Probably because Valve, amongst others, have realized that policies for handling AI can't operate on protest placard-board logic. They need actual rigorous definition about what activity they are trying to examine and regulate. And if they want these policies to matter, they need to be reasonable, and not "if honestly applied everyone will be violating them".
Yeah. In most cases I'd attribute this kind of "shutter a profitable operation" as a misunderstanding of opportunity cost. An exec imagines that budget funneled into a different project would bring in much greater profit, thus they should kill one project to reshuffle the funds. Which can be valid, but depends on an honest and accurate evaluation of whether that would actually happen. Too many publishers think that if ( say ) Call of Duty makes the highest percent profit, than dumping All The Money into COD will produce the highest return. . . . when in actuality, adding more money to an operation does not necessarily increase revenue linearly, or at all. Doubly the budget of Call of Duty doesn't double the number of people interested in buying it, etc.
In this case, though? Sure, the magazine was currently turning a profit, but I bet they predicted that this would change, likely within a single month. That 22nd issue was probably already approved largely as a generousity.
They aren't really even remakes. They are ground up new games, that just happen to share part of a story bible/premise sheet. Just like how Super Castlevania 4 isn't a "remake" of Castlevania 1.
Note, this is not intrinsically a bad thing. You can do some really worthwhile and interesting things by going back to the pitch sheet and starting over from scratch ( see: various Falcom games like Oath in Felghana or Trails in the Sky 1st ). However, I kind of hate the way the FF7 "Remake" especially has distorted the conversation about remakes, where any game which isn't trying to be completely different than the original is somehow lesser.
I would actually agree that the PSP was a failure. However, it wasn't a failure by any intrinsic quality on its own part, including its sales. Its a failure because Sony decided it was a failure, due to some combination of "We aren't interested in anything other than Immediate Final Victory over Nintendo" and "We don't actually want to succeed in the handheld space if it means having to actually make and support handheld gaming".
If the PSP were made by a more pragmatic company, it would have been a huge success. "For the first time ever, someone actually challenged Nintendo's handheld monopoly! And with a distinct sales premise that leverages your own established catalog!" But even the best product concept can't succeed in the face of indifference and hostility by the very company trying to sell it.
. . . sequels should be cheaper than the original, all else being equal. Because you've already done a huge amount of the work, building a codebase and set of creative assets. The entire "we should throw everything out and start from scratch every time" mindset is a big part of what is generally screwing over the medium.
My own theory is that its not actually about "middle vs working" for the most part. After all, lots of high paying jobs that absolutely put you in the middle class, like all the skilled trades, also have not traditionally gotten much respect. I think it has more to do with certain jobs being viewed as "sacrosanct": working in artistic fields viewed as elevated and praised and important, even when the pay is utter crap. Consider the glorified icon of the Starving Artist. Generative AI is thus "bad", not because its taking away jobs, or even taking away higher paying jobs that are "supposed to be" safe. Its "bad", because it cracks the mystique that participating in "art" automatically makes you a superior person, a secular priest participating in a holy calling.
I put a lot of the blame on the fact that the tech market largely exists in an ecosystem that is entirely artificial and created. That's allowed a whole lot of theoretically-smart people to think they had way more understanding and control of the world than they do. . . because they had been operating the entire time in a system that was the equivalent of "a spherical cow on a frictionless plane". Hence why "techbros" tend to run into all kinds of problems when they try to move beyond that entirely artificial environment, and solve problems that exist in the larger world that isn't designed by humans, and isn't obliged to be simple or intuitive for humans to understand.
Hey now, they also occasionally allow arcade titles to escape. Its just their non-Genesis console titles that they seem to actively hate and want to vanish into the memory hole.
My suspicion? its less the "taking jobs" part that angers them, so much as the "immigrants" part. Jobs being lost is fine by them, as long as its not leading to money and social status going to the "wrong" ( read: non-white ) people.
single person in the back row tries and fails to clap enthusiastically
I mean, I love FF9. Its debatably my favorite FF game. Doesn't change that a music album is pretty close to the lowest effort "Hey we are doing something!" action S-E could take. Better than a gacha collab, but only just.
