$70 million on gpu cluster + $21 million yearly on employee AI tools and training. They could fund 21 $1 million indie games per year with zero expectations, but no push the money to the slop and get nothing in return. Fuck them.
Some early adopters are going to lose big. The technology and techniques necessary to get AI accurate enough for production is not mature/is still rapidly developing.
AgenTic, not Agenic. As in, an AI that acts as your agent. Meaning, the goal would be to have an AI model that you could direct to perform certain tasks in the background while you focus on other things.
For example, youre in the middle of doing something or another when you remember that your oil change is due. You pull up KraftonAI and tell it to “book me a service appointment for my vehicle at the dealership this weekend”. The AI proceeds to work on that task in the background, only prompting you for input if it meets a road block it doesn’t understand.
I mean, that’s the goal of all of these AI companies. If you peruse any marketing material for Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT, Grok, etc. they almost all mention the “agentic capabilities” of their flavor of spyware.
Personally, an AI model which is capable of doing tasks like this would actually interest me. However, no organization (for profit or otherwise) is trustworthy enough to have access to all of the data on me that it would take to make an agentic AI actually useful, so, for me, it would have to be something I run locally. However, rather than invest all of the time, effort, and money into learning how to make that happen, I think I’ll just call the damn dealership and schedule an appointment. I may suffer from terminally online brain rot, but I’m not so paralyzed by human interaction I can’t make the occasional phone call.
Bruh, I still haven’t bought the first game because I don’t wanna give money to Microsoft… now I won’t buy the sequel because I don’t wanna give money to Krafton. Madness.
Good news! You’re allowed to skip them and instead play the hundreds to thousands of older games you’d surely love, but that slipped under your radar at the time. Plenty to hold us over until publishers and studios learn their lesson.
There will always be passionate developers eager to put down the work and make good games. There will be a lot of shit they will try to shovel down our throats, but it’s just as easy to ignore it.
I think it will go the way of the NFT. People who don’t understand tech will hype it beyond belief and then the actual developers will go “this is useless” and not use it.
Well, maybe not exactly like NFTs because NFTs were actually useless while AI looks like it might have some actual niche use.
honestly for most people i feel like AI has already a solidified use, “the magic thing that answers all your questions and generates pretty pictures*”
compare that to NFTs which had strictly no use for the average person. i think what we’re seeing with AI is quite different
will the hype maintain itself when the AI bubble bursts, the VC money dries up, free options get removed and paid options significantly ramp up in price? that remains to be seen
*(the fact that the answers and pictures are often garbage is irrelevant. as long as they’re good enough often enough, it has value to many people)
Once the VC funding is gone and AI companies need to become profitable, I don’t see myself as an individual paying for some LLM, at best I’d try to setup a free LLM like deep seek on local hardware, but maybe corporations might pay for AI access for their employees if they think it provides some benefits, even if that’s not really true in the long run
Not saying krafton deserves the benefit of the doubt but:
Understand that “agentic AI” is almost entirely a buzzword that means “Microservices with an LLM somewhere in the mix”. Which… is what people are already doing.
Yes, there are some (idiots) who think that means EVERY single node in the graph needs to be an LLM and fuck the planet, Jensen needs a new zipper. But, by and large, what that means is they are using the exact same infrastructure they were last week but MAYBE added an LLM for preprocessing or postprocessing. It makes management happy because “We are using AI” and it makes everyone else happy because they can keep using the tools that actually work.
The general “gold standard” for game AI uses (My background is Unreal so) pathnodes. Little blips that indicate where an NPC should be and that get built into a graph. That graph represents the paths NPCs can take. You add special pathnodes to indicate an interactives and weight the paths to prioritize routes. So imagine if you had the heaviest weight pathnodes on the streets of a town, lower weight nodes for alleyways, and very low weight nodes for a path through a swamp in case of emergency.
Now realize that many textures and assets have those baked in these days. That road texture? That is a path with “road” weight.
What benefit would AI provide for that? None. Because you would just be computing this “live” rather than offline.
As for interactives ? Again, you can bake that into the asset itself. That apple tree has an interaction to check if there is an apple and, if you are hungry, eat it.
Again, why take that online if you don’t have to?
Then you have the idea of NPC schedules. In theory, you can give each NPC a job and they can find food and blah blah blah blah. We already did that. It was called The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. At the best of times, it was indistinguishable from just giving an NPC a schedule corresponding to a work day. The rest of the time, it was complete stupidity as people would walk five blocks for an apple. and they mostly forgot/overwrote their actual jobs (outside of the ones who were hardcoded… which were most of them).
This is one of those “holy grail” ideas that people think of to sell the idea. But you invariably end up with the Star Citizen bar tender where mostly it just breaks and the interactions people expect are the same ones we have been dealing with for decades. Asking Sam Malone for some weed is funny but it isn’t anything you are going to do while playing a game (outside of youtube content). You roll up, buy a drink, ask for some info, and leave.
