Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 151 posts

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#31

Post by CuriouslyC »

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…

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#32

Post by the__alchemist »

ramesh31 wrote: post #29
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…

>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…

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#33

Post by ungovernableCat »

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.

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#34

Post by paulcole »

volkk wrote: post #19
sgt wrote: post #11

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.

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!

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.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#35

Post by danaris »

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.

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.)

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#36

Post by flohofwoe »

freeCandy wrote: post #28
sgt wrote: post #11

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 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 episodes of the same 'forever game' with updated graphics but the same gameplay.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#37

Post by picofarad »

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.

That doesn't seem to follow.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#38

Post by matusp »

volkk wrote: post #19
sgt wrote: post #11

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.

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!

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?

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#39

Post by semiquaver »

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.

Because people can tell the difference between AI art and human art. Not true for logic unless you are incompetent.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#40

Post by layer8 »

zabzonk wrote: post #16

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.
Post reply on HN