I think I'd expand upon that: the big problem is people trying to apply AI to challenges that are poorly suited for being solved by AI, because the things that AI actually can do well and efficiently aren't profitable or "sexy" enough to entice the gigantic capital investment. Art AI could certainly generate near infinite amounts of placeholder/alpha quality visual assets, for instance. However, since no one is going to make a fortune with a quicker, better source for placeholder art? They instead promote it as being totally able to produce AAA final release grade art "any day now". And thus that gets the investor dollars, even though it is at best only true with so many asterisks attached as to be moot. Presumably the salespeople are hoping to disappear with the cash before everyone finally admits that they spent billions on a tech that only slightly reduces the total man-hour-dollars needed to produce something.
While this almost certainly was nothing more than water cooler spitballing at absolute most. . . I kind of could see it working. After all, Capcom made puzzle games out of their fighters, and IIRC so did SNK. The precedent is there. The big issue, I suspect, is whether the western fanbase ( or developers ) would be willing to accept the intrinsic parody this would involve; versus being outraged at their definitely-serious games being mocked.
My theory: the inevitable copyright takedowns are not a tragic outcome, they are part of the plan. Its an intended part of the theater, whether for the personal ego-boost of being "oppressed by the man" or else as a cynical marketing move that earns them far more headlines and eyeballs.
Yeah, I'm more cynical. My own suspicion is that the "multiple projects" are more like a t-shirt line and a six week collab with a gacha game. Any actual substantial rerelease would be a nice surprise. . . provided, of course, the coin landed "heads" and it was actually a good rerelease.
The optimistic theory: They realized how abusive Roblox is and decided they didn't really want to get involved in something that was likely to draw bad PR and regulation eventually.
The cynical theory: They hate the idea of even theoretically having to share money with content creators, versus a GAAS where they get all the money themselves.
The most likely theory: The idea simply didn't occur to them, not at a relevant time. They just aren't that creative or insightful.
Depends. In terms of "ceasing to be major ongoing franchises", I'd say its mostly a matter of shifting trends + only wanting to invest in the biggest moneymakers. AAA publishers especially seem to have a bad habit of undervaluing diversity of library. Why spend money on Ridge Racer if racing games aren't doing so well, while fighting games are selling tons- just make Tekken and Soul Calibur. "Great" idea, until you've overinvested in one genre or series, needing ridiculously high sales to pay it back, and the tastes shift again.
In terms of keeping classic games in circulation? I think that's mostly a matter of organizational culture, along with "Are you bad at actually saving your work?" Bandai Namco does seem to be unusually bad about this. You'd think at the very least they'd do some cheap and easy Tekken and Soul Calibur collections for easy money off their marquis franchises, but its like they hate the idea of people buying their old games.
Steam Deck and other handhelds. . . that cost considerably more than a Switch 2. To the degree that, aside from the Steam Deck, none of them are market relevant in the slightest ( remember, even the Steam Deck, by far the most successful handheld PC, has sold such few units that it does not even register in the console market ).
Or, no. No matter whether one random person on an internet comments thread might be willing to spend $600+ on a folding screen Switch 2, the audience in general for such isn't there.
Could it be a case of "We're testing the waters and so picked characters that seemed less likely to immediate trigger CADs from S-E"? Capcom being a much more known factor, in terms of what they will tolerate in fan projects.
It should be very easy to see why Nintendo didn't go this route: cost. People already grumble about the price of the Switch 2. Nintendo wasn't going to add a cutting edge new screen tech that would have added another couple hundred to the retail price.
This does make me wonder: what is the most technically impressive "homebrew" game developed for each console? Which, admittedly, would first require what "counts" and is allowable. For instance, would the Roadblaster "port" to SNES be legal, or would it be disqualified due to using an "expansion chip" that never existed to run CD-ROM data that the SNES could never read?
