The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now.
I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tools.
AI assistance is most dangerous (for your competition) when you mostly need it for the scripting and code, and not for the art or direction. You don't need an AI disclosure on steam if you use AI responsibly.
Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.
Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).
The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
Imagine I sell you something and you pay me in cash. The notes look authentic, but I later discover that they are conterfeits. It would be absurd to claim that your successful passing-off deception demonstrates that I don't value money at all.
Whatever the morality involved, it's an unstable norm. There can be good actors who use AI and disclose, and good actors who don't use AI and don't disclose. There are bad actors, however, who will use AI and not disclose. The entire discourse will be flooded with non-disclosers accusing each other of AI use (particularly, the bad actors will accuse everyone else of AI use, to flood the zone with shit), and there will be no way for a consumer to distinguish good from bad. Bad actors will prevail economically.
See e.g. corporate green and rainbow washing, Amazon marketplace, organic food.
I agree that the current culture of disclosure is unstable. Nevertheless, I think that there will still eventually be a mechanism to verify the degree and manner to which AI was involved in the production of art, though perhaps with very different economic scale and distribution channels. Speculating, perhaps there may be an "organic food" niche of mass media art.
If you find a counterfeit bill, you experience a loss. Imagine if instead of a counterfeit bill you got a counterfeit movie. The quality is exactly like the real deal, but it's an illegal copy. You find out after the fact. Does this affect your enjoyment of the movie? You've been bamboozled either way, but in one scenario you lose out and in another scenario the people selling the movie lose out.
Art consists of decisions made by the artist that are interpretable by the audience. Automatically generated imagery lacks this, but still presents a fascimille of it. The intention and thoughtfulness of the artist is encoded within their creation, and when there is no artist this is lost.
Just because it takes effort or time to tell a fake doesn't mean its not important.
If you buy a fake that looks extremely close but falls apart a month later, that doesn't mean you don't care.
If art is visually polished in some way such that quick quality cues are handled that doesn't mean that it will actually have a meaning or a message. You won't know until you have a chance to fully consume it.
> The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all.
Or: the fact that (some) people can't tell between food that is marketed to them as "healthy" and food that actually makes them healthy, is strong evidence that healthy food was not what they value at all.
> By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all.
Well, no? Most people don't value gold for intrinsic attributes of the metal, but for the market-assigned value of it or perceived status.
I think GP overstated the point, but it's clear that a lot of people who object to AI authored content are objecting not because of the intrinsic attributes of the content but because of their emotions on the subject.
That doesn't make it invalid. If someone really doesn't want to consume AI generated content, then so be it.
But I also think the people making a big deal out of this seriously overestimate how deeply most people care. I suspect most people care only to the extent that the quality is lacking.
I'd justify that view with your example: People keep eating unhealthy food despite knowing it's bad. And as another example, we keep buying things we can't be sure is ethically sourced. We're willing to look past a whole lot.
The same way "Made in ..." labels were originally protectionist measures, I suspect disclosure requirements etc. will seriously backfire when it turns out most people stop caring the moment the quality is usually good enough.
I can tell you I hate more than anything when I’m lied to. Some AI art could be fantastic (haven’t seen anything yet but I’m sure it’ll happen someday).
I don’t want something you prompted an AI for because genuinely I could just do that myself. The barrier to entry is nil. I’m not interested in the idea an artist has I’m interested in how they execute it.
If they executed it through human effort then I place a much much higher value on that. Same as I would if someone selling a hand forged a knife rather than a mass produced cut out.
Even if the human-made item is lower quality I’d prefer it by a mile if for no other reason than I know someone’s love and effort went into it.
I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated.
The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made.
Point is - the output quality fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s principle, not the output quality, that guides most people in avoiding AI art.
If you saw two paintings and one was painted with the blood and guts of the artist, and another was a nice oil painting - would you value the former more regardless of aesthetic merit?
On the contrary; it seems to me that caring about its authorship even though the product may be outwardly indistinguishable from something a human could have made shows that human authorship is, in fact, precisely what they value.
Are you trying to make an argument that "if they really valued human authorship so highly, they'd devote their every waking moment to learning what every possible method is to tell when a given work was created by an LLM" or something? Because I would think that was fairly obviously bullshit by this point. For one thing, there's plenty of ways to make LLM-generated works (especially smaller, simpler ones) that are 100% indistinguishable from something human-created. (This is especially true in text formats, where the amount of information, and thus the possible failure modes, available in the output is smaller than in images or video.)
Being unable to tell a game is garbage without personally playing it is a problem with or without AI. Though AI is vastly increasing the amount of slop out there, for sure.
Carmack didn't invent BSP trees. He read about them in a paper and produced an efficient implementation that could render a 2D map in 3D using integer math on 386-class CPUs. He has always envied the mathematicians who actually come up with this stuff.
I think he did come up with "Carmack's Reverse" (a dynamic lighting algorithm) independently. But not even the "fast inverse square root" was his; that, oddly enough, came from what is currently probably the premiere AI company: NVIDIA.
But his implementations of these algorithms were indeed beautiful. I suppose AI could do something similar today, because the likes of Carmack had come before. But using AI for code is hobbling the creation of new Carmacks; and humans have the remarkable property that they can learn from other humans and still push the boundaries forward. When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.
That’s how double standards work, there often isn’t a clear reason.
The art and audio is somehow seen as more important and something only humans should de in a game than the code and design, you know the actual game portion of the game.
I recently was sent patches for my open source space game[1] that added cascaded shadow mapping[1] and gravitational lensing[3] for black holes, both things that I've wanted for years, but found too difficult to tackle. The patches were made with Claude Opus doing pretty much all the work, guided by a human. The quality of the patches was, in my estimation, pretty damn good. It didn't do weird things, it used the infrastructure already present, it looked like what I wish I could have written. It was clearly not plagiarized in bulk, in as much as it was so well integrated with my existing code, though I imagine all CSM code/shaders and gravitational lensing shaders tend to look pretty similar, or at least do similar things. It was eye-opening to find out that Claude was capable of doing such a thing.
Neither of these changes affect the game play, they are both purely aesthetic in their effects, without introducing anything which might be called "art" in a traditional sense, unless you count crudely modeling the behavior of light in shaders and C code as "art", but at that point the distinction between code and art vanishes. I had previously had a "no-ai" policy in my codebase, just as a kind of over-reaction, and kind of, "if I ban it, then I don't have to think about it" response. But these patches... after studying them, there's just no way I wasn't accepting them.
When you're playing a game, you don't -usually- see, let alone care about the underlying code, you care about what it does.
At least in certain genres, the use of AI art (or worse, writing) can become obvious to the player, and it winds up breaking whatever level of immersion that existed.
There's also the issue where it causes the 'signal/noise' ratio to go out of whack; Using Visual Novels as an example, the amount of shovelware has increased by at least one order of magnitude.
You can still have a VN with good enough writing, that 'AI Art' can be forgiven; and some devs actually do that to get started, i.e. they are hoping the project gets enough interest and support that they can go ahead and pay for an actual artist.
Agree on the substance, but hate the way things ended up colloquially called.
AI art is human art. It is based on human intent and choices (and in non-trivial cases it’s a lot of effort to get the machine to produce something that resembles a artist’s mental image), and the rest is mathematically sourced from human art.
I strongly suspect the only difference is in level of decision making, where details that aren’t explicitly planned are randomly generated rather than chosen (consciously or not). Or unable to be planned - refining the generation results is the most difficult part. Which translates to that “sloppy” image.
Humans detect mode collapse. If there was one artist making art in the style of AI (by hand), he'd be no more annoying than say Reg Mombassa, Guy Delisle or Tony DiTerlizzi or anyone else drawing in an idiosyncratic, easy to recognize way.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I think this would be true if "AI" art would have a limited set of distinct styles - and it surely does not. I agree - there are a few distinct neuroslop styles from major models, and those trigger aversion. But that's not the full picture.
There's an insane amount of fine-tunes out there (be it base models or LoRAs), that drastically vary in styles they produce. "AI" art can look very different, and I still think the only common property to it is sloppiness, lack of intentional attention to the fine details.
A lot of people are confused and/or behave defensive and hallucinate copyright issues(which is real, but IMO not the reason why artistic or creative AI contents aren't accepted).
It's just not good enough. AI art generators aren't used in porn industry much. That should tell enough about quality and value of those. Bad VHS tapes were worse than YouTube 144p, and still totally fine for that industry. We're almost as far away from viability of AI art as we are from reliable self driving cars.
AI code generation is simply good enough. It might spit out GPL or Classified codes, but a lot of code just works. So they're widely accepted. AI translations and text interpretations are good enough too. READMEs are okay but barely. People are quick to point out Claude isms and reach for dislikes. "That's not just a double standard - it is a concrete indication that code and text are not the same" or whatever.
I agree art lags text, but it's not that it isn't good enough, it's that it isn't controllable and it lacks expression that comes from an innately human thing.
Self driving cars are pretty fucking good, that's not doing the work you think it's doing.
I'd argue it's not even that. AI generated data all has malocious/hostile undertones that affect sanity of both users and viewers. The situation appears to be getting better especially in Chinese open weight models, but it hasn't reached the point where the resultant data neutrally compare against human sanitized data("art").
From the user’s perspective, there’s not much difference between good code and bad code if the gameplay is the same. The bad code might be a nightmare for the developer adding new features and updates, but it doesn’t directly affect the user’s experience with the game.
AI art, on the other hand, generally looks like obvious AI shit, and the user will see that and notice it.
Even human-made art will negatively affect the user’s experience if it just isn’t that good.
From what I’ve seen of AI art, nothing is yet coming close to the overall quality and effect a talented team of artists can achieve.
I think AI disclosures are good though for a different reason: when there are so many games, I want to know if this game was worth someone’s time and effort and money to make, or is just AI slop.
you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art.
Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
> Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art?
There's no good reason for it.
Nobody seems to piss on an artist who leans on AI for the programming side of their game, whereas when it's the other way around...
