Is This Really The Future You Want?

[u/Kamsimation]

This is what happens when there's no regulation

[u/Bruoche]

People need to learn something can both be low quality AND oversaturate a market in a way that hurt higher quality product.

If your game takes five years to develop, it doesn't matter the clone is shittier, it'll get 5 years of enjoying profits off the game without having to worry about competing with you, because your game simply isn't out.

I think these low quality clones benefits neither consumer or the indie devs

[u/Material-Watercress1 → u/Bruoche]

We need to admit that there is some market appetite for slop

[u/Bruoche → u/Material-Watercress1]

There is always a market for easy content, for a lot of reason. I still wouldn't say it's good...

[u/Lurker_Zee → u/Bruoche]

People need to learn Schrödinger's victim.

It's bad when we say it is.

But it is also good enough to make us look like the victims, when we say it is. As long as you remember it's bad all the time, comrade.

[u/Bruoche → u/Lurker_Zee]

You're just repeating what the comment I'm answering to said without addressing my point....

[u/Lurker_Zee → u/Bruoche]

Your point is hypocritical.

Your point says "Believe this thing that I want you to believe, but also believe that it has an exception that hurts me, and cry for me."

Why? Because you say it?

No, it's a victim fallacy and I am not impressed.

[u/Bruoche → u/Lurker_Zee]

My comment is specifically saying it isn't an exception.

That's the very reason consumer laws exists : something can be shitty and yet profitable.

If you have a bunch of low quality games flooding all markets, it adds friction to finding good games and thus hurt said good games by borrowing them in trash.

Take for example reaction channels like SSSniperWolf. It's trash. Yet it is profitable and hurts creator by using their content without credit.

[u/Clageo → u/Lurker_Zee]

This is what zero reading comprehension does to someone

[u/schattig_eenhoorntje → u/Bruoche]

What are you developing for 5 years?

AI speeds the development up, so no game needs 5 years to produce. Both legit indie devs and copycats get a speed boost.

If making a game takes you a lot of time (let's say a year), it must contain some very non-trivial mechanics handled by non-trivial code because all the easy stuff is very fast to make with AI. In this case, AI wouldn't be able to replicate that.

[u/Bruoche → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

5 year is too long for the type of games AI would replicate, that's fair.

Even then, the most extreme case I can think of is stuff like mecha chameleon with 2 month of dev, and even then I'd expect they would loose a lot of sales were they cloned heavily before arrival.

How long did the popularity of mecha chameleon last? A few months at most, hardly more then even their extremely short development period of 2 months. If everyone had their hand on a clunkier version before, most people would have had their fill by the time the game comes out and I don't expect many would have converted back to buying it to play a slightly more polished version then the game they already got bored with.

And that's for commercial games. 5 year is very long for a team full time but many indies are hobbyists and solo. Multiple years is common for any fully fledged projects. Between inexperience, being spread thin with other duties and the sheer amount of work there is it does take time to make a good polished game.

We often talk about the 20/80 rule, 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, churning out features with or without AI is very easy, but those last 20% of polish take actually 80% of your time. It's easy to add a weapon that targets multiple ennemies in a RPG, but what if the player select the border with part of the select area having no ennemies? How to handle status effects that trigger on hit? What if an ennemy has multiple limbs to target?

Then you need to add sprite for it, make it good, then export it, then import it in your files, hook it to the game, make sound effects, make them right, mix them, try them in context, edit, export, import, hook, make the code giving text and descriptions and stuff, link all of it to new keys for locale files, write it all in each languages, maybe throw animations for the weapon, and so on...

I'm myself working on just a text game and content alone takes so long because there's always more details to polish everywhere all the time, little edge case you didn't think about, little juice to add, assets to make, it all takes time and adds up for every little detail.

Sure you can slop your way through in a couple of hour and get a tech demo, my first prototype took less then a week, but game design, polishing, balancing, asset creation, hooking things up, debugging, writing, and so on are all essential if you care about making a good game and will just takes time no matter what.

[u/13MasonJarsUpMyAss → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

there are games that will take over five years, even with good AI assistance. take Dwarf Fortress, for example. Assuming they had access to a current frontier level LLM since 2002, the game probably would have taken them ten years to get to its current state

[u/Bruoche → u/13MasonJarsUpMyAss]

Exanima is another extreme example, to think it's supposed to just be a stepping stone to a bigger project too...