I think the key that too many people overlook is that older simpler games. . . yes, they may be older and simpler. But that is exactly what makes them work better as learning tools for modern developers. Its not that single screen arcade games are "better". Its that single screen arcade games, or the like, have fewer components and thus bring greater clarity to the game design. You can more readily learn about dynamic difficulty, and how to generate difficulty from mechanics, via something like Space Invaders than from RE4, for example.
The problem with the "just release it and find out" plan is that you only need a certain lesser degree of certainty about ownership to get a giant ruinous lawsuit going. Its possible one of the maybe-owners wouldn't even need to prove that they owned it, simply to prove to a judge that the party releasing it knew that they didn't.
"Better" is a very dicey word, is the thing. It wouldn't reference specific keystone titles, but whether that's actually a merit in real life is highly debatable. Especially since, while referencing games like Metroid and SOTN might not be "elegant", its also a lot less ambiguous. Whereas "Adventure-Platformer" uses one of the most broad and vague genre labels ( Adventure ), and manages to say absolutely nothing about the navigational focus of actual metroidvanias.
And, regardless of all the theoreticals? Any suggested alternative term has to overcome the fact that 'metroidvania' is jargon we already have and already use. It takes a lot more benefit to justify the greater effort of replacing an existing term, versus creating an entirely new term.
As someone whose heard of retrobrighting, but never actually investigated how its one: so it involves using hydrogen peroxide? Well then, I'm not shocked you get damage. Hydrogen peroxide bleaches things by oxidizing them. You know what causes a big chunk of damage to plastic? Oxidation. While plastic chemistry can be complicated, this feels kind of like trying to repair burn damage to an object by "cleaning" away charring with a blowtorch.
This is not exclusive to the video game industry, sadly. One notable example from the tabletop gaming business: the company "Dyskami Publishing" basically exists the distance new products like the current edition of BESM from "Mark MacKinnon", their creator. Why? Because his name is still at least moderately toxic, even a couple decades later, for basically grabbing the cash box and running across the border when the RPG industry started contracting after the peak d20 OGL days.
Basically, not using AI as a tool to create a game, but using AI as part of the game, with an LLM serving as a "virtual GM" to manage to ( more traditionally designed ) procedural content. Its ridiculously ambitious and I only give it maybe 20% odds of working out well. . .but even if it fails it'll at least be the right kind of failure.
Being "fair", I am skeptical that this is an actual sincere belief on their part. Rather, its a pretense to cover their actual belief: that they don't want people buying older games, because the current execs make bigger bonuses and gain more clout from new games.
I'd bet that's an artifact from the days when IBM sold you both the product and the upkeep. They likely were originally writing those manuals, not for the end user, but for their own maintenance personnel. And even when this shifted, the design culture stuck.
And had most of the contents of the AD&D 2e players handbook, hence the size. Though even completely original 90s WRPGs often had similar sized manuals, hence why IMO they were the peak for physical manuals.
I would say the key is not precisely that games these days have "too much" stuff, but that they have too much extraneous stuff. Things added, not because its part of the Core Vision of the game or contributes to such; but because that individual item is perceived as popular and thus hopefully leads to more people trying and buying the game. Which definitely emerges from the "trying to be everything for everybody" concept. Big AAA studios generally hate greenlighting anything that isn't at least potentially aiming to be The Next Big Thing That Earns All The Money And Dominates The Industry.
I wouldn't rule out "thieves stole loot without a plan for what to do with it". Its shockingly common that even seemingly-talented thieves able to pull of quite clean heists, have no actual idea of the challenges of turning the stolen items into usable cash. Which could lead to the items showing up on Craigs List, or it could lead to the mouldering in some storage unit for years.
LLM/Stable Diffusion tech is the same tech, whether its called "generative AI" or something. Its just a question of what you are training that tech to do. Hence why a chatbot and an art AI can both be made from the same underlying technology.