As for dialogue trees? Need I remind everyone of Darth Vader’s penchant for slurs? Because that is what you get.
Mostly this is like a LOT of applications for AI. People want to replace humans. They end up making something MUCH more fragile than what those humans have been making for decades and then need to allocate resources to update the prompts when a new model drops and so forth.
Versus just continuing to bake pathnodes into a road texture and setting a property on that vacuum cleaner asset and so forth.
I would argue it is more similar to the last few bubbles for this same kind of tech.
A decade or so the big deal was computer vision (think “recognize stuff through the power of AI”). Massive promises were made, a LOT of people specialized in glorified signal processing, and then it mostly faded away when it didn’t live up to the hype.
Except… a significant percentage of the smart home industry is all about paying money to have your video feeds analyzed for people. Same with image hosting services and so forth. Hell, youtube runs on it for DMCA purposes.
And we’re going to see the same thing with “AI” yet again. People will realize chatgpt isn’t going to suddenly manifest itself as Stana Katic and suck you off while telling you you are ten times the man Malcolm Reynolds ever was. But it really does do a lot of “admin work” and is one of the best tools out there for text based pre and post processing of human readable data.
Wild. Sounds like Subnautica 2 dodged a bullet. Hope they sue the literal pants off them and then build the spiritual-Subnautica-2 we all always wanted with the damages awarded and the Early Access money that they know we’re going to give them the moment they announce it.
And RIP Inzoi, we barely knew you before you got infested with AI bullshit and it sounds like that’s only going to accelerate to hyperspeed now.
Inzoi was dead on arrival in terms of quality already. It’s so half baked and barebones the AI crap only served as the moldy cherry on top. Some players have pointed out it was obviously a K-Pop idol simulator before they marketed it as a Sims game. There are still a number of interactions in that AI slop for an excuse of a game that only make sense in this context. Oh well, luckily we live in the golden age of Indie games and don‘t have to put up with this.
Ehh, I wasn’t worried about that until the AI stuff happened. Even a K-Pop idol simulator would’ve been an interesting start. Filling in the content to a level that creates compelling stories and gameplay takes time. It takes years of expansions for Sims games to start getting decent levels of content and stop feeling soulless and shiny and bland compared to the previous game (arguably Sims 4 hasn’t even gotten there yet but that’s more of a Sims 4 problem).
Once Inzoi started trying to fill in the content with AI they thought they could rely on that to shortcut their way to success but I knew it wasn’t going to work. It needs the human touch, it’s gotta be quirky and have its own individual character. K-Pop idol might’ve been exactly what it needed to stand out if they had leaned on that instead of trying to fill in the gaps in content with bland and soulless AI, which is exactly what life sim games DON’T ever need more of.
I don‘t think a K-Pop simulator would‘ve sold very well. Especially not in the west because a lot of it seemingly revolved around romantic relationships and keeping them secret at all cost. Even as little as being seen with the opposite sex in public is career suicide for an idol. That seems like a tough pitch for a game tbh.
I’m not going to pretend I can judge its potential for commercial success, I’m just saying I think that hypothetical K-pop idol game would’ve been a more interesting game than Inzoi is currently or seems likely to ever be in the future I see for it now. That said, I’m not dying on this particular hill and I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about it so if you think I’m wrong about that you’re totally entitled to that point of view and I’m not going to try to defend my beliefs any further, I think I’ve said all I could possibly have to say about Inzoi at this point. Where the game goes from here is something which reality will eventually tell us, but I’m not optimistic about it.
I can see your point, though I belief it would probably be as superficial and soulless as an idol game as it is now. But I completely agree it‘s not a hill worth dying on. Inzoi in it‘s current form is a bit of a disaster and it will probably stay that way.
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And these companies wonder why all the good games this year came from indie developers.
I guess the original Subnautica was lightning in a bottle, maybe someday another studio will make a game that feels like Subnautica
$70 million on gpu cluster + $21 million yearly on employee AI tools and training. They could fund 21 $1 million indie games per year with zero expectations, but no push the money to the slop and get nothing in return. Fuck them.
The company in Sub zero being bought out by Altera as a literally cry for help for the subnautica franchise.
Some early adopters are going to lose big. The technology and techniques necessary to get AI accurate enough for production is not mature/is still rapidly developing.
Wondering what they meant by “agenic” AI, I looked up the definition of agenic. It is “relating to agenesis.”
Okay, so I look up agenesis. “Any imperfect development of the body, or any anomaly of organization.”
…
Yeah, so I’m still wondering what they meant by agenic AI.
AgenTic, not Agenic. As in, an AI that acts as your agent. Meaning, the goal would be to have an AI model that you could direct to perform certain tasks in the background while you focus on other things.
