good!

To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.

Absolutely. It seems like 90% of the issues we have in society is because of this fucked-up economic system :/

That was the point I was trying to make too. The question of “is it theft” is moot, it still causes harm.

For me it boils down to: were the artists, whose work was used to build the large commercial models, asked about this and agreed to it? No.

Piracy only affects existing work, genAI affects all the future artwork they would try to make a living from. See AI hitting cultural sector hard: Fifth of freelance artists have lost income, work | NL Times

Reality is that people on platforms like Reddit or Lemmy (or the tech side of the Fediverse in general) can be incredibly fervent about their AI hate, but they don’t represent the average people, whose work has become ever so slightly more convenient thanks to AI

According to research, the overwhelming majority of gamers across all ages and genders do hate genAI though:

Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. - Quantic Foundry

In a recent survey, we explored gamers’ attitudes towards the use of Gen AI in video games and whether those attitudes varied by demographics and gaming motivations. The overwhelmingly negative attitude stood out compared to other surveys we’ve run over the past decade.
(…)
Overall, the attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games is very negative. 85% of respondents have a below-neutral attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games, with a highly-skewed 63% who selected the most negative response option.

I still don’t like it. The models being built on non-consensually scraped artwork has been known from the very start. If they still thought these were ok to use, I don’t really want to get involved with their output…

It’s the same as when any other company quickly replaces the genAI art when busted, “oops we didn’t mean to include it” - then maybe don’t use it in the first place?

wait it used genAI? It’s coming off my wishlist… :/

I recall an estimation that about 1/20 players leave a review, but this probably depends a lot on genre and other factors.

My Genshin install on PC would be ~115 GB (in practice it’s more bc I have an extra voice pack), while the same game on mobile is allegedly ~30 GB 😒

I’m glad for those disclosures (because I’m not touching AI games), but tons of devs don’t disclose their AI usage, even in obvious cases, leaving us to guessing :/

Oh this might be what pushes larger companies to drop kernel level anticheat! That would remove the main reason that keeps my gaming on Windows.

I guess Genshin also counts. The monetisation is horrible, the character designs are facepalm-worthy, the localisation is so bad it makes me wince, Paimon is the worst, but damn, I love the exploration gameplay, landscapes and music 🤷 (Also it helps that I’m f2p, so at least I’m not supporting Hoyo’s predatory practices…)

all those Artifex Mundi hidden object games :D

They’re essentially reskins of the same simplistic gameplay and weak stories for like 15 years, but sometimes I still get in the mood for one :D

I love the better ones’ environmental art, but I’d be wary to pick up ones made in the last few years bc I’m pretty sure they started to use AI as soon as it became available, due to the conveyor belt nature of the genre.

EDIT: Ok apparently I was wrong, and they just altogether stopped releasing their games on PC since the pandemic O.o

wow this is really fun!

Hmm sadly that’s a very different gameplay to Just Dance, here’s an example. In JD they record dancers with motion capture, and you need to follow that choreography, while the game tracks your accuracy with a phone, console controller, or camera.

So it needs a bigger production team than FLOSS indies can probably manage :c

The only Ubi game I play is Just Dance Now. Sadly I can’t think of a non-Ubi alternative to that gameplay :/

this extension seemingly only lists third party DRM.

That could be the case! Unfortunately I can’t see any documentation about it on their website or github repo.

I’m playing with mouse and keyboard, so not sure that’s possible with the Android version.

I saw a Linux Genshin launcher on github a while ago, but iirc it carries some ban risk that I don’t want to expose my account to.

I don’t know of a bulk tool, but the Augmented Steam browser extension shows a DRM warning above the purchase button when you go on a game’s Steam store page.

And many games haven’t been assessed either. I plugged my Steam account into ProtonDB, and apparently 51% of my games can be made to run perfectly on Linux, 10% are various levels of broken, but the remaining 39% has no information. I guess it’s because I have many indie games in my library.

The only thing I want to say is that the “10%” that don’t work are usually pretty popular.