Its not that shocking in retrospect: Nintendo is by far the oldest company in the industry. More than any other, they probably came in with a corporate culture of long term thinking. "Ooops we lost important info" is probably a mistake Nintendo made, and learned from, decades before most of the people in the industry were even born.
Basically, a modern Daggerfall using GenAI tech as a "virtual GM" managing the procedural content.
It is ridiculously ambitious, and I'd personally only give it a 25% chance of living up to its aspirations at best. However, its the right kind of ambition to be interesting ( maybe even if it fails ), and an example of how to use GenAI tech in video games as something other than a questionable excuse to reduce labor costs.
I think the key here would not using GenAI as part of developing the game, but using GenAI as part of the game engine itself. Which is to say, procedural games already effectively involve "training" the procedural engine to produce the desired array of results in game. Now you could do the exact same thing, only with the much more powerful GenAI tech as the underlying procedural "engine".
Of course, the "problem" with this is that it would require just as much work producing appropriate bespoke art for the training, and labor in doing the training, as it takes with current procedural games. Except that's only a problem if your goal with using GenAI is to produce a magic free "infinite art forever" button. For everyone else, it would just be a tool to do procedural design, only better than before.
Comments 40
Re: "Built On Theft And Plagiarism" - A Growing Number Of Game Developers Are Sick To Death Of Generative AI
@gingerbeardman
Probably because Valve, amongst others, have realized that policies for handling AI can't operate on protest placard-board logic. They need actual rigorous definition about what activity they are trying to examine and regulate. And if they want these policies to matter, they need to be reasonable, and not "if honestly applied everyone will be violating them".
Re: Here's Why Official Dreamcast Magazine Never Got A Proper Final Issue
@smoreon @Sketcz
Yeah. In most cases I'd attribute this kind of "shutter a profitable operation" as a misunderstanding of opportunity cost. An exec imagines that budget funneled into a different project would bring in much greater profit, thus they should kill one project to reshuffle the funds. Which can be valid, but depends on an honest and accurate evaluation of whether that would actually happen. Too many publishers think that if ( say ) Call of Duty makes the highest percent profit, than dumping All The Money into COD will produce the highest return. . . . when in actuality, adding more money to an operation does not necessarily increase revenue linearly, or at all. Doubly the budget of Call of Duty doesn't double the number of people interested in buying it, etc.
In this case, though? Sure, the magazine was currently turning a profit, but I bet they predicted that this would change, likely within a single month. That 22nd issue was probably already approved largely as a generousity.
Re: Final Fantasy VII Is Getting A New Steam Version "To Provide An Improved Gameplay Experience"
@heligo
They aren't really even remakes. They are ground up new games, that just happen to share part of a story bible/premise sheet. Just like how Super Castlevania 4 isn't a "remake" of Castlevania 1.
Note, this is not intrinsically a bad thing. You can do some really worthwhile and interesting things by going back to the pitch sheet and starting over from scratch ( see: various Falcom games like Oath in Felghana or Trails in the Sky 1st ). However, I kind of hate the way the FF7 "Remake" especially has distorted the conversation about remakes, where any game which isn't trying to be completely different than the original is somehow lesser.
Re: Apparently, The PSP Counts As A Failure To Some People Now
I would actually agree that the PSP was a failure. However, it wasn't a failure by any intrinsic quality on its own part, including its sales. Its a failure because Sony decided it was a failure, due to some combination of "We aren't interested in anything other than Immediate Final Victory over Nintendo" and "We don't actually want to succeed in the handheld space if it means having to actually make and support handheld gaming".
If the PSP were made by a more pragmatic company, it would have been a huge success. "For the first time ever, someone actually challenged Nintendo's handheld monopoly! And with a distinct sales premise that leverages your own established catalog!" But even the best product concept can't succeed in the face of indifference and hostility by the very company trying to sell it.
Re: "Part Of Me Looked Down On America" - Sakura Wars Creator On Japanese Gaming's Rise And Fall
. . . sequels should be cheaper than the original, all else being equal. Because you've already done a huge amount of the work, building a codebase and set of creative assets. The entire "we should throw everything out and start from scratch every time" mindset is a big part of what is generally screwing over the medium.