For example, youre in the middle of doing something or another when you remember that your oil change is due. You pull up KraftonAI and tell it to “book me a service appointment for my vehicle at the dealership this weekend”. The AI proceeds to work on that task in the background, only prompting you for input if it meets a road block it doesn’t understand.
That’s even worse than I thought.
I mean, that’s the goal of all of these AI companies. If you peruse any marketing material for Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT, Grok, etc. they almost all mention the “agentic capabilities” of their flavor of spyware.
Personally, an AI model which is capable of doing tasks like this would actually interest me. However, no organization (for profit or otherwise) is trustworthy enough to have access to all of the data on me that it would take to make an agentic AI actually useful, so, for me, it would have to be something I run locally. However, rather than invest all of the time, effort, and money into learning how to make that happen, I think I’ll just call the damn dealership and schedule an appointment. I may suffer from terminally online brain rot, but I’m not so paralyzed by human interaction I can’t make the occasional phone call.
Subnautica 2 is so screwed.
Hi-Fi Rush 2 is so screwed.
Bruh, I still haven’t bought the first game because I don’t wanna give money to Microsoft… now I won’t buy the sequel because I don’t wanna give money to Krafton. Madness.
Last Epoch is so screwed.
Ohhhh so this is what they stole the Subnautica devs bonus for.
It all makes sense now.
And I will continue to not play their games.
We are going to have a new generation of games that are really gonna suck!
Good news! You’re allowed to skip them and instead play the hundreds to thousands of older games you’d surely love, but that slipped under your radar at the time. Plenty to hold us over until publishers and studios learn their lesson.
If it’s AI, don’t buy.
There will always be passionate developers eager to put down the work and make good games. There will be a lot of shit they will try to shovel down our throats, but it’s just as easy to ignore it.
I don’t really mind if AI is used in a crafty sort of way. But let’s be honest here, that never happens.
I think it will go the way of the NFT. People who don’t understand tech will hype it beyond belief and then the actual developers will go “this is useless” and not use it.
Well, maybe not exactly like NFTs because NFTs were actually useless while AI looks like it might have some actual niche use.
honestly for most people i feel like AI has already a solidified use, “the magic thing that answers all your questions and generates pretty pictures*”
compare that to NFTs which had strictly no use for the average person. i think what we’re seeing with AI is quite different
will the hype maintain itself when the AI bubble bursts, the VC money dries up, free options get removed and paid options significantly ramp up in price? that remains to be seen
*(the fact that the answers and pictures are often garbage is irrelevant. as long as they’re good enough often enough, it has value to many people)
Once the VC funding is gone and AI companies need to become profitable, I don’t see myself as an individual paying for some LLM, at best I’d try to setup a free LLM like deep seek on local hardware, but maybe corporations might pay for AI access for their employees if they think it provides some benefits, even if that’s not really true in the long run
So this is what the money was for ‽‽ Not even proper AI, but an “Agentic AI” ‽
Fuck you krafton. Rest in pieces.
Not saying krafton deserves the benefit of the doubt but:
Understand that “agentic AI” is almost entirely a buzzword that means “Microservices with an LLM somewhere in the mix”. Which… is what people are already doing.
Yes, there are some (idiots) who think that means EVERY single node in the graph needs to be an LLM and fuck the planet, Jensen needs a new zipper. But, by and large, what that means is they are using the exact same infrastructure they were last week but MAYBE added an LLM for preprocessing or postprocessing. It makes management happy because “We are using AI” and it makes everyone else happy because they can keep using the tools that actually work.
Honestly, NPC behavior would be a really good application for a specifically trained model
It really wouldn’t.
The general “gold standard” for game AI uses (My background is Unreal so) pathnodes. Little blips that indicate where an NPC should be and that get built into a graph. That graph represents the paths NPCs can take. You add special pathnodes to indicate an interactives and weight the paths to prioritize routes. So imagine if you had the heaviest weight pathnodes on the streets of a town, lower weight nodes for alleyways, and very low weight nodes for a path through a swamp in case of emergency.
Now realize that many textures and assets have those baked in these days. That road texture? That is a path with “road” weight.
What benefit would AI provide for that? None. Because you would just be computing this “live” rather than offline.
As for interactives ? Again, you can bake that into the asset itself. That apple tree has an interaction to check if there is an apple and, if you are hungry, eat it.
Again, why take that online if you don’t have to?
Then you have the idea of NPC schedules. In theory, you can give each NPC a job and they can find food and blah blah blah blah. We already did that. It was called The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. At the best of times, it was indistinguishable from just giving an NPC a schedule corresponding to a work day. The rest of the time, it was complete stupidity as people would walk five blocks for an apple. and they mostly forgot/overwrote their actual jobs (outside of the ones who were hardcoded… which were most of them).
