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torben-friis | on: Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones
I don't think it's a problem of copying, as much as the fact that the signals we use to identify quality are no longer working.

Clones always existed, kids chose pokemon rather than a dollar store dragomons because pokemon became a household name by the time bootlegs appeared, legitimate shops only sold pokemon and the cartridge itself showed a quality difference.

Nowadays the clone can reach people before the original, the store shows everything equally, and the sprites, videos and description can be good enough to fool people. Steam works as a platform for the purchase itself but not as a discovery mechanism, because there's no "seal of quality" you can consider (other than skipping indies entirely).

No one can review at the scale needed, and it's entirely possible for a great game to have devs that are awful at marketing and get buried. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think some kind of threshold is necessary for the shops, or at least for an optional filter.

vunderba | parent | next
Agreed. Copycatting has existed all the way back to the early Atari days. In fact, Nolan Bushnell used to talk about constantly moving on to new products in order to “eat his own babies.” Swift style.

  Always wary of “the jackals” and convinced that the only way to stay ahead of the competition was to introduce new products, Bushnell wanted to discontinue the VCS and move on to the next-generation game console. Bushnell preferred moving to new technologies rather than spending time refining old ideas and letting his competitors catch up to him. He called his philosophy “eating your own babies” and said that if Atari didn’t (eat its own babies), somebody else would.
-- Steven Kent (The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon)

The issue today is the breathtaking speed with which people can rip you off by simply pointing an agentic coding harness at your original IP and laundering it into 50 copies in the span of a single weekend.

larodi | parent
the notion of "quality" equals very much luxury for many many people... and last time I checked some 90% of the peoples of the world were not concern with it (the lux), but with making ends meet. all opportunities arising would be taken immediately, and if some kid can play a game for 5EUR and likes it, even not the certified origins, his father would not rush to get the 80EUR one (and particularly if he can afford to summon, or like prompt, something workable into existence).

same for many forms of media, and for a lot of physical objects such as luxury items fakes. and we're talking utility here, so I bet lots of people use counterfeit electric equipment because it just works.

of course then comes ingenuity and community, but copyright is so dead, that it cannot be resurrected meaningfully at all perhaps at this moment.

torben-friis | root | parent
People are not choosing AI due to money here. It's not the 80EUR, AAA games being copied, it's indies that are frequently in the same price range as the original.

What's actually happening is people buying knockoffs not knowing they're knockoffs, or no one buying those but the original being buried in the volume anyway.

As for the 'think about the non privileged', AI is a pretty poor answer for them. Once we're at a point where the person isn't able to pay for genuine stuff, they might as well go for piracy and emulators rather than a mindless knockoff. A world where the privileged are given intellectually stimulating material and the rest are fed empty slop is the worst possible scenario.