Re: "The Fine Arts Were Always A Massive Grift" - Controversial Earthworm Jim Creator Goes All-In On Generative AI
@h3s
My own theory is that its not actually about "middle vs working" for the most part. After all, lots of high paying jobs that absolutely put you in the middle class, like all the skilled trades, also have not traditionally gotten much respect. I think it has more to do with certain jobs being viewed as "sacrosanct": working in artistic fields viewed as elevated and praised and important, even when the pay is utter crap. Consider the glorified icon of the Starving Artist. Generative AI is thus "bad", not because its taking away jobs, or even taking away higher paying jobs that are "supposed to be" safe. Its "bad", because it cracks the mystique that participating in "art" automatically makes you a superior person, a secular priest participating in a holy calling.
Re: "I Was Always Very Against AI..." - Cyberpunk Saturn JRPG 'Cyber Doll' Is Getting A Fan Translation, But There's A Catch
@Bakamoichigei
I put a lot of the blame on the fact that the tech market largely exists in an ecosystem that is entirely artificial and created. That's allowed a whole lot of theoretically-smart people to think they had way more understanding and control of the world than they do. . . because they had been operating the entire time in a system that was the equivalent of "a spherical cow on a frictionless plane". Hence why "techbros" tend to run into all kinds of problems when they try to move beyond that entirely artificial environment, and solve problems that exist in the larger world that isn't designed by humans, and isn't obliged to be simple or intuitive for humans to understand.
Re: Treasure's Sublime Guardian Heroes Turns 30 Today, Which Makes Us Sad We Never Got A Proper Sequel
@gojiguy
Hey now, they also occasionally allow arcade titles to escape. Its just their non-Genesis console titles that they seem to actively hate and want to vanish into the memory hole.
Re: "The Fine Arts Were Always A Massive Grift" - Controversial Earthworm Jim Creator Goes All-In On Generative AI
@Razieluigi
My suspicion? its less the "taking jobs" part that angers them, so much as the "immigrants" part. Jobs being lost is fine by them, as long as its not leading to money and social status going to the "wrong" ( read: non-white ) people.
Re: Square Enix's Next Final Fantasy IX Project Is A "Deep House" Album, Inspired By The Game's Iconic Soundtrack
single person in the back row tries and fails to clap enthusiastically
I mean, I love FF9. Its debatably my favorite FF game. Doesn't change that a music album is pretty close to the lowest effort "Hey we are doing something!" action S-E could take. Better than a gacha collab, but only just.
Re: "I Was Always Very Against AI..." - Cyberpunk Saturn JRPG 'Cyber Doll' Is Getting A Fan Translation, But There's A Catch
@Bakamoichigei
I think I'd expand upon that: the big problem is people trying to apply AI to challenges that are poorly suited for being solved by AI, because the things that AI actually can do well and efficiently aren't profitable or "sexy" enough to entice the gigantic capital investment. Art AI could certainly generate near infinite amounts of placeholder/alpha quality visual assets, for instance. However, since no one is going to make a fortune with a quicker, better source for placeholder art? They instead promote it as being totally able to produce AAA final release grade art "any day now". And thus that gets the investor dollars, even though it is at best only true with so many asterisks attached as to be moot. Presumably the salespeople are hoping to disappear with the cash before everyone finally admits that they spent billions on a tech that only slightly reduces the total man-hour-dollars needed to produce something.
Re: Flagship Chuck's Arcade Kansas City Location Closes Without Warning
@mouthwash
The issue is less that it closed, or even that it closed unexpectedly. Its that it closed, without any official notice or statement.
Re: "I Can Safely Say It's B**locks" - Ex-Rare Devs Debunk Killer Instinct 'Panel De Pon' Rumour
While this almost certainly was nothing more than water cooler spitballing at absolute most. . . I kind of could see it working. After all, Capcom made puzzle games out of their fighters, and IIRC so did SNK. The precedent is there. The big issue, I suspect, is whether the western fanbase ( or developers ) would be willing to accept the intrinsic parody this would involve; versus being outraged at their definitely-serious games being mocked.
Re: The Making Of: Dungeon Master, A Truly Trailblazing First-Person RPG
Silly question: does anyone know why Dungeon Master is not currently available for sale, even on GOG?
Re: "This Was Not Something We Wanted" - Bully's Fanmade Online Mod Has Been Shut Down, After Just One Month
My theory: the inevitable copyright takedowns are not a tragic outcome, they are part of the plan. Its an intended part of the theater, whether for the personal ego-boost of being "oppressed by the man" or else as a cynical marketing move that earns them far more headlines and eyeballs.
Re: A New Orchestral Album Celebrating The 30th Anniversary Of Chrono Trigger Has Just Been Released
@JackGYarwood
Yeah, I'm more cynical. My own suspicion is that the "multiple projects" are more like a t-shirt line and a six week collab with a gacha game. Any actual substantial rerelease would be a nice surprise. . . provided, of course, the coin landed "heads" and it was actually a good rerelease.
Re: Tired Of Waiting For Bandai Namco, Someone Has Finally Given Us 'Ridge Racer HD' - But It's Only In Dreams
@ItsAlwaysSunnyyy
The optimistic theory: They realized how abusive Roblox is and decided they didn't really want to get involved in something that was likely to draw bad PR and regulation eventually.
The cynical theory: They hate the idea of even theoretically having to share money with content creators, versus a GAAS where they get all the money themselves.
The most likely theory: The idea simply didn't occur to them, not at a relevant time. They just aren't that creative or insightful.
Re: Tired Of Waiting For Bandai Namco, Someone Has Finally Given Us 'Ridge Racer HD' - But It's Only In Dreams
@MARl0
Depends. In terms of "ceasing to be major ongoing franchises", I'd say its mostly a matter of shifting trends + only wanting to invest in the biggest moneymakers. AAA publishers especially seem to have a bad habit of undervaluing diversity of library. Why spend money on Ridge Racer if racing games aren't doing so well, while fighting games are selling tons- just make Tekken and Soul Calibur. "Great" idea, until you've overinvested in one genre or series, needing ridiculously high sales to pay it back, and the tastes shift again.
In terms of keeping classic games in circulation? I think that's mostly a matter of organizational culture, along with "Are you bad at actually saving your work?" Bandai Namco does seem to be unusually bad about this. You'd think at the very least they'd do some cheap and easy Tekken and Soul Calibur collections for easy money off their marquis franchises, but its like they hate the idea of people buying their old games.
Re: We're Now Entering The Era Of Folding-Screen Gaming Handhelds
@Axelay71
Steam Deck and other handhelds. . . that cost considerably more than a Switch 2. To the degree that, aside from the Steam Deck, none of them are market relevant in the slightest ( remember, even the Steam Deck, by far the most successful handheld PC, has sold such few units that it does not even register in the console market ).
Or, no. No matter whether one random person on an internet comments thread might be willing to spend $600+ on a folding screen Switch 2, the audience in general for such isn't there.
Re: Industry Giants Capcom And Square Collide In This New Fan-Made Fighter
Could it be a case of "We're testing the waters and so picked characters that seemed less likely to immediate trigger CADs from S-E"? Capcom being a much more known factor, in terms of what they will tolerate in fan projects.
Re: Best Of 2025: The Making Of Fight Club, The Game David Fincher Didn't Want You To Play
I wonder how many people watched Fight Club, going into the theater expecting either an action movie or possibly a ( combat ) sports movie?
Re: We're Now Entering The Era Of Folding-Screen Gaming Handhelds
@Axelay71 @Axelay71
It should be very easy to see why Nintendo didn't go this route: cost. People already grumble about the price of the Switch 2. Nintendo wasn't going to add a cutting edge new screen tech that would have added another couple hundred to the retail price.
