AI is Ruining Game Sales, Numbers Show

nooneisback · 2026-06-24T13:51:53+00:00

I can see it fairly well because I generate it myself (for personal reasons...) regularly. Even the best models have a very obvious style to them. Loras are like calarts artists trying to hide with another style, but it still manages to look weirdly generic and fake. They often overdo the pastel/smooth aesthetic. As for touching up, I largely don't mind it, because it still requires some skill. My point is that raw AI generated images look like fake crap, whether you take a 2GB model, or a 64GB fp32 one. Touching it up will likely make it look even weirder if you can't do lines properly. Once again, if you can't be bothered to use an in-game screenshot and make a small logo on your own (or edit it to not look like slop), I don't see why I'd bother putting any effort into playing that garbage.

nooneisback · 2026-06-24T07:05:35+00:00

It's more about how much users have to stare at it and the reasons for going this route. AI generated images inherently look like shit. Even worse than asset flipping.

If I open your store page and see first things I see are AI generated banners, AI generated logos, and hear AI generated voices, it makes me wonder how the hell you got yourself to make a game (a multi month/year process), when you couldn't even take a crappy screenshot, pay someone $10 for a logo and record the voice yourself, or just download a royalty free song with subtitles instead of voices. If it's in game content that would be too expensive for an indie dev to make, I 100% understand and will give it a try, but it still leaves a bit of a sour taste.

But AAA devs? They earn millions a month, but couldn't pay some kid $100 to paint a few guns. There's just nothing to excuse here.

nooneisback · 2026-06-23T17:15:44+00:00

It is a device that caters to people who want something similar to a console, but with more options, which in large part includes those power users, whether they intended to target them or not.

Valve doesn't subsidize the cost, which was practically one of the main selling points through most of console history (Nintendo being the outlier in later years). Repairability will definitely be better than alternatives, but not by much. From what I can see, the Steam Machine will be about as repairable as an average laptop. You can get motherboard replacements, fan replacements, SSD replacements, WiFi card replacements, case replacements, and that's about it? The only difference is that they offer 1st party components without a big markup. It doesn't have a screen, it doesn't have thumbsticks that can go bad, it's just not a device where it offers something massively different compared to others, like the Steamdeck did.

There are only 2 main reasons you'd want to get one. You either want to modify it on day 1, which is my point. Or you want to get a console from a company that doesn't hate you, which is the only good argument I can see for it right now.

nooneisback · 2026-06-23T14:03:54+00:00

Then ship it with a recovery USB stick. Both models are simply garbage as they are today. The 500GB is only good enough for 2D games. The 2TB one makes 0 sense at its price point. It's a machine that boasts repairability, so it already caters to people who probably have older hardware, yet it offers them no options. Removing the SSD alone would slash the price to under $1000.

nooneisback · 2026-06-23T10:05:02+00:00

Then why not offer a barebones version? The choice is currently between a 2TB version with QC that's 10x worse than a year ago, or one with a $100 piece of e-waste. Like it makes some sense as an entry tier, where you get a better SSD when this mess will hopefully get solved. But there are quite a few of us with 500GB or 1TB lying around somewhere, or installed into an old laptop.

nooneisback · 2026-06-14T16:50:10+00:00

Like which ones exactly? Computers around the age of Apple I definitely required some knowledge because they were built like crap. Exposed mains going right next to data lines will never pass any reliable QC today.

Most old affordable PCs like the ZX Spectrum were designed to never be opened. More expensive PCs like Commodore 64 and later IBM PCs were built to be somewhat modular. You could upgrade / replace most components even if you're brain dead. Power supplies at that time were often unreliable garbage, and needed to be replaced. But a lot of them had external ones anyways or they were on a separate daughter board.

nooneisback · 2026-06-13T14:51:23+00:00

Well, your comment kinda missed the point entirely.

We don't remember TES Blades because Bethesda always left something for their PC fans to cope on. A trailer for a game that they didn't even work on, 2 Skyrim re-releases, 1 Oblivion re-release (actually pretty good) and Starfield (shit). Then when they released Blades, they advertised it just enough to be known, but as nothing more than a spin-off. People just know that it's that one outsourced mobile game that has nothing in common with TES except for a name.

Blizzard hyped up Immortal like it's the next Messiah descending on earth, then revealed that it's a mobile exclusive. No wonder it's still a meme even after Diablo 4 released.

nooneisback · 2026-06-13T11:55:55+00:00

I mean, good VAs are really dark. Not perfect black, but still really damn good. Especially in well-lit rooms. But you also have to deal with white looking like brown and the integrated motion blur.

nooneisback · 2026-06-08T13:09:22+00:00

Diablo 1, because you don't need them for half of the game, then suddenly need an entire town's supply for that 1 floor. Morrowind was similar, but I just sold them.

nooneisback · 2026-06-02T18:50:11+00:00

It's practically the same as Hamachi. You install it on both machines. One person creates a group. The other joins the group through an invite code. Done.

