Welcome to The Results Screen, a series in which I just rant and rave about things in the industry that have caught my eye. Today, it’s the rampant increase in AI used in Video Games.
AI has unfortunately seeped into many facets of everyday life, and it's hit in a big way in the Games industry. The Eastern Market seems to have embraced it wholesale with even legendary Dragon Quest artist N singing its praises. In the West, Tim Sweeney of Epic Games has been banging the drum of the AI revolution. It recently came out that Epic's Disney/Star Wars shooter was abandoning manual coding altogether in favour of AI code. The Epic Store also received a "Vibe Coded" speed update (Which Valve and Steam bettered like a day after) that Tim was all too pleased with himself about.
"Vibe Coding" to my understanding is the process of just describing into your AI of choice what you want and it churning it out. That's a bit of a simplification but that's the general idea. This is the behind the scenes of various videos you may have seen on Twitter and TikTok of Minecraft in Elden Ring for example. They're a fun novelty but not when you think about how it's being made. It's especially bad when you consider more interesting things like original mods that put James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2 into Tony Hawk Pro Skater or Solaire from Dark Souls in. These new slop mods feel like the video of the Doom Guy fighting an Abyss Watcher outside of Peach's Castle with none of the self awareness. Asha Sharma, Xbox's new favourite figurehead has recently announced Xbox Labs, a team dedicated to exploring this technology. It didn't take long for the ex AI head to go back on her promise of not introducing AI into the XBOX ecosystem.
It extends beyond mods and demonstrations. Steam holds an event at least twice a year known as 'Next Fest' where the focus is on the demo's for all kinds of different game with the point being both discoverability for developers and players. Thanks to the rise of Vibe Coding, the number of demos in the October Next Fest has doubled to roughly 8000 from the event in Spring, with a whole lot of it being AI Slop. It's gotten so bad that I've seen a few indie developers pulling their public demos in favour of private playtests so the concept isn't stolen and published on the cheap or as Roblox game in a week.
I suppose it’s inevitable with the technology but it’s my sincerest hope that this trend ends sooner rather than later, and that regular creativity and hard work prevail in this industry and all others.