The consistent position is to condemn all of it, or to only focus on the quality of the outputs. AI-gen art looks like shit, and always requires an artist to fix it post. (Just like letting an AI vibe-code it's way to a finished program with no programmer oversight will inevitably produce a large pile of shit.)
The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square.
If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.
It’s just a matter of principle. Some of the evilest people on earth are the ones who own, operate, and directly benefit from the commercial proliferation of these tools. They commit crimes against us but see no consequence for which national-level politicians they’ve been sure to own. They’re aggressive in how they buy and corrupt local governments against the wishes of their constituents and the burden of responsibility is diffused because it’s not Anthropic buying your city council, it’s some other corp who focuses on building and operating power sinks that ruin entire neighborhoods and drive up their natural resource costs.
The reasons to hate AI (the industry as opposed to the technology) are impossible to ignore unless you keep your head buried firmly in the sand.
If one’s moral compass suggests that building a business on deceit is okay then I suspect they don’t particularly care about all of the externalities anyway.
If the difference between me getting to enjoy some solo developer's vision or not is whether they use the ai, I'll ignore it. Not everyone who can create a great gameplay experience can code, draw, or create music, and the margins can preclude having three different people. The problem you are pointing out is that ai is allowing a repetition of "Engels' pause" where capital accrues all the benefits of automation. Back then the unrest was resolved with workhouses and shipping people to Australia. Also shooting them in the streets. It is hard to predict how that will end up this time.
>If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag.
Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to zero is bad?
>If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.
Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to a number greater than one is acceptable?
>It’s just a matter of principle.
I am having trouble understanding the principle. If I interpreted correctly, then what is special about reducing number of employees to 0 rather than reducing them to some other amount.
My guess is from the "cheapness" association.
AI generated images and video are used a lot in scams, really cheap and bad marketing, waste of time clickb8 videos and stories etc.
I can't speak for everyone but my brain associates it with that and when I see AI tells my immediate thought goes: "is this trying to lie/cheat me in some way, did they really put in effort and care in this?".
Code is more opaque, an ugly unmaintainable mess can still create a decently functioning game experience from the player's pov. There's infamous examples of some very shitty code still resulting in games people adore.
Ultimately your point stands, if the product is genuinely good and appeals to people, they will like to buy it and play it no matter how the sausage was actually made. AI generation just ruins the signal though, it's tougher to find the jewels among the sea of slop and that'll affect how consumers judge your product.
As a former game coder who worked before there were game engines the attitude depresses me. Game programming was an inventive and creative art and the models that are spewing out barely playable imitations of games are using all that code we put out there, just as they are using all the art. Same is true of game designs.
I think we should be making games with AI however. I just don't think art is special; we have all been robbed and now we should all use the new tools that are the result of that robbery.
I don't care about "acceptability" personally however I have tried a bunch of different flows for AI generation of assets and will likely use them to some extent in the final product.
The main issue comes to coherence. With code the coherence is strictly syntactic not semantic it's just about symbolic relationships and those are what LLMs are good at. An LLM implementing a piece of code with 0 preparation is likely to be indistinguishable from an engineer writing in manually. Coding itself is just the representation of syntactic relationships. The variables are true or false, that's it. Whether AI writes it or a person does if the variables end up in the right state at the right times it's insignificant especially if it's the same person structuring the code and just gets the AI to write it exactly as they would.
For AI generated assets getting coherence in terms of art assets not even just say like character art design, but artistic coherence is much broader and hard to make explicit. What is it that makes the colors, texture, models and animations work together well? What is the relationship between having an item with a specific color and texture in a specific context in relation to all those other items? That's essentially the question of what good art is and it's far more intuitive you could attempt to formalize it but someone can just disagree with your formalization and you can't really say anything.
Getting art that is coherent with the rest of your work depends upon having someone who is able to internalize it and express it. I personally don't think AI will ever be capable of that however I do think we will likely end up in a place where a good artist could leverage AI to produce far more assets then they could have individually. It will depend on them feeding it a bunch of structure and criteria and evaluating what it does though.
How can an AI understand enough about your character and his role in the story such that his personality is conveyed through his animation, his gait, his voice acting, the materials and clothing, etc. It's just not a strict syntactic relationship which is what AI is actually good at, there is no way to actually formally represent that.
The issue with AI generated assets for me is that they are just bad and ugly and being used by people with bad taste. I can see a future where you have technically competent artists having AI tools they can train or set up to reflect their vision and be closer to their work following principles they establish but we aren't there now. For coding because it lacks that a well written program by a human or AI (guided by a human) is basically identical. I could say an AI designed game would probably be awful for similar reasons that AI is or purely vibecoded things that are artistic like shaders, specific mechanical tuning, etc for the same reason AI art is bad. Those are also much easier to tune because they are at the end of the day symbolic formal representations that can be easily manipulated by AI.
it's been around for a while. That's what Eurojank is. Or stuff like Expedition 33 and BG3. Mid-sized studios that are too big to call indie, but are not on the scale of first-party studios.
The article reads like it's about 15 years late to reality. Trying to get funding from a publisher as an independent studio was always somewhere between hard and impossible, and especially towards the 2010s. That's why Kickstarter became such an unbelievable success.
PS: The one exception was when Epic was on its aggressive rampage to buy as many exclusives for the Epic Game Store as possible. But I guess that money shower has also dried up by now.
I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation).
Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining sequels follow a similar trajectory.
They sold six million copies and made a big profit from Myst, which they presumably invested in the company, to make the next game, with the profits from that (and the diminishing returns from Myst) topping up their coffers.
At some stage of the journey they took so much money out of the company that they could not fund development without taking on loans, albeit as advances from publishers.
Why does every business have to be based on debt, even if it is a financial success?
With automotive, we have car companies that have been going for a century or more, and some of them have 'Open AI/SpaceX' levels of debt in the hundreds of billions, even though they have had a century to work out how to make cars. For example, VW. Sure they have had to buy many other brands, expand in China, pay for diesels that lied and much else, however, is it not possible for a single business to be financed by debt?
Even the money printing machine that is Apple has untold billions in debt. They don't even make their own products. There are reasons for this, however, this stock market thing seems all about making debt, not 'money'.
I think the answer is always scope creep. You hit it big on a game, your ambition grows, the next game costs an order of magnitude more… eventually you either run out of money, or you build Star Citizen
Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.
You have to see games differently from other software. Treat games as consumables, that are meant to be finished. Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
However, players will desire more of that similar experience. Ask anybody who just finished a good game and they'll tell you how finishing it left a void, and that they're looking for a similar game to fill that void again. Once you see this, it's easy to understand why there is an ocean of very similar games out there that still manage to sell in good numbers.
> Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
I think this has changed a lot since the early 2000s. There are now plenty of "forever games" where players spend hundreds or thousands of hours in, especially MMOs and free-to-play games. And even traditional AAA franchises like CoD or Battlefield are essentially just releasing new episodes of the same 'forever game' with updated graphics but the same gameplay.
In the early 2000s there were forever MMOs. I think Minecraft is the outlier "forever game" that isn't an MMO. And anyone can get hung up on a specific game and become a glitch-hunting speedrunner. But there really aren't that many.
You said it yourself, CoD and Battlefield have to keep releasing new similar games, not coast off the last one.
Quake came out in 1996, Diablo in 1997, Starcraft in 1998. Sure the adrenaline juicing is more sophisticated now, but there were already multiplayer games which could hook one for life.
i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
Bar is actually higher than bad. You have to be above mediocre even. As PC player I have decades of games easily accessible. You really need to get to at least top 25% of that if not much higher.
People complain that games get rated 7/10. But I think more so 7/10 is often bare minimum of game worth dedicating time for unless you really low the genre or specific thing. So while average game would be 5/10. An average game that is worth buying and sells is actually more so 7/10.
And when you are an investor, you must predict who is able to make a good game. What is the likelihood that a Myst-like will pay for itself. There is already a lot of Myst-likes on Steam, do players want more?
The whole "visual novel" genre would say "Yes, we'd like more". They range from all sorts of gameplay though, from Myst-like to RPGs, and a lot in-between. Definitely a market for Myst-like games, the trick is to figure out so production costs don't overrun eventual profits of course, as always.
But I think this also goes the other way as well. Even the most reclusive dev hermit can get some people to try out their game, and people love a hidden gem, and love talking about it. It makes it quite impractical for a genuinely great game to remain just undiscovered.
During peak Covid, Vampire Survivors blew up as the hot game. It is a pedestrian dual stick shooter. There are hundreds of examples which do the same thing, possibly better.
Getting a hit game requires decent fundamentals and a heap of luck.
No it's not. I'd highly recommend playing it - it's a phenomenal game. It's not a dual stuck shooter, you can literally play it with one hand. The entire schtick of the game is that it auto fires, so all the player takes care of is mobility. It was inspired by the exactly one other game that seems to have created the genre - Magic Survival. But Magic Survival was a mobile game so it was full of ads, spam, microtransactions, and all the other sort of stuff that enshittifies everything on mobile.
But the dev nonetheless thought it was a great and underserved idea. So he cleaned up the concept, got rid of the ads and other mobile crap, brought it to PC, and made $millions. His idea was then widely cloned, but games are much closer to art than commodities - so one can't expect clones to do as well as the 'original work' when they're being sold in the exact same gallery. That said, some of the clones also did extremely well when they meaningfully iterated upon the concept instead of just outright mimicking it. For instance Halls of Torment is another great game in the genre.
i mean even historically i've never heard of an amazing game that was undiscovered for ages and then blew up. maybe there's one currently festering somewhere, but i highly doubt it
It's extremely difficult, but there are enough to show that it can be done. Most people just don't want to. The secret seems to be infinite playtesting of infinite variations.
Factorio and Minecraft each took over a decade, and scrapped and redesigned core game mechanics many times. Half-Life 2 had a completely different storyline one year before release, and Ocarina of Time had a completely different environment. The Witness spent years testing puzzles and layouts in a blocky programmer world before finalizing it and making it beautiful. Baba Is You obviously also spent ages testing and trying a zillion combinations of puzzle elements. And those are just the ones at the top of my head.
You don't need as much to make a slop shooter that's moderately fun and relies on graphics and action gameplay. However, that market is saturated precisely because it is easier.