Re: Roguecraft DX Is Coming To The Amiga, Mega65, And Game Boy Color
This does make me wonder: what is the most technically impressive "homebrew" game developed for each console? Which, admittedly, would first require what "counts" and is allowable. For instance, would the Roadblaster "port" to SNES be legal, or would it be disqualified due to using an "expansion chip" that never existed to run CD-ROM data that the SNES could never read?
Re: Best Of 2025: Tomohiro Nishikado On Making 'Space Invaders' And What Makes Games Fun
I think the key that too many people overlook is that older simpler games. . . yes, they may be older and simpler. But that is exactly what makes them work better as learning tools for modern developers. Its not that single screen arcade games are "better". Its that single screen arcade games, or the like, have fewer components and thus bring greater clarity to the game design. You can more readily learn about dynamic difficulty, and how to generate difficulty from mechanics, via something like Space Invaders than from RE4, for example.
Re: Best Of 2025: The Making Of The Operative - No One Lives Forever, Monolith's Classic Spy-Themed FPS Trapped In Licensing Hell
The problem with the "just release it and find out" plan is that you only need a certain lesser degree of certainty about ownership to get a giant ruinous lawsuit going. Its possible one of the maybe-owners wouldn't even need to prove that they owned it, simply to prove to a judge that the party releasing it knew that they didn't.
Re: Who Created The Term "Metroidvania"? Gaming Historian Critical Kate Tries To Find Out
@Fallingshadow
"Better" is a very dicey word, is the thing. It wouldn't reference specific keystone titles, but whether that's actually a merit in real life is highly debatable. Especially since, while referencing games like Metroid and SOTN might not be "elegant", its also a lot less ambiguous. Whereas "Adventure-Platformer" uses one of the most broad and vague genre labels ( Adventure ), and manages to say absolutely nothing about the navigational focus of actual metroidvanias.
And, regardless of all the theoreticals? Any suggested alternative term has to overcome the fact that 'metroidvania' is jargon we already have and already use. It takes a lot more benefit to justify the greater effort of replacing an existing term, versus creating an entirely new term.
Re: More Old Capcom Mobile Games Have Been Saved From Digital Oblivion, Including A Breath Of Fire IV Card Game
I wonder how many of those Capcom actually still has in their possession, or whether they lost/discarded them, too.
Re: Hitoshi Sakimoto's 40-Year Career In Video Game Music Is Being Celebrated With A New Concert
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim has some of the best music to be found in the entire medium.
Re: "Retrobrighting" Might Actually Cause More Harm Than Good To Your Yellowing Consoles
As someone whose heard of retrobrighting, but never actually investigated how its one: so it involves using hydrogen peroxide? Well then, I'm not shocked you get damage. Hydrogen peroxide bleaches things by oxidizing them. You know what causes a big chunk of damage to plastic? Oxidation. While plastic chemistry can be complicated, this feels kind of like trying to repair burn damage to an object by "cleaning" away charring with a blowtorch.
Re: Random: Tommy Tallarico Got Bodied So Badly He's Now Using A Fake Name
This is not exclusive to the video game industry, sadly. One notable example from the tabletop gaming business: the company "Dyskami Publishing" basically exists the distance new products like the current edition of BESM from "Mark MacKinnon", their creator. Why? Because his name is still at least moderately toxic, even a couple decades later, for basically grabbing the cash box and running across the border when the RPG industry started contracting after the peak d20 OGL days.
Re: If The Oliver Twins' Ghost Hunters Is The Future Of GenAI Gaming, Then We Have Nothing To Worry About
@MontyMole
The one game I've seen anything about that seems to be trying to use AI for something actually interesting:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1685310/The_Wayward_Realms/
Basically, not using AI as a tool to create a game, but using AI as part of the game, with an LLM serving as a "virtual GM" to manage to ( more traditionally designed ) procedural content. Its ridiculously ambitious and I only give it maybe 20% odds of working out well. . .but even if it fails it'll at least be the right kind of failure.
