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Silamoth | on: The October inflection point for vibe game development
Wow, we really do live in the worst timeline. At least a lot of gamers are rallying against generative “AI” slop assets, and indie devs are largely against generative “AI” in general. But yikes, this is just unfortunate.

I don’t want the games industry to be polluted with slop that has no soul. But also, I want opportunities for people to learn or just exist in game development via smaller projects. There is some market for web games, casual games, and generally small games. These markets can be great for indie devs and beginners. But if we lose that market to the slop machine, real people will lose a lot of these opportunities.

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tourmalinetaco | parent
It already is polluted with soulless slop, and has been for around the last decade. Even Nintendo is nothing but a slop mill. Indie is the last bastion, and I personally am happy that more people will be able to develop games and bring interesting ideas to the forefront, not to mention modding and reverse engineered will make games even more customizable.
turpentine | root | parent
People who know less and have less experience doing things they don't understand are not likely to be associated with quality output.
tourmalinetaco | root | parent
Sure, however the average game is not associated with quality output. The average game dev is not associated with quality output. Even high budget professional games like GTA VI are slop and probably have codebases that make the devs cry because of outsourcing and rushed production.

Games are not some holy monolith LLMs are encroaching on, and your favorites are not harmed because some random guy has an idea and an LLM can patch it together, even if he puts it on Steam. Even if there will be more games on Steam now of low quality, they will be easy to filter and the good games will rise to the top as it always does.

Besides, some of the most beloved games are inefficient, low quality dumpster fires by any professional programming standard. Just look at Bethesda games, or Roblox in the youth department.

The quality ship sailed when the consoles became locked down PCs and speeds were high enough that uncompressed assets could be streamed directly to the rendering pipeline and the devs could just yell “POOR” if your PC didn’t run it. It’s been dead so long we don’t even know where the bones are anymore because we didn’t put a grave marker.