> i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
That's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I point you to one of these games, you can just say "but it wasn't actually good, otherwise it would have been more successful" or "the fact that you know about it shows that it was at least somewhat successful".
If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make.
Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well.
If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
I am not sure Myst actually is a great game. And I mean that as a game which audiences enjoy or want to play. It is great as in sense it did something special at certain point of when technology was available.
I just don't believe there would be many gamers with modern sensibilities who would play it or like it. And the more casual audience have found other things. So you do not need the showcase of multimedia spectacle to justify buying an computer...
It's worth pointing out that Cyan made 6 Myst games (not counting remakes), and people only really talk about the first two. That gives you some idea of the staying power of the franchise...
I recently played the remakes, and I have 8 hours in Myst and 12 in Riven. Compare that to 21 hours in Return of the Obra Dinn, 44 hours in Outer Wilds, or 90 hours in Blue Prince, or hell 35 hours in Terraformental (whose GUI is essentially a text adventure game). Compared to modern puzzle games, Myst is just so short; there's surprisingly little of actual substance there.
As a modern game, Myst does largely hold up. The puzzles are still quite reasonably by modern standards (indeed, in many ways, Myst did revolutionize the puzzle game genre). As an example of environmental story-telling, it's still one of the premier examples. But the game is extremely thin by modern standards. And the remakes never did a proper redesign to account for how unrestricted 3d motion requires you to change how to guide the player's attention to key objects (in Myst, the key "what am I supposed to do" letter to start the game is surprisingly hard to find, even when you know where it roughly is!). And puzzle games have never been a strong genre--Myst is more notable for its role as a tech demo than for its role as a puzzle game.
I don't think that's true. Games are a product of their time and context; if Tetris didn't exist, do you think it would be a massively popular hit today? I can see it being an interesting entrant in the mobile space like a match-3 game, but not something that literally everyone plays. Like we were ready to be Tetrisized in the 1980s but by the 2010s the vibe was more Angry Birds.
This is the real issue nobody else wants to address. Tastes have changed and genres have progressed.
A few other old time devs have tried reboots of their games (a few point and click adventures, mostly) and they were hyped up beyond belief since they were made by legendary developers and were "bringing back the classics". Then they released and got a few sales from older people wanting to get a taste of youth again, but realizing it's just not the same. Those new games by old devs didn't progress in terms of gameplay, and visually, they were worse because they tried too hard to be "retro" and made things look shoddy and low effort on powerful hardware. When back in the day, artists busted their asses to make things look beautiful on shoddy hardware.
Myst has had a bunch of sequels and remakes, but there's a reason people only care about Myst 1. It was lightning in a bottle and trying to desperately pull the "remember Myst?" card several times gets a bit embarrassing after a while.
There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.
The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.
> The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
I know a guy who works with one of those publishers.
According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.
I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue, and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.
You dump the 100m first and then you get to see if its fun to play. That's a bit hyperbolic but especially for big games, they really don't come together until the end.
Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?
The problem the article is talking about is that publishers will no longer fund "AA" games with $2-15 million budgets. The game market has bifurcated into low end indie titles (< $1 million budget) and AAA games with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Personally I think this is a huge shame, as "AA" games were a lot of of my favorites during the PS2 and PS3 generations.
The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.
Might there be so many indie studios competing for the same financing? So they can get financing for smaller games, because investors can just bet on 50 eclectic puzzle games, and if one takes off that will cover their investment, but they can't finance one larger game, because of the risk profile.
The funding climate for indie games is the worst it's been in a long time and it's been bad for over a year. Lots of publishers have stopped signing deals or are only funding small amounts with really bad terms.
For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies.
The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.
Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.
I think it's that Myst was released in a hungry, undersaturated market, and the competition is a lot tougher now. I truly love what Cyanworlds is doing, but the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be playing TF2 Classic, or Animal Well, or Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, than Obduction.
Another problem is, their games were popular at a time when most people didn't even have an internet connection, and therefore had far more patience for offline gaming. Their games require a LOT of patience.
It was a ton of people's first exposure to "interactive multimedia", as I recall it being positioned at the time. I remember seeing both Myst and 7th Guest [0] in similar showcases in computer stores.
Well, I don't know. Most of the Myst games seem to be background, painted, with a bit of moving art. Comparing this with (say) an isometric RPG (think BG3, Pillars of Eternity) and those look a lot more expensive, but still capable of making money. Or maybe it's just that I never liked Myst - too stupid, I guess.
Interesting timing on this article considering The Big Walk comes out this week. Obviously the game is not as intricate as a Myst game, but it feels like the perfect mixture of a game where design really matters and reaction to what the market wants. People like playing together and collaborating to make their own fun. It is not hard to imagine a version of Myst like this -- the most fun I have had playing a PC game was sitting next to a friend as we played Riven beginning to end.
This is surprising to read in a world where we received Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. All top-tier games (When ranked among all games in history), all recent, and all with a moderate budget and studio size, on the size order of Cyan's in its hayday. And Blue Prince has deep puzzle elements that would be at home to a Myst player.
This article and headline present a conflicting version of reality to the one I experience.
They actually touch on Blue Prince in the article; it is interesting that Expedition 33 isn't driving investment in similar sized games. But the thesis seems to be that Blue Prince like (smaller budget) is the preferred direction; more attempts at the upside of a runaway hit. Medium budget games give you less shots on goal and no corresponding payout increase.
Blue Prince immediately came to mind for me as relevant modern art. Honestly Myst style puzzle games seem like the easiest type of game for a generative world model to simulate, so I expect if players actually want them we'll see a lot more in the future.
>This is surprising to read in a world where we got Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year.
Note that none of these were made in the US like Myst was.
The cost of living is just too damn high to afford even a small team without massive funding for the amount of time it takes to make games like these. It's why every single notable AA game of the last decade has been made elsewhere now.
This did not escape my notice. Continental Europe in particular seems to have produced my favorite games of the past decade. And not from any one country: Examples include Poland, Denmark, Croatia, Czech, France. This is an observation; I offer no explanation.
They probably spent the bulk of their myst/riven fortune on Uru (a puzzle solving MMO, a year before World of Warcraft). It was bold and a very cool idea but didn't work out. They kept enough in reserve and have enough residual sales to hang on through the years, but now big projects have to be capitalized with outside money.
Myst was really interesting when it first came out, but games like that are woefully out of date in a world where most games are immersive, and where players are accustomed to onboarding systems like tutorial levels to help prevent frustration and focus on story and enjoyment. I also just really don't think that in this world's collective attention span, nobody wants to play a game where you have to traverse the entire map a bunch of times to solve a puzzle by trial and error.
You can't assume a sequel to something popular last year will do as well as the original - much less something from 30 years ago.
Each game has to stand on its own. When you discover a winning formula, there may be appetite for more of it. Or there may not be. Your audience is satiated at some point, and that assumes you even keep the quality up and don't just make slop to coast off the original's brand recognition.
how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
if you need further proof it really is satire, here we go: our business model relies on Fed rates at 0%.
> “Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”
> how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
Blue Prince is an interesting case, because the developer had a successful SaaS business that funded a significant part of development.
Without such a source of "passive" income, I doubt most us have the kind of savings that would allow us to spend ~8 years working full-time on our game
I don't know if English has a word for when you are half confused and half amused, but that is how I feel.
From this same article, here is the co-head of the studio that wanted to produce Myst.
> “I don't think people realize the true cost of developing games,” Anderson says, having used Kickstarter to partially fund two of Cyan’s past titles. “A million dollars seems like a ton of money, but it doesn't even come close to covering the full cost of a production like Anglerfish.”
Thanks for making me checkout in detail Blue Prince.
I don't understand why an article can say that a random dude has built a Myst-like game for what looks like less than a million, and then the very same article is about an indie studio, which says "nah, need more than that".
I mean, what I understand is that: you CAN make a Myst-like game for less than 1 million (see Blue Prince), you just cannot be sure that you will make the money back. Also, financing is easier when money is free.
In which case sure, I understand it. But please read the title, read the article, come back here and pls join me in a petition to add /s to the title.
Because obviously the author is implying "nah Anderson, YOU cannot make that game, check Blue Prince ;) ". Right?
Apples to oranges, I think. Blue Prince was self-funded and solo developed for much of its long development time. Publisher funding was sought to polish and market the game.
The developers in the article are taking about seeking upfront publisher funding for a small studio to develop the game with a much shorter time horizon. The publisher would likely need to invest much more, but would take a much greater percentage of revenue, and with an established franchise like Myst and a team of veteran devs the risk is - in theory - lower.
Indeed. Folks with a trust fund/juicy investment account/etc have always been able to self-fund their solo gamedev career. It’s a whole other process to take a pitch deck to a publisher and get funded in the strength of your reputation alone
I appreciate your answer, thanks! Unfortunately my curiosity about the videogame industry has been replaced by anxiety over the newspaper one.
That said yes, put in those terms it makes sense, one thing can be true under a financing model and false under another one.
Can you please get hired by Wired? It would really help me address some trust issues.
To be honest, I still don’t know if no one can or cannot afford to make a Myst games anymore but I think at this point I will just accept the answer is
I was iffy on it as well, so looked it up before suggesting it. M-W has it as the 3rd definition, for example. It's hit or miss whether that usage is in a given dictionary, it seems.
Games fundamentally require a lot of artistry, depend on user device performance, and involve many factors to consider. from engine licensing costs to labor costs.
There's this concept of 'AA games' or 'Myst games' that sit between AAA and indie titles. From what I hear across most of the industry and genres, as people's disposable income shrinks, the market is polarizing into reliable AAA games on one side and small, niche indie games on the other. Small indies can bet on extreme gameplay that big companies would never attempt.
In other words, when people start cutting back on hobbies, the first thing they reduce is spending on hobbies. And when they start tightening further, the first games to get dropped from their lists are the mid-tier ones.
Whether it's software or any genre market, this middle tier is disappearing because consumer spending itself is becoming extremely polarized.
This is a contradiction in cost structure.
