Comment by Johanx64
2 days ago
"Normal" people will just buy the game if it's good.
So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales pitch and not part of decision making process when making the purchase.
There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could care less, except the people outlined above.
"Normal" people already hate AI being chowed down their throat. The won't mind AI, when it doesn't feel like AI. As soon as it does, that is a bad not a good feature.
By your own admission its not irrelevant, there are a small group of people who do care about that kind of thing on either side. For an indie dev, that matters. AAA studios can pretty much guarantee at least a few thousand sales, indie devs, especially the less established ones, have far less. For first timers, there'll be none at all.
The thing is though, appealing to the pro-AI crowd is much more difficult. They want a game thats a shining example of what AI can be in gaming. The anti-AI crowd doesn't need that, they've got examples of that for decades. A few AI generated voice lines won't do much to appeal to the pro-AI crowd.
Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd" (whatever the fuck that even means) when they use AI tools.
If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI generation, they are doing so to save costs or work around their very limited budget. Or using it to work around some limitations where voicecasting every line would be infeasible, etc.
And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen is not a loss at all.
Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming increasingly prevalent.
> Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd"
Oh yes they are, there's a lot of games (or at least, promises of future games) that promise to be 100% vibe-coded or that make heavy use of AI in a way thats very prominent to the player. There was an example just last week:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3730100/Whispers_from_the...
> And losing the small portion of the vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are, wasnt part of their audience to begin with), is not a loss at all.
That seems like a very different crowd to me. I've been around the industry long enough to see the signs of that, and I don't see that much from the anti-ai crowd, or at least not in any more significant numbers. See: the project zomboid AI art issue
But like I say, for an indie, yes losing a small audience can still be a big loss.
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