This is one of those “holy grail” ideas that people think of to sell the idea. But you invariably end up with the Star Citizen bar tender where mostly it just breaks and the interactions people expect are the same ones we have been dealing with for decades. Asking Sam Malone for some weed is funny but it isn’t anything you are going to do while playing a game (outside of youtube content). You roll up, buy a drink, ask for some info, and leave.
As for dialogue trees? Need I remind everyone of Darth Vader’s penchant for slurs? Because that is what you get.
Mostly this is like a LOT of applications for AI. People want to replace humans. They end up making something MUCH more fragile than what those humans have been making for decades and then need to allocate resources to update the prompts when a new model drops and so forth.
Versus just continuing to bake pathnodes into a road texture and setting a property on that vacuum cleaner asset and so forth.
This is so similar to the dotcom boom where people overestimated the technology and how quickly we would achieve the promised goals.
Half of the shit promised in the 90’s only came about in the early 10’s after literal decades of building the infrastructure.
I don’t think it’ll completely go away but people will eventually figure out it’s no magic bullet and it’ll see significantly less investment.
I would argue it is more similar to the last few bubbles for this same kind of tech.
A decade or so the big deal was computer vision (think “recognize stuff through the power of AI”). Massive promises were made, a LOT of people specialized in glorified signal processing, and then it mostly faded away when it didn’t live up to the hype.
Except… a significant percentage of the smart home industry is all about paying money to have your video feeds analyzed for people. Same with image hosting services and so forth. Hell, youtube runs on it for DMCA purposes.
And we’re going to see the same thing with “AI” yet again. People will realize chatgpt isn’t going to suddenly manifest itself as Stana Katic and suck you off while telling you you are ten times the man Malcolm Reynolds ever was. But it really does do a lot of “admin work” and is one of the best tools out there for text based pre and post processing of human readable data.
It’s really useful for troubleshooting unfamiliar devices if you have a PDF of the documentation.
Beyond surface level troubleshooting it’s mostly for parsing large amounts of text for relevant information
I knew this game was fucked when they changed the name from PUBG to PUBG: Battlegrounds.
You don’t like Public Unknown’s BattleGrounds: Battlegrounds? Smh my head.
PlayerUnknown’s*
Ur are right, the joke stands tho.
Wild. Sounds like Subnautica 2 dodged a bullet. Hope they sue the literal pants off them and then build the spiritual-Subnautica-2 we all always wanted with the damages awarded and the Early Access money that they know we’re going to give them the moment they announce it.
And RIP Inzoi, we barely knew you before you got infested with AI bullshit and it sounds like that’s only going to accelerate to hyperspeed now.
Inzoi was dead on arrival in terms of quality already. It’s so half baked and barebones the AI crap only served as the moldy cherry on top. Some players have pointed out it was obviously a K-Pop idol simulator before they marketed it as a Sims game. There are still a number of interactions in that AI slop for an excuse of a game that only make sense in this context. Oh well, luckily we live in the golden age of Indie games and don‘t have to put up with this.
Ehh, I wasn’t worried about that until the AI stuff happened. Even a K-Pop idol simulator would’ve been an interesting start. Filling in the content to a level that creates compelling stories and gameplay takes time. It takes years of expansions for Sims games to start getting decent levels of content and stop feeling soulless and shiny and bland compared to the previous game (arguably Sims 4 hasn’t even gotten there yet but that’s more of a Sims 4 problem).
Once Inzoi started trying to fill in the content with AI they thought they could rely on that to shortcut their way to success but I knew it wasn’t going to work. It needs the human touch, it’s gotta be quirky and have its own individual character. K-Pop idol might’ve been exactly what it needed to stand out if they had leaned on that instead of trying to fill in the gaps in content with bland and soulless AI, which is exactly what life sim games DON’T ever need more of.
I don‘t think a K-Pop simulator would‘ve sold very well. Especially not in the west because a lot of it seemingly revolved around romantic relationships and keeping them secret at all cost. Even as little as being seen with the opposite sex in public is career suicide for an idol. That seems like a tough pitch for a game tbh.
I’m not going to pretend I can judge its potential for commercial success, I’m just saying I think that hypothetical K-pop idol game would’ve been a more interesting game than Inzoi is currently or seems likely to ever be in the future I see for it now. That said, I’m not dying on this particular hill and I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about it so if you think I’m wrong about that you’re totally entitled to that point of view and I’m not going to try to defend my beliefs any further, I think I’ve said all I could possibly have to say about Inzoi at this point. Where the game goes from here is something which reality will eventually tell us, but I’m not optimistic about it.
I can see your point, though I belief it would probably be as superficial and soulless as an idol game as it is now. But I completely agree it‘s not a hill worth dying on. Inzoi in it‘s current form is a bit of a disaster and it will probably stay that way.
Hell no bruh