When developing software, reducing the size to a mid tier level doesn't linearly reduce fixed costs. You still need to build server infrastructure, payment systems, security, basic UI/UX, cross platform support, and more, all of which come with enormous upfront costs. AAA companies can amortize these fixed costs by selling to millions of users, but a AA studio with limited capital ends up spending most of its budget just on infrastructure, leaving few resources to polish the core value of the product, graphics, gameplay fun, and design.
Also, when a recession hits, a cognitive tandem effect occurs. Only two things survive: what everyone else is playing, and niche products that match your personal taste. Mid tier products with moderate price and moderate quality require marketing efforts to convince consumers of their ambiguous value, often relying on influencer reviews or other forms of consumer persuasion.
I agree with some points, but I also disagree with others.
I agree that the 'overall' video game industry is recession resistant. Over the long term, it will continue to grow.
But I don't think the 'polarization' of video games makes the middle tier recession resistant
So, because the game industry has an escapist quality to some extent, I can understand why people set aside a budget for hobbies. But apart from that, I think game consumption itself is becoming polarized."
Has there not been enough point and click puzzle games? There's been dozens of mystlikes including recent ones and pretty much all of them fail since players generally prefer walking around a 3D world.
Myst has severely overlooked a platform that has recently made some pretty decent strides - VR.
I have a Kat Walk C2 and a game like Myst in VR with that VR rig would be absolutely goddamned insane.
Myst ruled because you felt like you were in another world back then. Recreate that with the tech we have to really make you feel like you're in that world.
No, I want a Myst or Riven game where I'm actually walking around the world. The VR support/remake pales in capability versus what I've seen done with actual VR games, and Myst could easily pull that off if they'd just look at the platform seriously and have some actual VR gamers to bounce ideas off of/beta test.
_Dimhaven_, released just a few months ago, looks fairly Myst-like from the videos I've seen. While I haven't played it, Zadbox, the developer, also made the very Myst-like _Quern_; released 2016 and which I have played.
I can't help but think the article is a story about _Cyan's_ woes conflated with industry woes. Which isn't to say that the industry doesn't have problems! But Cyan really underperformed with _Firmament_. Look at the Kickstarter comments:
They did a rug pull on whether they would ship DVDs with the Firmament collector's boxes _after_ they had complaints about the quality of the equivalent Obduction backer reward. While they did ship a DVD for Obduction, from personal experience the box itself it came in was a bit underwhelming. I didn't care so much about packaging, but I could see how someone would, and the whole situation on this point with Firmament was a very eye-rolling "again?" scenario. The first time with Obduction that they weren't able to ship what they planned in this way was bad luck; the second time was, generously, bad planning about something that was entirely foreseeable on their part.
They made a bad bet on how well VR would take off, with Firmament very obviously created with VR play in mind.
So many people were disappointed with Firmament itself. "18,420 backers pledged $1,433,161 to help bring this project to life" but they can't do that again specifically because they burned a huge amount of goodwill with the people most likely to support them that way. Keep in mind that's a 2019 number and CPI adjusting would bring it up to about 1.8 million, at the lower end but solidly within the 1 to 10 million amount Wired said they were trying to raise for Anglerfish from a publisher. And _Obduction_, while beautiful, was a bit short and had its own issues.
I would also note with all the discussion of the impact of AI art on games that Cyan was an early _target_ of the anti-AI crowd over their use of AI art in Firmament. IIRC, Steam did not have a dedicated disclosure section at the time Firmament, but they did disclose it responsibly and appropriately in the credits. A more detailed statement from Cyan can still be found at https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in... -- on this, I agree with Cyan's 2023 post, we ought to be able to distinguish "AI Assisted" from AI-generated, although it seems many are allergic to such nuance.
Yes, this is definitely more an article about Cyan than it is about the Myst-like genre of games. Quern was relatively popular and it is certainly the best Myst game since Riven. Dimhaven is quite good too if a lot more linear. I think the problem is that it’s just very hard to build a satisfying puzzle game. You need brilliant puzzles and a lot of testing.
What are you talking about? I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money.
The audience won't like it because they have beef with the tools I'd choose to use, but that's a them problem, not a me problem. Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. They'll never know, I guess.
Still, a weekend-long indy game jam in which the contestants are expected to use AI, rather than being forbidden to use it, would be pretty interesting to see.
You said "for practically no money". How much are we talking about here?
> weekend-long indy game jam
There was apparently one at GDC earlier this year but I couldn't find any details about the winners. I did find https://www.genjam.net, the nicest thing about which I can say is that many of the examples appear to function.
Can you name three reasonable-quality games out there like this that were definitely made in such a way? It costs only $100 to publish a game on Steam, recoupable if you meet a fairly low revenue threshold. You can publish elsewhere with no money up front (e.g. Itch). If this were actually true, and even if 90% of players would just pass based on the AI disclosure (doubtful, and also doubtful that _all_ games made this way would actually disclose it), you'd expect there to be lots of Myst quality games out there; hundred to thousands already, at least a handful of which should _already_ be successful.
Not entirely a rhetorical question. I've found any images need serious review and touch-up at a minimum and usually multiple rounds of revision. The topology on any generated 3D models is generally atrocious. TTS is not tuned for voice acting to an extent it's absolutely no good for that purpose as far I can tell, and that would be a cornerstone of any serious modern "Myst-class" adventure game. I can't comment on music and SFX in particular and have heard secondhand that current models are "all right", but imagine it's probably the same situation: no care taken, you get uselessly mid results. If it's really that easy and that cheap, I'd like to see it.
It'll happen. How could it not? It's just too soon.
Good example: watch people on /r/stablediffusion goofing around with Minimax-H3. It's clear the model can do amazing stuff including game scenes [1], but it just dropped last week so there's nothing to see yet.
If I were inclined to make the next Myst, that's what I'd start with. I'd need taste and talent (which admittedly are showstoppers in my case), but not a lot of money or skill.
Let's put it this way: Myst came out in 1993, which coincides with an era in which I was very actively involved in the PC game business at a technical level. If you were playing PC games back then, you were probably running some of my code.
So yes, if we're talking "Myst class" relative to the 1993 release, I'm very confident that I could vibe-wrangle something just like it in a week, using only open models that were released within the last month or so. When I say "It's just too soon," I mean that the capabilities exist now, but they are new enough that no one has had time to do anything interesting with them. And cloning a 1993 game is not especially interesting, at least not to me.
Obviously the Myst franchise hasn't stood still since then. I don't know anything about the newer releases, so I'd have to do some hedging there. You would rightfully complain that any new Myst game that someone hacks in a week would not be competitive with the SotA. But it could certainly stand up to the original.
> Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art.
I feel like unless you've grokked that art (and most importantly art direction) is also important to communicate the game design to the player, then you clearly aren't god's gift to game design :)
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...
The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now.
I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tools.
AI assistance is most dangerous (for your competition) when you mostly need it for the scripting and code, and not for the art or direction. You don't need an AI disclosure on steam if you use AI responsibly.
Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.
Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).
The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
Imagine I sell you something and you pay me in cash. The notes look authentic, but I later discover that they are conterfeits. It would be absurd to claim that your successful passing-off deception demonstrates that I don't value money at all.
Whatever the morality involved, it's an unstable norm. There can be good actors who use AI and disclose, and good actors who don't use AI and don't disclose. There are bad actors, however, who will use AI and not disclose. The entire discourse will be flooded with non-disclosers accusing each other of AI use (particularly, the bad actors will accuse everyone else of AI use, to flood the zone with shit), and there will be no way for a consumer to distinguish good from bad. Bad actors will prevail economically.
See e.g. corporate green and rainbow washing, Amazon marketplace, organic food.
I agree that the current culture of disclosure is unstable. Nevertheless, I think that there will still eventually be a mechanism to verify the degree and manner to which AI was involved in the production of art, though perhaps with very different economic scale and distribution channels. Speculating, perhaps there may be an "organic food" niche of mass media art.
If you find a counterfeit bill, you experience a loss. Imagine if instead of a counterfeit bill you got a counterfeit movie. The quality is exactly like the real deal, but it's an illegal copy. You find out after the fact. Does this affect your enjoyment of the movie? You've been bamboozled either way, but in one scenario you lose out and in another scenario the people selling the movie lose out.
That doesn't seem to follow.
The degree to which you can discern is the degree to which you can meaningfully ask for human vs AI.
Art consists of decisions made by the artist that are interpretable by the audience. Automatically generated imagery lacks this, but still presents a fascimille of it. The intention and thoughtfulness of the artist is encoded within their creation, and when there is no artist this is lost.
You can't win this argument. Your comments probably require prior exposure to art to understand.
And the degree which this is discerned... sometimes AI art wins contests.
Do you understand how that addresses none of what I talked about?
It is a direct refutation.
Art is not a contest, and the lie is not one of quality
ai art usage isn't a binary black or white thing as most imply
Just because it takes effort or time to tell a fake doesn't mean its not important.
If you buy a fake that looks extremely close but falls apart a month later, that doesn't mean you don't care.
If art is visually polished in some way such that quick quality cues are handled that doesn't mean that it will actually have a meaning or a message. You won't know until you have a chance to fully consume it.
> The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all.
Or: the fact that (some) people can't tell between food that is marketed to them as "healthy" and food that actually makes them healthy, is strong evidence that healthy food was not what they value at all.
Neither follows. Both blame the victim of a lie.
> By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all.
Well, no? Most people don't value gold for intrinsic attributes of the metal, but for the market-assigned value of it or perceived status.
I think GP overstated the point, but it's clear that a lot of people who object to AI authored content are objecting not because of the intrinsic attributes of the content but because of their emotions on the subject.
That doesn't make it invalid. If someone really doesn't want to consume AI generated content, then so be it.
But I also think the people making a big deal out of this seriously overestimate how deeply most people care. I suspect most people care only to the extent that the quality is lacking.
I'd justify that view with your example: People keep eating unhealthy food despite knowing it's bad. And as another example, we keep buying things we can't be sure is ethically sourced. We're willing to look past a whole lot.
The same way "Made in ..." labels were originally protectionist measures, I suspect disclosure requirements etc. will seriously backfire when it turns out most people stop caring the moment the quality is usually good enough.
I can tell you I hate more than anything when I’m lied to. Some AI art could be fantastic (haven’t seen anything yet but I’m sure it’ll happen someday).
I don’t want something you prompted an AI for because genuinely I could just do that myself. The barrier to entry is nil. I’m not interested in the idea an artist has I’m interested in how they execute it.
If they executed it through human effort then I place a much much higher value on that. Same as I would if someone selling a hand forged a knife rather than a mass produced cut out.
Even if the human-made item is lower quality I’d prefer it by a mile if for no other reason than I know someone’s love and effort went into it.
I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated.
The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made.
Point is - the output quality fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s principle, not the output quality, that guides most people in avoiding AI art.
Generally anti AI person who is a game dev here:
> The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made.
Where’s the line? Is using tools in maya and photoshop to rapidly speed up asset generation ok?
> I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated.
Do you feel the same about PCG?
PCG is authored, its usage has intention.
Procedural Content Generation?
If you saw two paintings and one was painted with the blood and guts of the artist, and another was a nice oil painting - would you value the former more regardless of aesthetic merit?
Why would you say that?
On the contrary; it seems to me that caring about its authorship even though the product may be outwardly indistinguishable from something a human could have made shows that human authorship is, in fact, precisely what they value.
Are you trying to make an argument that "if they really valued human authorship so highly, they'd devote their every waking moment to learning what every possible method is to tell when a given work was created by an LLM" or something? Because I would think that was fairly obviously bullshit by this point. For one thing, there's plenty of ways to make LLM-generated works (especially smaller, simpler ones) that are 100% indistinguishable from something human-created. (This is especially true in text formats, where the amount of information, and thus the possible failure modes, available in the output is smaller than in images or video.)
You don't get to play the game before you pay for it.
Do you want to have to go ask for refund after refund after noticing it's yet-another-AI-slop-cookie-cutter-lookalike several hours in?
Being unable to tell a game is garbage without personally playing it is a problem with or without AI. Though AI is vastly increasing the amount of slop out there, for sure.
As a professional coder, I both agree and deeply hate this position.
And code indeed has its values. See all algorithms invented by Carmack like BSPs, z-fail, etc.
> See all algorithms invented by Carmack
The problem is very few (none?) of them actually were. He was just a wizard at applying them. This furthers the utilitarian argument.
Carmack didn't invent BSP trees. He read about them in a paper and produced an efficient implementation that could render a 2D map in 3D using integer math on 386-class CPUs. He has always envied the mathematicians who actually come up with this stuff.
I think he did come up with "Carmack's Reverse" (a dynamic lighting algorithm) independently. But not even the "fast inverse square root" was his; that, oddly enough, came from what is currently probably the premiere AI company: NVIDIA.
But his implementations of these algorithms were indeed beautiful. I suppose AI could do something similar today, because the likes of Carmack had come before. But using AI for code is hobbling the creation of new Carmacks; and humans have the remarkable property that they can learn from other humans and still push the boundaries forward. When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.
> When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.
I don't think is so. Models continuing to improve by learning from other models is a counterexample.
That’s how double standards work, there often isn’t a clear reason.
The art and audio is somehow seen as more important and something only humans should de in a game than the code and design, you know the actual game portion of the game.
I recently was sent patches for my open source space game[1] that added cascaded shadow mapping[1] and gravitational lensing[3] for black holes, both things that I've wanted for years, but found too difficult to tackle. The patches were made with Claude Opus doing pretty much all the work, guided by a human. The quality of the patches was, in my estimation, pretty damn good. It didn't do weird things, it used the infrastructure already present, it looked like what I wish I could have written. It was clearly not plagiarized in bulk, in as much as it was so well integrated with my existing code, though I imagine all CSM code/shaders and gravitational lensing shaders tend to look pretty similar, or at least do similar things. It was eye-opening to find out that Claude was capable of doing such a thing.
Neither of these changes affect the game play, they are both purely aesthetic in their effects, without introducing anything which might be called "art" in a traditional sense, unless you count crudely modeling the behavior of light in shaders and C code as "art", but at that point the distinction between code and art vanishes. I had previously had a "no-ai" policy in my codebase, just as a kind of over-reaction, and kind of, "if I ban it, then I don't have to think about it" response. But these patches... after studying them, there's just no way I wasn't accepting them.
[1] https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
AI slop is cringe and bad. (From an artistic point of view.)
You can't force people to like it.
Nobody is talking about forcing people to like it. But people hate AI art on principle, even if it’s as good as people.
And those same people don’t care about the AI code in the same games.
Why do people prefer free range eggs to cage eggs even if the eggs are identical?
> even if it’s as good as people
It's not and never will be.
Because code is invisible to the end user while art is right in their face.
When you're playing a game, you don't -usually- see, let alone care about the underlying code, you care about what it does.
At least in certain genres, the use of AI art (or worse, writing) can become obvious to the player, and it winds up breaking whatever level of immersion that existed.
There's also the issue where it causes the 'signal/noise' ratio to go out of whack; Using Visual Novels as an example, the amount of shovelware has increased by at least one order of magnitude.
You can still have a VN with good enough writing, that 'AI Art' can be forgiven; and some devs actually do that to get started, i.e. they are hoping the project gets enough interest and support that they can go ahead and pay for an actual artist.
Because people can tell the difference between AI art and human art. Not true for logic unless you are incompetent.
Agree on the substance, but hate the way things ended up colloquially called.
AI art is human art. It is based on human intent and choices (and in non-trivial cases it’s a lot of effort to get the machine to produce something that resembles a artist’s mental image), and the rest is mathematically sourced from human art.
I strongly suspect the only difference is in level of decision making, where details that aren’t explicitly planned are randomly generated rather than chosen (consciously or not). Or unable to be planned - refining the generation results is the most difficult part. Which translates to that “sloppy” image.
Humans can detect sloppiness, not “AI”.
Humans detect mode collapse. If there was one artist making art in the style of AI (by hand), he'd be no more annoying than say Reg Mombassa, Guy Delisle or Tony DiTerlizzi or anyone else drawing in an idiosyncratic, easy to recognize way.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I think this would be true if "AI" art would have a limited set of distinct styles - and it surely does not. I agree - there are a few distinct neuroslop styles from major models, and those trigger aversion. But that's not the full picture.
There's an insane amount of fine-tunes out there (be it base models or LoRAs), that drastically vary in styles they produce. "AI" art can look very different, and I still think the only common property to it is sloppiness, lack of intentional attention to the fine details.
A lot of people are confused and/or behave defensive and hallucinate copyright issues(which is real, but IMO not the reason why artistic or creative AI contents aren't accepted).
It's just not good enough. AI art generators aren't used in porn industry much. That should tell enough about quality and value of those. Bad VHS tapes were worse than YouTube 144p, and still totally fine for that industry. We're almost as far away from viability of AI art as we are from reliable self driving cars.
AI code generation is simply good enough. It might spit out GPL or Classified codes, but a lot of code just works. So they're widely accepted. AI translations and text interpretations are good enough too. READMEs are okay but barely. People are quick to point out Claude isms and reach for dislikes. "That's not just a double standard - it is a concrete indication that code and text are not the same" or whatever.
I agree art lags text, but it's not that it isn't good enough, it's that it isn't controllable and it lacks expression that comes from an innately human thing.
Self driving cars are pretty fucking good, that's not doing the work you think it's doing.
I'd argue it's not even that. AI generated data all has malocious/hostile undertones that affect sanity of both users and viewers. The situation appears to be getting better especially in Chinese open weight models, but it hasn't reached the point where the resultant data neutrally compare against human sanitized data("art").
AI art is kinda like CGI. If you can tell, it usually means that it's bad. If you can't it doesn't matter.
>We're almost as far away from viability of AI art as we are from reliable self driving cars.
Have you been in a self-driving car?
Have you driven around them? Waymos have caused me more near misses in the last month than I can recall in a year of driving in Atlanta.
From the user’s perspective, there’s not much difference between good code and bad code if the gameplay is the same. The bad code might be a nightmare for the developer adding new features and updates, but it doesn’t directly affect the user’s experience with the game.
AI art, on the other hand, generally looks like obvious AI shit, and the user will see that and notice it.
Even human-made art will negatively affect the user’s experience if it just isn’t that good.
From what I’ve seen of AI art, nothing is yet coming close to the overall quality and effect a talented team of artists can achieve.
I think AI disclosures are good though for a different reason: when there are so many games, I want to know if this game was worth someone’s time and effort and money to make, or is just AI slop.
you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art.
Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
> Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art?
There's no good reason for it.
Nobody seems to piss on an artist who leans on AI for the programming side of their game, whereas when it's the other way around...
The consistent position is to condemn all of it, or to only focus on the quality of the outputs. AI-gen art looks like shit, and always requires an artist to fix it post. (Just like letting an AI vibe-code it's way to a finished program with no programmer oversight will inevitably produce a large pile of shit.)
The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square.
If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.
It’s just a matter of principle. Some of the evilest people on earth are the ones who own, operate, and directly benefit from the commercial proliferation of these tools. They commit crimes against us but see no consequence for which national-level politicians they’ve been sure to own. They’re aggressive in how they buy and corrupt local governments against the wishes of their constituents and the burden of responsibility is diffused because it’s not Anthropic buying your city council, it’s some other corp who focuses on building and operating power sinks that ruin entire neighborhoods and drive up their natural resource costs.
The reasons to hate AI (the industry as opposed to the technology) are impossible to ignore unless you keep your head buried firmly in the sand.
If one’s moral compass suggests that building a business on deceit is okay then I suspect they don’t particularly care about all of the externalities anyway.
If the difference between me getting to enjoy some solo developer's vision or not is whether they use the ai, I'll ignore it. Not everyone who can create a great gameplay experience can code, draw, or create music, and the margins can preclude having three different people. The problem you are pointing out is that ai is allowing a repetition of "Engels' pause" where capital accrues all the benefits of automation. Back then the unrest was resolved with workhouses and shipping people to Australia. Also shooting them in the streets. It is hard to predict how that will end up this time.
