VoterFrog

Did Starfield only cost 4x as much to make as HiFi? Doubt it. I’d bet the marketing budget of Starfield alone dwarfed the lifetime cost of HiFi. I agree that “bombed” is maybe too harsh but the problem that the article is talking about is ROI. As I continues to balloon, R needs to keep up and it’s not.

Yeah there’s definitely some overlap. Lots of dark UX is used for enshittification but sometimes enshittification is just plainly bold bad UX for the sake of making money with a hint of “Yeah it’s bad. What are you going to do about it?”

On the other hand, enshittification is part of a cycle that starts with a service that grows dominant at least in part by providing a great experience, only to tear that experience down when it gets in the way of making money. Dark UX isn’t always part of that cycle. Plenty of services of all sizes use these patterns right from the start. Not really accurate to call it “enshittification” when it was always just shit.

There’s a kind of qualitative difference between a game that was built to be played and later has DLC released for it and a game that is essentially built as a DLC platform. The latter has become extremely common in AAA games and it winds up feeling incomplete because the insertion points for planned DLC are usually quite noticable.

The logger analogy is a misunderstanding of what people with a degree in CS do. Most become software engineers. They’re not loggers, they’re architects who occasionally have to cut their own logs.

They’ve spent decades reducing the amount of time they have to spend logging only to be continually outpaced by the growth of demand from businesses and complexity of the end product. I don’t think we’ve reached a peak there yet, if anything the capabilities of AI are opening up even more demand for even more software.

But, ultimately, coding is only a fraction of the job and any halfway decent CS program teaches programming as a means to practice computer science and software engineering. Even when an AI gets to the point that it can produce solid code from the English language, it has a ways to go before replacing a software engineer.

One thing that’s for sure: tons of business owners will get richer and pay fewer workers. I think we’re going to have to face a reckoning as we reach the limits of what capitalism can sustain. But it’s also unpredictable because AI opens up new opportunities for everyone else as well.

I’d say that this kind of technology lowers the cost of production enough to see those kinds of quality visuals more widely. There’s a lot of rote technical effort that goes into even a single CCG card. Having a generative AI that can take care of those parts frees the artist up to focus on the parts of the art that really stand out to you. That means more quality art, for cheaper, which means more games will feature it.

they want to leverage a mind-like thing (either a human brain or a trained AI) that has internalized a ton off content that it can use to generate new content from, but they don’t ever want to pay them or treat them like a living being.

That’s anybody, really. Everything you’ve ever accomplished has depended upon the insights and knowledge of countless other people who never saw a dime from you for it. That’s part of living in a society and it’s a crucial part of how it advances.

Or maybe it’s simply a false equivalence we all need to accept. Maybe creativity can exist independent from a conscious brain, or maybe it’s just a vulnerability in human consciousness to look at these stochastic arrangements of data and say “that looks inspired”.

I think that most of the value we get from creativity isn’t from the mechanics of creating something. And I think that by removing the mechanical barrier, we unlock that value much more widely across humanity. Art is a form of communication. Will we ever feel the same connection when that communication comes wholesale from an AI? I don’t know. But we’re certainly not there yet.

I’d like to chime in the point out that the vast majority of employed artists aren’t making anything as creative as cover art for a hobbyist board game. If they’re lucky, they’re doing illustrations for Barbie Monopoly or working on some other uncreative cash grab. More likely, they’re doing incredibly bland corporate graphic design. And if you ask me, the less of humanity’s time we dedicate to bullshit like that, the better.

Professionals will spend more of their time concerned with higher order functions like composition and direction. More indies and small businesses will be empowered to create things without the added expense. And consumers will be able to afford more stuff with higher quality visuals.

Frankly, it’s an absurd question. Has Polygon obtained consent from all of the artists for the works used by its own human artists as inspiration or reference? Of course not. To claim that any use of an image to train or influence a human user is stealing is to warp the definition of the word beyond any recognition. Copyright doesn’t give you exclusive ownership over broad thematic elements of your work because, if it did, there’d be no such thing as an art trend.

Then what’s the studio having its name dragged through the mud for? For using a computer to speed up development? Is that a standard that Polygon wants to live up to as well?