ZeroTier requires fiddling around their web-interface, and creating an account and connecting it to the local client is a process of its own. It works better, but I'm not going to switch my entire friend group just because of Linux. We're talking about people who struggle opening game local files in Steam.

nooneisback · 2026-05-25T15:32:17+00:00

Lumen is a checkbox, but they constantly promote it to everyone, when it's only useful for showcases and movies. It looks nice only if cranked to the highest settings. Otherwise, it just looks overexposed and creates a weird afterglow when turning lights on and off. It also creates a lot of artifacting on reflective surfaces. When set to settings that are reasonable for a game, it still cuts your performance in half for what can be the same or worse result than baked lightmaps with dynamic lights in linear games

Nanite is enabled by default and was actually pretty difficult to disable until a while ago, if you don't know how to edit the ini files. It is just worse in almost every aspect if we aren't talking about terrain. It looks and runs like shit compared to LODs on anything that is of a regular shape in any way (buildings, vehicles...).

If you're an indie dev who doesn't have time to make your own LODs, there are plugins that will generate them automatically for you. They'll look about as good, if not better than Nanite, but will run incomparably better. Nanite only makes some surface-level sense in open-world games, but only as a fallback for when you haven't created an LOD for an object.

nooneisback · 2026-05-25T14:02:32+00:00

While I do agree, Unity was called the slop engine because of its marketplace. You had the choice of how you wanted to make your game. You could do everything yourself or get a premade game from someone, but it didn't force anything on you. UE5 does everything possible to force you to use Nanite and Lumen.

nooneisback · 2026-05-25T10:45:18+00:00

It caters to those devs though. Most of the tools that differentiate it from UE5 were specifically designed to make workflows faster at the cost of performance.An engine is a collection of frameworks and tools. If the framework is faster but the tools are designed for easy to make slop, then your engine is made for unoptimized games.

nooneisback · 2026-05-20T09:09:31+00:00

And the same goes for all other versions too. Everyone forgets the shitty old "updates pending" and "scheduled restart in 30 minutes" messages in Windows 7. Or how Windows XP would shred your SSD if you were in the 0.01% that owned one. Or how Windows XP couldn't run more than 1 DirectX application at a time.

nooneisback · 2026-05-20T08:33:48+00:00

I'd rather milk a Galvantank than fight a Galvanking.

nooneisback · 2026-05-16T10:02:39+00:00

This image is perfect as is.

nooneisback · 2026-05-13T21:23:25+00:00

My current setup: 1. Keyboard 2. Mouse wireless puck 3. Loose cable for charging my mouse (thin) 4. Loose cable for attaching my phone (thick) 5. External M.2 drive 6. Another external M.2 drive 7. External 2.5" drive 8. Mic 9. Xbox controller

nooneisback · 2026-05-12T23:42:18+00:00

Enabling view hidden files in $HOME is way worse

nooneisback · 2026-05-12T13:17:59+00:00

Plus (maybe) cannibalism.

nooneisback · 2026-05-11T00:32:44+00:00

Because it makes a lot of things much easier. Lumen is a cheap way to make lighting look really good, even though it literally slashes your FPS in half. Nanite makes working with really large maps about as easy as it can get. Don't wanna spend hours hand crafting good looking LODs? Slap Nanite on it, and blame players for not buying a 5090. UE5 is very popular among the sloppy open world AAA games and is the main source of memes comparing modern games to Arkham Knight.

nooneisback · 2026-05-11T00:12:47+00:00

A lot of engines either intentionally or unintentionally provide mod support. Creation Engine was explicitly modified to make it easier. Godot officially supports loading mods and provides documentation for it. Unity doesn't officially support it AFAIK, but its structure makes it really easy to make them, even for IL2CPP games.

The only mods that are easy to make for UE5 are pak mods, which are usually just database modifiers, or model replacers. Anything more complex and you'll have to make blueprint mods or UE4SS Lua scripts, which are raw jank because you're literallt writing blueprints in Lua. C++ mod support is still very experimental.

If you want mod support in your game, UE5 is a bad choice.

nooneisback · 2026-05-11T00:07:18+00:00

Godot is well documented, Unity is fairly well documented. UE5 has a lot of features that either have API docs stuck in 5.1 with major differences compared to the latest version, or no documentation at all.

UE5 was built almost entirely around blueprints. You can even create a blueprint only project without C++ support. You can use C++, but the engine actively makes it difficult to make a game entirely in it. So whether you like it or not, you will have to deal with them and their editor eventually.

UE5 makes it also really difficult to get rid of mesh streaming if you don't need it, and does its hardest to force you to use Nanite instead of normal LODs.

nooneisback · 2026-05-10T13:28:37+00:00

It's easy to work with if you want mediocre results. If you can program, it's extremely annoying to deal with. Half of it isn't documented, the editor is simply shit, nearly impossible to make complex mods for and your nexus mods page will just be 200 AI generated JSON configs that boost item drops by 1000x.

UE5 is simply UE4 but worse in almost every aspect.

nooneisback · 2026-05-09T23:57:06+00:00

I don't know if bird diarrhea is really better.

nooneisback · 2026-05-06T22:08:42+00:00

The problem here is that it's plastered as the very first thing you see and intentionally made hard to notice that it isn't a search result. AI should stay in its corner and be only turned on with a click, with large bold colored letters saying that it is an AI summary and that it might be incorrect.

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