>If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag.
Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to zero is bad?
>If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.
Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to a number greater than one is acceptable?
>It’s just a matter of principle.
I am having trouble understanding the principle. If I interpreted correctly, then what is special about reducing number of employees to 0 rather than reducing them to some other amount.
My guess is from the "cheapness" association. AI generated images and video are used a lot in scams, really cheap and bad marketing, waste of time clickb8 videos and stories etc. I can't speak for everyone but my brain associates it with that and when I see AI tells my immediate thought goes: "is this trying to lie/cheat me in some way, did they really put in effort and care in this?".
Code is more opaque, an ugly unmaintainable mess can still create a decently functioning game experience from the player's pov. There's infamous examples of some very shitty code still resulting in games people adore.
Ultimately your point stands, if the product is genuinely good and appeals to people, they will like to buy it and play it no matter how the sausage was actually made. AI generation just ruins the signal though, it's tougher to find the jewels among the sea of slop and that'll affect how consumers judge your product.
As a former game coder who worked before there were game engines the attitude depresses me. Game programming was an inventive and creative art and the models that are spewing out barely playable imitations of games are using all that code we put out there, just as they are using all the art. Same is true of game designs.
I think we should be making games with AI however. I just don't think art is special; we have all been robbed and now we should all use the new tools that are the result of that robbery.
code is a tool that produces an outcome, art is the outcome
you can produce art with ai, but not everything ai produces is art, etc... when you produce code with ai it is always code
I don't care about "acceptability" personally however I have tried a bunch of different flows for AI generation of assets and will likely use them to some extent in the final product. The main issue comes to coherence. With code the coherence is strictly syntactic not semantic it's just about symbolic relationships and those are what LLMs are good at. An LLM implementing a piece of code with 0 preparation is likely to be indistinguishable from an engineer writing in manually. Coding itself is just the representation of syntactic relationships. The variables are true or false, that's it. Whether AI writes it or a person does if the variables end up in the right state at the right times it's insignificant especially if it's the same person structuring the code and just gets the AI to write it exactly as they would.
For AI generated assets getting coherence in terms of art assets not even just say like character art design, but artistic coherence is much broader and hard to make explicit. What is it that makes the colors, texture, models and animations work together well? What is the relationship between having an item with a specific color and texture in a specific context in relation to all those other items? That's essentially the question of what good art is and it's far more intuitive you could attempt to formalize it but someone can just disagree with your formalization and you can't really say anything.
Getting art that is coherent with the rest of your work depends upon having someone who is able to internalize it and express it. I personally don't think AI will ever be capable of that however I do think we will likely end up in a place where a good artist could leverage AI to produce far more assets then they could have individually. It will depend on them feeding it a bunch of structure and criteria and evaluating what it does though.
How can an AI understand enough about your character and his role in the story such that his personality is conveyed through his animation, his gait, his voice acting, the materials and clothing, etc. It's just not a strict syntactic relationship which is what AI is actually good at, there is no way to actually formally represent that.
The issue with AI generated assets for me is that they are just bad and ugly and being used by people with bad taste. I can see a future where you have technically competent artists having AI tools they can train or set up to reflect their vision and be closer to their work following principles they establish but we aren't there now. For coding because it lacks that a well written program by a human or AI (guided by a human) is basically identical. I could say an AI designed game would probably be awful for similar reasons that AI is or purely vibecoded things that are artistic like shaders, specific mechanical tuning, etc for the same reason AI art is bad. Those are also much easier to tune because they are at the end of the day symbolic formal representations that can be easily manipulated by AI.
I thought the term "AAA game" was silly, but now I've heard someone use the term "AA game" as well and that's even sillier.
it's been around for a while. That's what Eurojank is. Or stuff like Expedition 33 and BG3. Mid-sized studios that are too big to call indie, but are not on the scale of first-party studios.
The article reads like it's about 15 years late to reality. Trying to get funding from a publisher as an independent studio was always somewhere between hard and impossible, and especially towards the 2010s. That's why Kickstarter became such an unbelievable success.
PS: The one exception was when Epic was on its aggressive rampage to buy as many exclusives for the Epic Game Store as possible. But I guess that money shower has also dried up by now.
I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation).
Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining sequels follow a similar trajectory.
I've heard - on HN! - that today's kids, who didn't grow up in the graphics wars, don't care all that much about graphical fidelity.
They sold six million copies and made a big profit from Myst, which they presumably invested in the company, to make the next game, with the profits from that (and the diminishing returns from Myst) topping up their coffers.
At some stage of the journey they took so much money out of the company that they could not fund development without taking on loans, albeit as advances from publishers.
Why does every business have to be based on debt, even if it is a financial success?
With automotive, we have car companies that have been going for a century or more, and some of them have 'Open AI/SpaceX' levels of debt in the hundreds of billions, even though they have had a century to work out how to make cars. For example, VW. Sure they have had to buy many other brands, expand in China, pay for diesels that lied and much else, however, is it not possible for a single business to be financed by debt?
Even the money printing machine that is Apple has untold billions in debt. They don't even make their own products. There are reasons for this, however, this stock market thing seems all about making debt, not 'money'.
I think the answer is always scope creep. You hit it big on a game, your ambition grows, the next game costs an order of magnitude more… eventually you either run out of money, or you build Star Citizen
Is this a genuine question? I could try to explain more, but debt allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
I could save for 40 years for a house, or buy one today with debt today. In the latter case, I get to enjoy it now and save money on rent.
Basically the whole world works this way. You could save and then spend, or spend then repay.
In a lot of context, you make or save more by spending sooner than the cost of interest.
Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.
You have to see games differently from other software. Treat games as consumables, that are meant to be finished. Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
However, players will desire more of that similar experience. Ask anybody who just finished a good game and they'll tell you how finishing it left a void, and that they're looking for a similar game to fill that void again. Once you see this, it's easy to understand why there is an ocean of very similar games out there that still manage to sell in good numbers.
> Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
I think this has changed a lot since the early 2000s. There are now plenty of "forever games" where players spend hundreds or thousands of hours in, especially MMOs and free-to-play games. And even traditional AAA franchises like CoD or Battlefield are essentially just releasing new episodes of the same 'forever game' with updated graphics but the same gameplay.
In the early 2000s there were forever MMOs. I think Minecraft is the outlier "forever game" that isn't an MMO. And anyone can get hung up on a specific game and become a glitch-hunting speedrunner. But there really aren't that many.
You said it yourself, CoD and Battlefield have to keep releasing new similar games, not coast off the last one.
Quake came out in 1996, Diablo in 1997, Starcraft in 1998. Sure the adrenaline juicing is more sophisticated now, but there were already multiplayer games which could hook one for life.
Age of Empires 2 for me!
Like cooking/restauranting, the creator market is saturated due to the passion people have for it.
i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
Bar is actually higher than bad. You have to be above mediocre even. As PC player I have decades of games easily accessible. You really need to get to at least top 25% of that if not much higher.
People complain that games get rated 7/10. But I think more so 7/10 is often bare minimum of game worth dedicating time for unless you really low the genre or specific thing. So while average game would be 5/10. An average game that is worth buying and sells is actually more so 7/10.
I actually did build a game (with my 5 year old boy) recently. https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382
We had a lot of fun building it and I used Lua and LÖVE2D to basically build a game engine for a boat game in an isometric world.
But to take something like that to something that pays the bills... mindboggling.
I've seen a lot of good games killed by large studios because they feel the opportunity cost is too great, despite being profitable.
Mediocre games also happen to blow up all the time. So I'm sure there's a lot of sentiment around not getting that lucky.
I also think it's a spectrum. You need a good enough game and to be lucky.
And when you are an investor, you must predict who is able to make a good game. What is the likelihood that a Myst-like will pay for itself. There is already a lot of Myst-likes on Steam, do players want more?
The whole "visual novel" genre would say "Yes, we'd like more". They range from all sorts of gameplay though, from Myst-like to RPGs, and a lot in-between. Definitely a market for Myst-like games, the trick is to figure out so production costs don't overrun eventual profits of course, as always.
But I think this also goes the other way as well. Even the most reclusive dev hermit can get some people to try out their game, and people love a hidden gem, and love talking about it. It makes it quite impractical for a genuinely great game to remain just undiscovered.
During peak Covid, Vampire Survivors blew up as the hot game. It is a pedestrian dual stick shooter. There are hundreds of examples which do the same thing, possibly better.
Getting a hit game requires decent fundamentals and a heap of luck.
No it's not. I'd highly recommend playing it - it's a phenomenal game. It's not a dual stuck shooter, you can literally play it with one hand. The entire schtick of the game is that it auto fires, so all the player takes care of is mobility. It was inspired by the exactly one other game that seems to have created the genre - Magic Survival. But Magic Survival was a mobile game so it was full of ads, spam, microtransactions, and all the other sort of stuff that enshittifies everything on mobile.
But the dev nonetheless thought it was a great and underserved idea. So he cleaned up the concept, got rid of the ads and other mobile crap, brought it to PC, and made $millions. His idea was then widely cloned, but games are much closer to art than commodities - so one can't expect clones to do as well as the 'original work' when they're being sold in the exact same gallery. That said, some of the clones also did extremely well when they meaningfully iterated upon the concept instead of just outright mimicking it. For instance Halls of Torment is another great game in the genre.
well said
i mean even historically i've never heard of an amazing game that was undiscovered for ages and then blew up. maybe there's one currently festering somewhere, but i highly doubt it
It's extremely difficult, but there are enough to show that it can be done. Most people just don't want to. The secret seems to be infinite playtesting of infinite variations.
Factorio and Minecraft each took over a decade, and scrapped and redesigned core game mechanics many times. Half-Life 2 had a completely different storyline one year before release, and Ocarina of Time had a completely different environment. The Witness spent years testing puzzles and layouts in a blocky programmer world before finalizing it and making it beautiful. Baba Is You obviously also spent ages testing and trying a zillion combinations of puzzle elements. And those are just the ones at the top of my head.
You don't need as much to make a slop shooter that's moderately fun and relies on graphics and action gameplay. However, that market is saturated precisely because it is easier.