Re: Mighty Final Fight Forever Will Launch Just In Time For Christmas
@Sketcz
Being "fair", I am skeptical that this is an actual sincere belief on their part. Rather, its a pretense to cover their actual belief: that they don't want people buying older games, because the current execs make bigger bonuses and gain more clout from new games.
Re: Random: Remember When Games Came With Instructions? This Guy Does, And He Wants To Find The Heaviest PS1 Manual
@FeRDNYC
I'd bet that's an artifact from the days when IBM sold you both the product and the upkeep. They likely were originally writing those manuals, not for the end user, but for their own maintenance personnel. And even when this shifted, the design culture stuck.
Re: Random: Remember When Games Came With Instructions? This Guy Does, And He Wants To Find The Heaviest PS1 Manual
@PKDuckman
And had most of the contents of the AD&D 2e players handbook, hence the size. Though even completely original 90s WRPGs often had similar sized manuals, hence why IMO they were the peak for physical manuals.
Re: "There Weren't A Lot Of Extras, So It Had To Be Done Right" - Fallout Co-Creator Reveals What Modern Game Devs Can Still Learn From The '80s
I would say the key is not precisely that games these days have "too much" stuff, but that they have too much extraneous stuff. Things added, not because its part of the Core Vision of the game or contributes to such; but because that individual item is perceived as popular and thus hopefully leads to more people trying and buying the game. Which definitely emerges from the "trying to be everything for everybody" concept. Big AAA studios generally hate greenlighting anything that isn't at least potentially aiming to be The Next Big Thing That Earns All The Money And Dominates The Industry.
Re: More Than $25,000 Of Rare Coin-Op Components Stolen From North American Arcade
I wouldn't rule out "thieves stole loot without a plan for what to do with it". Its shockingly common that even seemingly-talented thieves able to pull of quite clean heists, have no actual idea of the challenges of turning the stolen items into usable cash. Which could lead to the items showing up on Craigs List, or it could lead to the mouldering in some storage unit for years.
Re: The Oliver Twins Are Reviving Ghost Hunters Using (Shudder) Generative AI
@Santar
LLM/Stable Diffusion tech is the same tech, whether its called "generative AI" or something. Its just a question of what you are training that tech to do. Hence why a chatbot and an art AI can both be made from the same underlying technology.
Re: "There's Basically Nothing" - Final Fantasy VII Remake's Director Reveals "Almost No Documentation" Exists For The Original
@NatiaAdamo
Its not that shocking in retrospect: Nintendo is by far the oldest company in the industry. More than any other, they probably came in with a corporate culture of long term thinking. "Ooops we lost important info" is probably a mistake Nintendo made, and learned from, decades before most of the people in the industry were even born.
Re: The Oliver Twins Are Reviving Ghost Hunters Using (Shudder) Generative AI
@Sn0w
There's at least one game in development that is more or less aiming for this.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1685310/The_Wayward_Realms/
Basically, a modern Daggerfall using GenAI tech as a "virtual GM" managing the procedural content.
It is ridiculously ambitious, and I'd personally only give it a 25% chance of living up to its aspirations at best. However, its the right kind of ambition to be interesting ( maybe even if it fails ), and an example of how to use GenAI tech in video games as something other than a questionable excuse to reduce labor costs.
Re: The Oliver Twins Are Reviving Ghost Hunters Using (Shudder) Generative AI
@breach187
I think the key here would not using GenAI as part of developing the game, but using GenAI as part of the game engine itself. Which is to say, procedural games already effectively involve "training" the procedural engine to produce the desired array of results in game. Now you could do the exact same thing, only with the much more powerful GenAI tech as the underlying procedural "engine".
Of course, the "problem" with this is that it would require just as much work producing appropriate bespoke art for the training, and labor in doing the training, as it takes with current procedural games. Except that's only a problem if your goal with using GenAI is to produce a magic free "infinite art forever" button. For everyone else, it would just be a tool to do procedural design, only better than before.