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No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

wired.com

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Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#41

Post by the__alchemist »

flohofwoe wrote: post #36
freeCandy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

> 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 ep…

Age of Empires 2 for me!

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#42

Post by nucleogenesis »

galangalalgol wrote: post #18
bob1029 wrote: post #13

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 tool…

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.

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#43

Post by picofarad »

llm_nerd wrote: post #25

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 Nor…

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#44

Post by efromvt »

the__alchemist wrote: post #24

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 confl…

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#45

Post by rufasterisco »

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.’”

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#46

Post by swiftcoder »

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#47

Post by nucleogenesis »

rdbl27 wrote: post #26
tsimionescu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#48

Post by _aavaa_ »

galangalalgol wrote: post #18
bob1029 wrote: post #13

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 tool…

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.

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#49

Post by jubilanti »

rdbl27 wrote: post #26
tsimionescu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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