Back in June, we shared that while our goal continues to be shipping as many games as possible on Steam, we needed some time to learn about the fast-moving and legally murky space of AI technology, especially given Steam's worldwide reach. Today, after spending the last few months learning more abou...
Well... Who's ready for an endless stream of low quality AI asset flips?
We've already seen what AI-generated books have done to platforms like Amazon. I suspect that this will eventually be the end of "open" uncurated digital storefronts, since AI will eventually allow for crappy content to be produced at a faster rate than it can be consumed and it'll become impossible to discover anything worthwhile.
There are also good stuff done with AI, for example there is this game called Suck Up where you are a vampire and you go door to door trying to get people to let you in. People you are trying to convince are basically chatbots and it works a lot better than you'd expect
I am not sure whether AI will make the creation of asset flips much easier though, given that store bought assets are already being dropped into a 'game' already.
There are only a finite number of easily purchasable game dev assets out there, but in theory there is a nearly infinite of assets that can be generated by AI.
Mark my words, soon we're gonna be inundated with lot of really shitty, mostly AI-generated games by con artists trying to make a quick buck.
AI struggles to make a complete, composite product. This is the limit on game creation as it is anyway, not number of assets available to steal/download/buy. There are thousands of options for near-complete games out there that can be easily customized further with the millions of art assets out there as it is.
Even then, Steam isn't completely without moderation. It's been possible to automate the creation of asset flips for a while (and we've seen it done plenty of mobile), but Steam makes some effort to remove the lowest quality games and make it ineffective to publish low-quality shovelware. AI is still quite a ways off from being even remotely faster or more effective than just buying a template and filling in the resources with cheap or free assets.
Why take already created assets if you can generate everything the way you want it? I found lumalabs.ai yesterday wich makes text to 3D. Right now it could be a good base for someone to generate an idea of the final product and then have a 3D artist re-do them in more details for the final project or just clean them up a bit.