120
"The 'AI Stigma' is real and severely punishes developers": A new study shows how much using AI in games hurts sales, and the numbers are hard to believe (www.windowscentral.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.ml
69 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8882542

It's a different story for the more established studios with an existing following and previous titles. Game Oracle found that the use of AI by these studios resulted in a significant 40% to 60% drop in sales.

That's a huge difference. AI stigma seems to hit competent developers with a lot to lose the hardest, and I'm not sure that game studios are ready to accept it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I’m a game developer of 14 years. It is not “the best thing to happen.” However, it is providing significant benefit in a low risk environment to make projects insanely fast.

While AI art may have a stigma, and rightfully so, I don’t see a future where humans write code manually as a regular occurrence. I expect the majority of code will be AI written. There’s a number of reasons why, and I’ve talked about this elsewhere on lemmy & .ml. I think the toothpaste is out, and it’s not going back in, at least here.

I really wish people would change this conversation to “How do we/society get our just deserts from this situation?” Rather than “IT’S ALL BAD.” They stole all our stuff. They’ve admitted to it. Okay, tech bros, then it’s the tools of the people. Or we get money back, especially so if you live near a data center.

I’ve been able to make prototypes of projects I’ve dreamt about in an insanely short time at pretty low costs. That’s good enough for me.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Every coworker I've seen that uses AI code tools heavily is bad. They produce (or at least push) nonsense code they don't understand.

    I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they're building than a team of excitable slop pushers going a thousand lines a second.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago*

    I think that a lot of the issue behind AI is profit motive. If that was removed from the equation, AI could be a really useful tool for development. But the fact that the main usecase at every company is "go faster so line goes up" gets in the way of that.

    The other issue is efficiency. Burning down a rainforest to make a stupid banking app isn't very appealing to me. But if we could work to make generative AI more efficient at what it does, and transition to consumer ownership of compute/hardware, it might be more feasible. That's a long ways off, and I don't think the powers that be want that future.

    I use AI every day at work. We built an entire orchestration framework on top of Claude Code. It features skills that can pull in a jira ticket with well defined acceptance criteria and complete it without very much human intervention at all. We've built out entire epics and our QA team has not seen an uptick in defects. This is because we all still do manual code reviews in addition to AI reviews. We even have a skill that checks AC against the PR diff to make sure we're meeting AC before it gets to QA. AI does make our team more efficient.

    But at what cost? None of us are learning anything about coding. I feel more burnt out than I ever have. It's an environment nightmare. It is a moral/ethical nightmare. Finally, none of us are seeing any additional compensation for improving efficiency. That compensation is going to Anthropic.

    There is a world where AI can be a net benefit to the world, but it isn't our current one.

    I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they're building

    TL;DR I basically agree lol

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] -3 points 2 months ago* (3 children)

    I understand what you’re saying, but you’re talking about real world examples rather than the mechanics at play.

    Let’s said you have the best engineer in the world. They are fantastic as describing nuanced, complex ideas. The fastest they can write is about 300 words per minute. The fastest they can read is 1200 words per minute.

    Put them up against an AI model. They write at 6000 wpm & read at like 11 mil or something ridiculous.

    Now, you’re making the argument, “Speed isn’t everything!” and that’s true. Which would rather you have, though: the same engineer, the AI, or the same engineer using the AI? I’d argue you’d rather have them both, because you have someone who can describe what they want in depth, they can point it towards heuristics or targets, and they can setup evals or governance strategies to better control the output.

    I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I work with competent, smart people. My experiences have been the opposite. 🤷

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    The problem has never ever ever been words per minute. That is a completely irrelevant metric. A distraction.

    Anything the AI produces is going to need to be evaluated by a person, and that is a more difficult, less rewarding task.

    And if it doesn't need to be reviewed by a person because it's magically flawless, that's extremely anti-labor so fuck that.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (2 children)

    How are you talking about the mechanics at play when the price of tokens isn't a part of your discussion?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    There’s many facets to it, including token costs, the risk of captured markets, more “win more” economics.

    Right now, this stuff is insanely cheap as a solo dev who isn’t making a bunch of autonomous agent API calls. Nearly all my interactions are working with an agent to make a game or project. I’m not attempting to, nor interested in, yet another AI service based company.

    I work at a reasonable pace, usually 1 conversation is my focus with actual work, whereas another agent may be doing research or documentation. Too many things in motion turns into a mess to test or validate. Solve one issue at a time. I don’t hit token limits, and I’m making good progress.

    When I read stories of people being inefficient or wasteful, yeah, that’s sad, don’t do that. I feel reasonably efficient & the cost is really low (for me/lifestyle). I use the $20/mon Claude subscription for my personal.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    I'm a senior engineer of 10+ years. I do not, nor will I ever, use AI to write code. Fuck that shit. It makes everything worse in countless ways. So much garbage I have to deal with at work now because of it, and it absolutely has made no difference in velocity. I take that back actually, it's slowed things down because now there's a lot more "what the fuck is this shit" reviews I have to do now, which just slows everything down. Like just the other day where someone on my team submitted a MR where the AI wrote a pre-commit hook that ran a script to parse the source code of our entire monorepo to scan for occurrences of a few functions to make sure they weren't used.

    I have to deal with so many "ideas" now that no sane person would ever come up with, because they are fucking stupid.

    Oh, and I can't tell you how many times I've had to tell people to remove absolutely useless tests from MRs. It's almost a joke at this point.

    The good news it's already starting to get way too expensive to keep on like this and management is finally starting to feel the pain, so I doubt it really has much legs left. It always comes down to money, in the end, and this shit isn't cheap and will only continue to skyrocket in price as the wildly unprofitable AI companies run out of money and need to start showing profitability.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent