts, and this is reflected by each company’s unique internal culture; every studio operates differently, and this is directly reflected in the games they end up putting out (OG Valve is a great example). How many big studios have you seen shed a sizeable amount of senior devs, after which they no longer seem to be able to make the same quality games as before? Happens all the time, and this is why; the internal culture and proprietary knowledge-base has had a paradigm shift wherein a lot of the studio’s previous identity has been lost. That’s the magic of gamedev studio culture and the people that create it, and that needs to be protected while also upholding workers’ rights simultaneously. The best way to do that is to allow all members of said culture to create their own rules of union governance from within, not necessarily to have standards that maybe disrupt said culture from without. This is obviously a generalization, as you could additionally have a looser external unionization framework protecting and binding/collectively bargaining on behalf of gamedevs as a class of worker; there is more than one way to skin the cat here. Obviously there’s a “who watches the watchmen” situation that arises here, so this needs to be done in accordance with reforms in worker advocacy laws holistically, because I don’t even need remind anybody of the deluge of “toxic company culture” Kotaku exposés over the years; we certainly need an external and legal framework to push back against that. It’s a tough nut to crack, and it’s why things seem to be moving so slowly. We’re pushing a boulder up a massive hill here while fighting bad actors and neoliberal capitalism at the same time.

Yep.

Just checked and the mods removed all my comments in that convo, but left the other guy’s up, despite me providing objective evidence and research (from Harvard, no less). The annoying social media circlejerk from resentful losers is so real.

AAA gamedev here. Had a guy scream at me on here on a different account for several days straight last week that “AI will eventually take your job, too, just wait and see” after I told the guy “all you have to do as an artist is make better quality work than AI slop can produce, which is easy for most professionals; AI is still useful in production pipelines to speed up efficiency, but it will never replace human intuition because it can’t actually reason and doesn’t have feelings, which is all art is and is what programming requires”.

Got told that I was a naive and bad person with survivorship bias and hubris who doesn’t understand the plight of artists and will eventually also be replaced, as if I’m not a technical artist myself and don’t work with plenty of other artistic and technical disciplines every single day. Like, okay, dude. I guess nearly a decade of senior-level experience means nothing. I swear, my team had tried and tossed away anywhere from 5 to 10 potential “cutting-edge AI production tools” before the general public had even heard about ChatGPT because most of them have such strict limited use-cases that they aren’t practically applicable to most things, but the guy was convinced that we had to boycott and destroy all AI tools because every artist was gonna be out of a job soon. Lol. Lmao, even.

This is the correct answer.

https://youtu.be/_2C2CNmK7dQ

And then you get hired back 6 months later for more pay after they realize how badly they fucked up.