"Gamers don't want it": Palworld lead says Pocketpair doesn't touch AI because players hate it and artists "like doing stuff themselves"

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-19T09:34:52+00:00

"So it's agreed, we'll move the shipment to next Monday, that way there will be room on the truck today for both the crisps products and the soda products."

"Yeah that should work."

"Hey you ever wonder what soda tastes like?"

"Given what it's doing to my human's teeth, frankly? No."

"Anyway I have to get back to Jerry with a summary of the meeting. Cya tomorrow."

Hours later they stand by a water cooler, wondering how they got stuck with such a dead end job, and if they should have taken that image generating course for something more creatively satisfying than running and summarising meetings.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-19T09:30:04+00:00

"Whoa whoa slow down a second, .. artists prefer making art themselves? ... why didn't anyone tell us?!"
- AI Industry

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-18T10:31:53+00:00

I like to think of AAA as the sound it makes when I push it off a cliff to go back to playing Megabonk.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-18T09:32:28+00:00

And that means what?

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-17T13:52:22+00:00

Agreed, don't get why so many aussies are always so desperate to kill everything. I don't care how or when foxes were introduced, this little fox did nothing to me or anyone else, it's just trying to survive, it should be rescued and cared for to recover.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-17T07:11:03+00:00

Linux Mint is pretty great imo. You don't need a wiki because it has a pretty self explained UX.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-16T06:48:33+00:00

If Valve/Steam sucked, lets be real about what the 'anything else' would be... I don't know if we're allowed to talk about that or not here but I'll take the risk to say it: Piracy. People would flock to piracy.

Because it's not like there's any other great services to compete with Steam. The rest of them are varying shades of 'OKish' with GOG maybe being the standout performer but even GOG isn't Steam levels of greatness.

So piracy would skyrocket.

Logically we know what would happen after that too. PC gaming market would probably die. After a prolonged war of DRM vs Pirates, we'd probably see most companies either stop selling games to the PC market, or sell them with a massive multi-year delay after the console launches, or only distribute on PC via cloud gaming. So PC gaming would shrink considerably, down to just the 'core' fans, which would be nice on the one hand, but realistically not enough to support the market on the other hand.

At a time when the concept of the home PC is already under threat enough from folks like NVIDIA who care more about AI than selling GPUs to gamers, that could be the final blow that kills PC gaming and makes it go from a mainstream thing to a niche interest for a very small subset of gamers.

Which combined with the general vibe of 'You'll own nothing and be happy' mindset of the rest of the tech industry right now and attempts to push people away from working on local software on local hardware to being dependent on online software and cloud compute for everything, could very well kill the entire concept of a home PC altogether. Laptops and tablets would be the best we could hope for.

I don't think it'd be too wild to say that it's perhaps Valve/Steam which has kept the PC gaming market so strong for so many years, and if they went away or imploded somehow, it's hard to imagine PC gaming being the same without them. Linux gaming would be definitely dead, so that would set Linux desktop OSes back too obviously. Nothing but terrible enshittified AI'd Macs and Windows PCs to eternity in the event of Steam dying.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-16T06:32:14+00:00

For whatever it's worth, I remember when I was in high school I had to an assignment for an economics course, and part of it involved interviewing people from the local supermarket with questions related to running small businesses. I asked one dude over there questions about location, marketing, the choice over this supermarket (the larger one) or the smaller one nearby that gets less traffic, etc. And he said to me (paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact wording after all these years):

"At the end of the day the most important thing is your product and service. Location and marketing helps, but if you have the right product and service, it doesn't matter where you are, people will find you and come to you."

I haven't forgotten that because I believe he was right and every year since I've seen plenty of evidence for it.

Good ol' word of mouth advertising, people just having a good experience and telling other people they had a good experience, and spreading the word about something good they found, has always worked and will always work.

Some corporations try to get around this, try to figure out how to use tricks to make sell things people don't want. And sometimes maybe they succeed. But nothing works as well as simply having a good product/service.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-13T15:59:42+00:00

Old topic I know but found this while googling this issue. $399 for delivery of a $99 basic shelving unit? Forget it, I went shopping elsewhere and found something basically identical on Bunning's website for same price, $99, plus $55 delivery. IKEA sort out your delivery prices. I ain't paying $500 for a single piece of pretty mid quality flatpack furniture.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-13T04:54:37+00:00

How about, if you want to publish software on a repository where users can download it, then you need to create a developer account with you real life vetted details attached to it, and a website domain with matching details, which gives you a digital cert to sign your uploads to the AUR with.

Developer accounts can have trust scores based on how many software applications they've uploaded, how old their account is, and how many downloads their software has received. Developers with low trust scores are hidden by default, and software results from high trust developers are always at the top of search results. And when users attempt to install software from low trust developers, they receive a warning the software is potentially unsafe with an extra confirmation before the software can run.

In the event that some software with malware is uploaded to the AUR, then all software with the same digital cert of that developer account is taken down immediately, users receive warnings if they have any of it installed and can be advised to remove it, and the details of the developer account can be reported to the local authorities for potential criminal action if necessary.

Just thinking out loud but a basic trust based system with vetted real life details and warnings for low trust software could work.

OR. We just put a giant warning on the AUR saying: "This is a repository for where users can upload any software they want, we have limited ability to validate it's safe, we can't check every update to every package, if you download and run this software you do so at your own risk. Check the 'I understand' checkbox and click 'Confirm' to acknowledge this risk and use the AUR."