> i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
That's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I point you to one of these games, you can just say "but it wasn't actually good, otherwise it would have been more successful" or "the fact that you know about it shows that it was at least somewhat successful".
This is the hard-pill-to-swallow meme truth.
If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make.
Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well.
If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
I am not sure Myst actually is a great game. And I mean that as a game which audiences enjoy or want to play. It is great as in sense it did something special at certain point of when technology was available.
I just don't believe there would be many gamers with modern sensibilities who would play it or like it. And the more casual audience have found other things. So you do not need the showcase of multimedia spectacle to justify buying an computer...
It's worth pointing out that Cyan made 6 Myst games (not counting remakes), and people only really talk about the first two. That gives you some idea of the staying power of the franchise...
I recently played the remakes, and I have 8 hours in Myst and 12 in Riven. Compare that to 21 hours in Return of the Obra Dinn, 44 hours in Outer Wilds, or 90 hours in Blue Prince, or hell 35 hours in Terraformental (whose GUI is essentially a text adventure game). Compared to modern puzzle games, Myst is just so short; there's surprisingly little of actual substance there.
As a modern game, Myst does largely hold up. The puzzles are still quite reasonably by modern standards (indeed, in many ways, Myst did revolutionize the puzzle game genre). As an example of environmental story-telling, it's still one of the premier examples. But the game is extremely thin by modern standards. And the remakes never did a proper redesign to account for how unrestricted 3d motion requires you to change how to guide the player's attention to key objects (in Myst, the key "what am I supposed to do" letter to start the game is surprisingly hard to find, even when you know where it roughly is!). And puzzle games have never been a strong genre--Myst is more notable for its role as a tech demo than for its role as a puzzle game.
I don't think that's true. Games are a product of their time and context; if Tetris didn't exist, do you think it would be a massively popular hit today? I can see it being an interesting entrant in the mobile space like a match-3 game, but not something that literally everyone plays. Like we were ready to be Tetrisized in the 1980s but by the 2010s the vibe was more Angry Birds.
I don't think Candy Crush is much different in genre to Tetris.
https://archive.ph/5RlIw
The article said they are looking for $1m to $10m in funding. Given the hype and pedigree, I feel they could crowdfund the low end of that trivially.
In this economy, when only old people like me care about Myst (and I’ve been around enough to know not to crowdfund games)? It’s not the 90s any more.
This is the real issue nobody else wants to address. Tastes have changed and genres have progressed.
A few other old time devs have tried reboots of their games (a few point and click adventures, mostly) and they were hyped up beyond belief since they were made by legendary developers and were "bringing back the classics". Then they released and got a few sales from older people wanting to get a taste of youth again, but realizing it's just not the same. Those new games by old devs didn't progress in terms of gameplay, and visually, they were worse because they tried too hard to be "retro" and made things look shoddy and low effort on powerful hardware. When back in the day, artists busted their asses to make things look beautiful on shoddy hardware.
Myst has had a bunch of sequels and remakes, but there's a reason people only care about Myst 1. It was lightning in a bottle and trying to desperately pull the "remember Myst?" card several times gets a bit embarrassing after a while.
That’s a weird value to get funding for right now.
If a publisher wants to fund something cheap and niche, maybe a bit of a gamble, it’s too much.
If they want to fund a more fleshed-out title that is likely to succeed with a bit of marketing spend behind it, it’s almost too little.
So I think they might be right, they’re in a weird space that publishers don’t want to look at right now.
Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?
There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.
The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.
> The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
I know a guy who works with one of those publishers.
According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.
I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue, and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.
Fair point.
You dump the 100m first and then you get to see if its fun to play. That's a bit hyperbolic but especially for big games, they really don't come together until the end.
Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?
The problem the article is talking about is that publishers will no longer fund "AA" games with $2-15 million budgets. The game market has bifurcated into low end indie titles (< $1 million budget) and AAA games with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Personally I think this is a huge shame, as "AA" games were a lot of of my favorites during the PS2 and PS3 generations.
The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.
Might there be so many indie studios competing for the same financing? So they can get financing for smaller games, because investors can just bet on 50 eclectic puzzle games, and if one takes off that will cover their investment, but they can't finance one larger game, because of the risk profile.
The funding climate for indie games is the worst it's been in a long time and it's been bad for over a year. Lots of publishers have stopped signing deals or are only funding small amounts with really bad terms.
What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team.
What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.
For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies.
The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.
But the original game was very playable and fun. There are plenty of modern games that only have a tiny bit more game play.
Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.
I think out of the original team there where only 1 and half developers.
> What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.
Seems no one has written "The Mythical Man Month" for the game industry yet.
It’s predominantly artists, and art pipelines are usually fairly scalable .
I think it's that Myst was released in a hungry, undersaturated market, and the competition is a lot tougher now. I truly love what Cyanworlds is doing, but the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be playing TF2 Classic, or Animal Well, or Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, than Obduction.
Another problem is, their games were popular at a time when most people didn't even have an internet connection, and therefore had far more patience for offline gaming. Their games require a LOT of patience.
Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs. Perhaps as a cheap way to show off CDROM capabilities.
Getting games installed and working in that era was often a chore. So when people sat down to play, it was already there for them.
Myst's sequels didn't sell as well as the first, despite the power of the brand, either. Likely because of competition.
It was a ton of people's first exposure to "interactive multimedia", as I recall it being positioned at the time. I remember seeing both Myst and 7th Guest [0] in similar showcases in computer stores.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest
> Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs.
I think every single shareware/demo disc I had also had some variation/sequel to Myst in one way or another too, somehow.
Well, I don't know. Most of the Myst games seem to be background, painted, with a bit of moving art. Comparing this with (say) an isometric RPG (think BG3, Pillars of Eternity) and those look a lot more expensive, but still capable of making money. Or maybe it's just that I never liked Myst - too stupid, I guess.
FWIW, I never got the appeal of Myst as well. Much too limited range of actions.
I played the first 4 with my pops so for me: nostalgia, the fantasy environments, the music (must have been what got me into ambient).
Interesting timing on this article considering The Big Walk comes out this week. Obviously the game is not as intricate as a Myst game, but it feels like the perfect mixture of a game where design really matters and reaction to what the market wants. People like playing together and collaborating to make their own fun. It is not hard to imagine a version of Myst like this -- the most fun I have had playing a PC game was sitting next to a friend as we played Riven beginning to end.
You might enjoy the new game Solarpunk. A very successful Kickstarter, made by two guys.
This is surprising to read in a world where we received Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. All top-tier games (When ranked among all games in history), all recent, and all with a moderate budget and studio size, on the size order of Cyan's in its hayday. And Blue Prince has deep puzzle elements that would be at home to a Myst player.
This article and headline present a conflicting version of reality to the one I experience.
They actually touch on Blue Prince in the article; it is interesting that Expedition 33 isn't driving investment in similar sized games. But the thesis seems to be that Blue Prince like (smaller budget) is the preferred direction; more attempts at the upside of a runaway hit. Medium budget games give you less shots on goal and no corresponding payout increase.
Blue Prince immediately came to mind for me as relevant modern art. Honestly Myst style puzzle games seem like the easiest type of game for a generative world model to simulate, so I expect if players actually want them we'll see a lot more in the future.
>This is surprising to read in a world where we got Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year.
Note that none of these were made in the US like Myst was.
The cost of living is just too damn high to afford even a small team without massive funding for the amount of time it takes to make games like these. It's why every single notable AA game of the last decade has been made elsewhere now.
This did not escape my notice. Continental Europe in particular seems to have produced my favorite games of the past decade. And not from any one country: Examples include Poland, Denmark, Croatia, Czech, France. This is an observation; I offer no explanation.
aren't all these guys rich? why do they need funding?
They probably spent the bulk of their myst/riven fortune on Uru (a puzzle solving MMO, a year before World of Warcraft). It was bold and a very cool idea but didn't work out. They kept enough in reserve and have enough residual sales to hang on through the years, but now big projects have to be capitalized with outside money.
Myst was really interesting when it first came out, but games like that are woefully out of date in a world where most games are immersive, and where players are accustomed to onboarding systems like tutorial levels to help prevent frustration and focus on story and enjoyment. I also just really don't think that in this world's collective attention span, nobody wants to play a game where you have to traverse the entire map a bunch of times to solve a puzzle by trial and error.
Give me a new Journeyman Project instead!
You can't assume a sequel to something popular last year will do as well as the original - much less something from 30 years ago.
Each game has to stand on its own. When you discover a winning formula, there may be appetite for more of it. Or there may not be. Your audience is satiated at some point, and that assumes you even keep the quality up and don't just make slop to coast off the original's brand recognition.
1. Approximately every software engineer secretly dreams of developing an awesome video game instead of the boring software he actually makes.
2. Consequently, there are way too many people wanting to develop video games relative to the commercial demand for them.
3. Consequently, it is incredibly hard to get funding for a video game project.
Meh, no not true. Plenty of software developers dont even like playing games.
And making a game is not all that much more fun anyway. A lot of that work is plain boring.
Fun software project and flashy outcome are two different things.
pretty interesting, the macro economics of the software space seem shaky
Big Walk is pretty close to a myst.
can we pls add /s to to the post title?
how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
if you need further proof it really is satire, here we go: our business model relies on Fed rates at 0%.
> “Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”
> how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
Blue Prince is an interesting case, because the developer had a successful SaaS business that funded a significant part of development.
Without such a source of "passive" income, I doubt most us have the kind of savings that would allow us to spend ~8 years working full-time on our game
I don't know if English has a word for when you are half confused and half amused, but that is how I feel.
From this same article, here is the co-head of the studio that wanted to produce Myst.
> “I don't think people realize the true cost of developing games,” Anderson says, having used Kickstarter to partially fund two of Cyan’s past titles. “A million dollars seems like a ton of money, but it doesn't even come close to covering the full cost of a production like Anglerfish.”
Thanks for making me checkout in detail Blue Prince.
I don't understand why an article can say that a random dude has built a Myst-like game for what looks like less than a million, and then the very same article is about an indie studio, which says "nah, need more than that".