Yeah, like I’m glad Linux support is increasing among games, but my main daily driver game (Genshin) still doesn’t support it 🤷 And I don’t think Hoyoverse will be spending work on Linux support when they are raking in so much cash from their millions of players. From what I can see Linux usage hovers around 0.3% in China, and that’s Hoyo’s main market.

I hope it works out for them!

23 per day atm :D

Edit: and DONE!

Ah sorry I misunderstood your comment then, I thought there was another one besides that.

Can you link to that other UK petition too pls? :)

I’m an EU citizen living in the UK, but only signed the UK one because I’m not putting my passport ID into petitions O.o

Obsidian backlinks from my daily notes :) Though I use it more often to track my books, as I mostly play endless live service games 😅

I can sort of use my Steam review date stamps too to track what I played, bc I review the vast majority of games I try.

Edit: and in Steam I put the finished/dropped games in their own categories, but my tag setup there is really extensive, so probably not the best example :) (I have at least 5-6 tags on each of my games.)

In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die

That happened to Ragnarok Online. Iirc the early server code got leaked by hackers (it seems it’s still being developed on GitHub lol), so all throughout the game’s 20+ years lifetime it has had a flourishing private server scene with hundreds of servers still online, so I don’t think it will die in our lifetimes.

Guild Wars 1 - last month celebrated its 20-years anniversary :) I only started it in 2018, but it’s a really solid game!

And both its developer and publisher are committed to keeping it alive as long as they can. It’s been mostly automated in 2013, so apparently it costs very little to keep the servers running.

Yeah, that’s one of the memories I retained of my 12-years-ago playthrough that the first boss was the most difficult by far.

Another of my issues is that I’m a completionist and want to play every sidequest and get most unlockables. And that means either juggling 4 wiki lists while playing, or as I ended up having to do, unify them into a single spreadsheet for each chapter. Spending hours not actually playing the game 😑

or be like me, play Witcher 1, then play other stuff for 12 years, then start replaying it again to go through the whole series this time, then take a 6-months break 2 chapters in… 😅 (yea, I have issues)

I love its atmosphere and writing, but the jank…

I wish Cyberpunk went under -60% off. I don’t tend to buy stuff over -80-90% sale, so more patience for me… 😅

had to look it up, 1996, damn that’s an old game xd

Oh I forgot about Oxenfree. Yeah, the story and voice acting were quite good, but the game had so many annoying design/UI decisions that it left me frustrated more than anything else :c

Gone Home - when I finished the game I was legitimately sad that I couldn’t spend more time with the people whose lives I got to know so intimately from their environments. And yes, they didn’t feel like characters anymore, they felt like actual people. That’s one of the highest praises I can give to a game’s storytelling.

Yeah the problem with boycotts and “vote with your wallet” is that one whale can offset the boycott of thousands of low-spending players 😐

Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?

Consumer boycotts very very rarely work. I’ve never heard of a single successful video game boycott.

How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?

Lobby for appropriate legislation with your government representatives. We could have legislation that forces companies to transparently show the chance of specific rewards, and even show the money you have to spend on average to get XY specific item. (I think there is already a law like this in the works in the EU?)

One of the major psychological tricks gambling games (including lootbox and gacha) employ is to obscure the true costs behind premium currencies. Once they are forced to remove this, and you are shown that yes, guaranteed acquisition of a single Genshin character will cost you ~300 USD, it might make you do a double-take before you pull out your bank card. (There are many more psychological dark patterns these developers employ, so it wouldn’t be a single miracle solution, unless of course legislation altogether bans random chance rewards buyable with cash.)

No, all the current versions are reported various levels of broken :/ Generally they can’t install, so you have to copy an installation from Windows, then there are some that don’t load at all, some only load to splash screen, some do work after you patch their broken UI and manually copy some Windows DLL-s. So idk, you might get lucky with the specific program/version/feature combo you need, but it just sounds like a pain to me.

O&O Shutup10++ (theoretically works on 11 too)

Not sure what it can do on Home/Pro editions, I’ve only ever tried it on Enterprise.

“bought” is an interesting word choice when they used massgrave :D