copygirl
Just a dorky trans woman on the internet.
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I understand Steam not wanting to moderate the absolute flood of user-created content of its thousands of games (on their own), but then, it probably shouldn’t force community forums on every single one of its games when the developers can’t or don’t want to moderate them.
(Also, the ADL doesn’t recognize the ongoing genocide of Palestinians so maybe we should just ignore what they think.)
The idea is that “roguelike” = a game like Rogue, which according to some people, requires checking most if not all of the boxes including ASCII, proc-gen, perma-death, turn-based, … while the term “rougelite” is less strict. But I think we’re past the point of that distinction being adopted into mainstream.
ECS already makes it a hundred times easier for me to conceptualize game mechanics, modify and extend them. Giving AI the ability the ability to create data separate from systems that use them will make it much easier for it to build a game. I don’t believe for a second it will be able to write functioning object-oriented game code for example. It will likely be best if it avoided coding via a text-based language altogether, and use visual scripting or another system based on chaining logic blocks together. But that still counts as the “system” part of ECS.
There is a possibility something like this will be possible in the future, but it’s not going to be an achievement of AI, it’s largely going to be the achievement of regular developers creating a general-purpose game engine that can be used to put together a game block by block, which can be utilized by both human game designers and AI. (Likely to better effect by the former.) I can imagine Entity Component Systems will play a big part of that.
One of the biggest blockers for AI making games is going to be testing it to select for better performance. With text it’s relatively easy to see if some text an AI produced is plausible. Images are also plentiful, but that’s a lot more subjective. With both of these it would also not take a massive amount of time to add a human element. It’s quick to check if a paragraph or image looks like it is a good response to the input promt. A game, however? How long do you need to play it to see if it’s fun? At best, perhaps, you can write an AI to control a bot character to see if it’s technically playable.
I don’t want to even think about the electricity that wlll be wasted training such models.
30% is the industry standard across the board, with the exception of Epic which takes 12%. However, Epic has already shown that it’s ready to dump loads of money into store exclusivity deals and tons of free games, so I will argue it’s for the sake of growing the number of users and developers using their platform.
But do they, or any other competitor or similar store, offer the same functionality as Steam? rtxn already mentioned some. And there’s more. And then there’s the fact that Valve is using all that money not only to stuff the pockets of alread rich people (not that Gabe isn’t a multi-millionaire if not billionaire, idk), but actually puts it back into the industry: Their own store, Linux/Proton (you may not care, but Microsoft becoming a monopoly in PC gaming is no good), and hardware (with their Steam Deck handheld, and VR stuffs).
Steam might be the biggest player when it comes to storefronts, but it’s because they’ve actually earned it. And they’re not actively preventing other competitors from entering the scene (other than existing). In fact, they keep trying, and keep failing, and then going back to Steam.
I’m not opposed to more money going to developers, but let’s not single out Steam, who (perhaps besides GOG? I am not familiar enough with it) is doing the most for users and develpers.