I mean, what I understand is that: you CAN make a Myst-like game for less than 1 million (see Blue Prince), you just cannot be sure that you will make the money back. Also, financing is easier when money is free.
In which case sure, I understand it. But please read the title, read the article, come back here and pls join me in a petition to add /s to the title.
Because obviously the author is implying "nah Anderson, YOU cannot make that game, check Blue Prince ;) ". Right?
Apples to oranges, I think. Blue Prince was self-funded and solo developed for much of its long development time. Publisher funding was sought to polish and market the game.
The developers in the article are taking about seeking upfront publisher funding for a small studio to develop the game with a much shorter time horizon. The publisher would likely need to invest much more, but would take a much greater percentage of revenue, and with an established franchise like Myst and a team of veteran devs the risk is - in theory - lower.
Indeed. Folks with a trust fund/juicy investment account/etc have always been able to self-fund their solo gamedev career. It’s a whole other process to take a pitch deck to a publisher and get funded in the strength of your reputation alone
I appreciate your answer, thanks! Unfortunately my curiosity about the videogame industry has been replaced by anxiety over the newspaper one.
That said yes, put in those terms it makes sense, one thing can be true under a financing model and false under another one.
Can you please get hired by Wired? It would really help me address some trust issues.
To be honest, I still don’t know if no one can or cannot afford to make a Myst games anymore but I think at this point I will just accept the answer is
> I don't know if English has a word for when you are half confused and half amused
I think bemused is the closest I can think of.
I only think of bemused as "confused".
Maybe incredulous at a stretch?
I was iffy on it as well, so looked it up before suggesting it. M-W has it as the 3rd definition, for example. It's hit or miss whether that usage is in a given dictionary, it seems.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bemused
Sure enough. Oxford only gives a bewildered definition. Although, their ambiguous examples could fit an amused/confused definition.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
Games fundamentally require a lot of artistry, depend on user device performance, and involve many factors to consider. from engine licensing costs to labor costs.
There's this concept of 'AA games' or 'Myst games' that sit between AAA and indie titles. From what I hear across most of the industry and genres, as people's disposable income shrinks, the market is polarizing into reliable AAA games on one side and small, niche indie games on the other. Small indies can bet on extreme gameplay that big companies would never attempt.
In other words, when people start cutting back on hobbies, the first thing they reduce is spending on hobbies. And when they start tightening further, the first games to get dropped from their lists are the mid-tier ones.
Whether it's software or any genre market, this middle tier is disappearing because consumer spending itself is becoming extremely polarized.
This is a contradiction in cost structure.
When developing software, reducing the size to a mid tier level doesn't linearly reduce fixed costs. You still need to build server infrastructure, payment systems, security, basic UI/UX, cross platform support, and more, all of which come with enormous upfront costs. AAA companies can amortize these fixed costs by selling to millions of users, but a AA studio with limited capital ends up spending most of its budget just on infrastructure, leaving few resources to polish the core value of the product, graphics, gameplay fun, and design.
Also, when a recession hits, a cognitive tandem effect occurs. Only two things survive: what everyone else is playing, and niche products that match your personal taste. Mid tier products with moderate price and moderate quality require marketing efforts to convince consumers of their ambiguous value, often relying on influencer reviews or other forms of consumer persuasion.
Video game sales usually have been very recession proof. E.g. people still want entertainment and escapism when shit hits the fan.
I agree with some points, but I also disagree with others.
I agree that the 'overall' video game industry is recession resistant. Over the long term, it will continue to grow.
But I don't think the 'polarization' of video games makes the middle tier recession resistant
So, because the game industry has an escapist quality to some extent, I can understand why people set aside a budget for hobbies. But apart from that, I think game consumption itself is becoming polarized."
Has there not been enough point and click puzzle games? There's been dozens of mystlikes including recent ones and pretty much all of them fail since players generally prefer walking around a 3D world.
Myst has severely overlooked a platform that has recently made some pretty decent strides - VR.
I have a Kat Walk C2 and a game like Myst in VR with that VR rig would be absolutely goddamned insane.
Myst ruled because you felt like you were in another world back then. Recreate that with the tech we have to really make you feel like you're in that world.
The 2021 remake of Myst has VR support as well as the remake of Riven.
I think I own five copies of Myst now. There are at least 4 remakes/remasters. It's kind of insane.
No, I want a Myst or Riven game where I'm actually walking around the world. The VR support/remake pales in capability versus what I've seen done with actual VR games, and Myst could easily pull that off if they'd just look at the platform seriously and have some actual VR gamers to bounce ideas off of/beta test.
How much did slay the spire cost?
I am pretty sure it's not the game that is the cause of the funding trouble?
Makes me miss my old Packard Bell PB16 .. or maybe I just miss the 90's in general .. or being young.. sigh
_Dimhaven_, released just a few months ago, looks fairly Myst-like from the videos I've seen. While I haven't played it, Zadbox, the developer, also made the very Myst-like _Quern_; released 2016 and which I have played.
I can't help but think the article is a story about _Cyan's_ woes conflated with industry woes. Which isn't to say that the industry doesn't have problems! But Cyan really underperformed with _Firmament_. Look at the Kickstarter comments:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/co...
They did a rug pull on whether they would ship DVDs with the Firmament collector's boxes _after_ they had complaints about the quality of the equivalent Obduction backer reward. While they did ship a DVD for Obduction, from personal experience the box itself it came in was a bit underwhelming. I didn't care so much about packaging, but I could see how someone would, and the whole situation on this point with Firmament was a very eye-rolling "again?" scenario. The first time with Obduction that they weren't able to ship what they planned in this way was bad luck; the second time was, generously, bad planning about something that was entirely foreseeable on their part.
More details here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/38264157...
They made a bad bet on how well VR would take off, with Firmament very obviously created with VR play in mind.
So many people were disappointed with Firmament itself. "18,420 backers pledged $1,433,161 to help bring this project to life" but they can't do that again specifically because they burned a huge amount of goodwill with the people most likely to support them that way. Keep in mind that's a 2019 number and CPI adjusting would bring it up to about 1.8 million, at the lower end but solidly within the 1 to 10 million amount Wired said they were trying to raise for Anglerfish from a publisher. And _Obduction_, while beautiful, was a bit short and had its own issues.
I would also note with all the discussion of the impact of AI art on games that Cyan was an early _target_ of the anti-AI crowd over their use of AI art in Firmament. IIRC, Steam did not have a dedicated disclosure section at the time Firmament, but they did disclose it responsibly and appropriately in the credits. A more detailed statement from Cyan can still be found at https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in... -- on this, I agree with Cyan's 2023 post, we ought to be able to distinguish "AI Assisted" from AI-generated, although it seems many are allergic to such nuance.
Yes, this is definitely more an article about Cyan than it is about the Myst-like genre of games. Quern was relatively popular and it is certainly the best Myst game since Riven. Dimhaven is quite good too if a lot more linear. I think the problem is that it’s just very hard to build a satisfying puzzle game. You need brilliant puzzles and a lot of testing.
What are you talking about? I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money.
The audience won't like it because they have beef with the tools I'd choose to use, but that's a them problem, not a me problem. Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. They'll never know, I guess.
> I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money.
I don't believe you can.
Well, not for free. :-P
Still, a weekend-long indy game jam in which the contestants are expected to use AI, rather than being forbidden to use it, would be pretty interesting to see.
> Well, not for free.
You said "for practically no money". How much are we talking about here?
> weekend-long indy game jam
There was apparently one at GDC earlier this year but I couldn't find any details about the winners. I did find https://www.genjam.net, the nicest thing about which I can say is that many of the examples appear to function.
Can you name three reasonable-quality games out there like this that were definitely made in such a way? It costs only $100 to publish a game on Steam, recoupable if you meet a fairly low revenue threshold. You can publish elsewhere with no money up front (e.g. Itch). If this were actually true, and even if 90% of players would just pass based on the AI disclosure (doubtful, and also doubtful that _all_ games made this way would actually disclose it), you'd expect there to be lots of Myst quality games out there; hundred to thousands already, at least a handful of which should _already_ be successful.
Not entirely a rhetorical question. I've found any images need serious review and touch-up at a minimum and usually multiple rounds of revision. The topology on any generated 3D models is generally atrocious. TTS is not tuned for voice acting to an extent it's absolutely no good for that purpose as far I can tell, and that would be a cornerstone of any serious modern "Myst-class" adventure game. I can't comment on music and SFX in particular and have heard secondhand that current models are "all right", but imagine it's probably the same situation: no care taken, you get uselessly mid results. If it's really that easy and that cheap, I'd like to see it.
It'll happen. How could it not? It's just too soon.
Good example: watch people on /r/stablediffusion goofing around with Minimax-H3. It's clear the model can do amazing stuff including game scenes [1], but it just dropped last week so there's nothing to see yet.
If I were inclined to make the next Myst, that's what I'd start with. I'd need taste and talent (which admittedly are showstoppers in my case), but not a lot of money or skill.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1virhsf/do...
> It's just too soon
And yet you yourself said:
> I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend
Which of these am I to believe?
Let's put it this way: Myst came out in 1993, which coincides with an era in which I was very actively involved in the PC game business at a technical level. If you were playing PC games back then, you were probably running some of my code.
So yes, if we're talking "Myst class" relative to the 1993 release, I'm very confident that I could vibe-wrangle something just like it in a week, using only open models that were released within the last month or so. When I say "It's just too soon," I mean that the capabilities exist now, but they are new enough that no one has had time to do anything interesting with them. And cloning a 1993 game is not especially interesting, at least not to me.
Obviously the Myst franchise hasn't stood still since then. I don't know anything about the newer releases, so I'd have to do some hedging there. You would rightfully complain that any new Myst game that someone hacks in a week would not be competitive with the SotA. But it could certainly stand up to the original.
> Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art.
I feel like unless you've grokked that art (and most importantly art direction) is also important to communicate the game design to the player, then you clearly aren't god's gift to game design :)
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...
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> Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish.
This seems like an insane amount of capital to make a game that could be vibe coded in a few weeks