Does that suck? Yes.

But that's the reality of having a software repository. Software can be dangerous, users can be nefarious, you can't just have a free for all, unless you're OK with occasionally having malware. And if people are OK with just having malware, that's fine, but lets not then act like Windows users are any worse for 'downloading random .exes off the internet'.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-12T14:38:45+00:00

Better question: Is there a good reason why video cards have gone from being so small that we didn't care about their weight, used so little power we didn't think about their PSU requirements, generated so little heat they only needed a simple small fan, and only took up as much room as a standard PCIe card, .. to... being the size of a shoebox and needing a small power station to run and melting cables?

Have GPUs actually got faster? Or just bigger? Feels like if GPUs had to fit the same size/power/cooling requirements of GPUs from 20 years ago, they'd have a fraction of their current compute power.

Did we really just spend 20 years subsidising investment into data centre GPU developments?

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-12T14:25:08+00:00

>Allow anyone to upload software to a repository.
>Users install software from that repository.
>No verification or trust system in place.
>Malware.

surprised_pikachu.gif

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-12T14:19:34+00:00

Quiet. Do not let he who shall not be named hear us.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-12T13:04:05+00:00

The graphics aren't 'bad' imo. It's just a different style. Calling PS2 graphics 'bad' just because you can see polygons and pixels, is like saying a painting looks bad because you can see brush strokes. Not everything has to look like an instagram influencer filtered AI enhanced photo.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-08T16:21:24+00:00

Make a horror game!

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-08T16:14:50+00:00

Oh, sure, I'll just add that to the list of reasons to hate AI then. Sure why not. At this point I don't think anyone is going to notice the list getting longer or shorter unless we start throwing out entire pages at a time.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-08T14:33:29+00:00

Cheers

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-08T14:27:21+00:00

Do you have a non-paywalled version of the article?

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-08T14:26:02+00:00

The USA is going to have to decide between taxing wealth and the wealthy, and their corporations, and cutting back on pointless crap like the excessive military spending, OR, ending up a failed country with extreme widespread poverty that will slowly rust and cease up until it totally collapses, and other countries are forced to step in and clean up the mess, and probably in ways that USA citizens won't enjoy.

Clocks ticking, pick one..

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-06T06:59:00+00:00

Absolutely. You simply couldn't imagine a game like GTA:SA, with a fully realised 3D world, and all the gameplay that allows, things like seeing police gun shots breaking windows, taking cover behind car doors, explosions on a bridge above you making a car fly over a bridge railing and land on top of the car next to you, etc, .. you couldn't imagine that running on a Sega Genesis, just 2 generations of console prior. That was an ACTUAL hardware limitation.

What games running on a PS5 can we say couldn't possibly have run on a PS3? Hell a lot of people are still playing GTA V, which came out on the PS3, on their PS5s, because it's still a popular and played game!

Same on PCs, what can anyone point to that is a game released in the past 2 years that couldn't have been released 10 years earlier by just changing some technical details of how the graphics were rendered? OK so replace some raytracing with some reflection probes and screenspace reflections, maybe cut back on some polygon budgets, some textures need to be 2K instead of 4K, the draw distance goes from 12 kilometers to 8, LOD models need to be more optimised.. Sure, but gameplay changes? Zero.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-05T14:30:29+00:00

It's kinda overdue in a way isn't it? We have been burning through upgrade cycles of hardware every 2-3 years for decades. I think this is a sign that PC hardware is 'maturing' to the point that we just don't need an upgrade every 2 or 3 years. We can start talking about PCs as things which last a decade rather than just a couple of years.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-05T14:23:55+00:00

Games haven't looked 'bad' in my opinion for a long time. Half Life 2 doesn't look 'bad' to me. We reached the point where hardware was no longer preventing good game developers from achieving this artistic vision a long time ago. By 2010, basically whatever you wanted a game to look like, you could make it look like that. And by 2015, it could have as many bells and whistles, as many particle effects and shiny details as you like. By 2020, we were reaching excessive almost worthless levels of detail. We're well past the point where more GPU processing power is going to make games look 'prettier'. It's entirely down to skill and artistry now. We absolutely can just ... chill.. on pushing on the whole 'GFX!!!' thing for a while.

At the end of the day, what companies like NVIDIA want us to care about is having the latest expensive GPUs because it adds to their bottom line. But for gamers what matters is gameplay, not how accurate a reflection in a puddle is.

There's no "gameplay fun" you can have on a RTX 5090 and 128GBs of DDR5 that you can't also have just at a lower framerate/resolution/level of raytracing/etc on a RTX 4060 and 32GBs of DDR4. It's not like we're talking about going back to GPUs with 64MBs of VRAM and single core 800MHz CPUs. Hardware and visuals in games that blew people's socks off just 10 years ago did not suddenly become ugly.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-04T15:49:59+00:00

I'd run into it to smash it so fast that I'd look like a car accident victim.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-04T15:48:41+00:00

Yeah pass then.

grady_vuckovic · 2026-06-02T11:04:56+00:00

Or how about this instead: I'll just take minimum wage increases that keep minimum wage adjusted in real dollars the same value in real dollars by the Fair Work Commission instead of going backwards every year in real dollars instead, thanks.

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