This is why we can't have nice things. The fact that people still see nothing wrong with this is infuriating.

Wow, it's almost as if AI ruins fucking everything.

If you think it can be cloned that fast why do you need a demo? Use AI to finish it and release now if it's so easy.

Yea. This year's Next Fest on Steam is just fucking sad with how much AI slop clones are clogging it.

Accurate name there mate.

If they use ai to make their game, it becomes soulless ai slop like the rest of it. The people copying their game aren't making anything good or even worth playing, and the intent isn't for it to be good. They're just making slop to siphon sales away from the original game, while cashing in on someone else's idea. And in the meantime it clogs up the marketplaces and pushes legitimate games down in the listings so it's harder to get seen, while also making your game look like part of the slop. Not to mention it's just straight up ip theft at that point.

I've seen the exact same thing play out on every market place. Ai has just made it possible to do it faster, and with games. I made a sticker design and listed it on redbubble. It was pretty popular, sold quite a bit. The instant it started getting rankings, people/bots screen shot the design and uploaded it again themselves. Pushed my listing all the way down by gaming the SEO and the sales dried up.

Same thing on Etsy. Made handmade jewellery. People stole the designs, made cheap imitations in China and sold them for a fraction of the cost, cheaper than I could produce them for because I was using real gold/silver. But in the meantime my legitimate listing was pushing all the way down.

it's people. people ruin everything

Every time a new medium opens for new people, a ton of crap is generated and everyon is shouting about the end times. And yet, we're still here.

The game dev ecosystem is already 99% crap. Open the playstore if you don't believe me.

The only thing stopping bad people with AI is good people with AI.

Am I doing apologia correctly?

/s

My question is who would actually buy the clones anyway? It's not really like the old days where you can scam old people with a handheld gamebox360, surely most people savvy enough to use steam are going to support the indie Dev or just pirate the game outright?

Yeah, I heard an interview with Lucas Pope where he was saying he was working on something but wouldn't be telling anyone anything about it - because he didn't want a hundred crappy copies of whatever innovative idea he has, before his game is even published.

Didn't realize the bar minimum to expect of a technology is not killing everyone. I guess if you lower the bar down to "not committing mass genocide" then it's a lot easier to like every new tech regardless of any other standard.

As far as I see it LLMs and vibe coding will not prevent people from coding by hand, but they will enable people to steal far, far more easily than they ever could before.

If something built an Automatic Lock Picker 3000, able to pick any lock in the world at an 80% success rate otherwise just try again ad nauseam, then a lot more people will steal shit. People obviously could steal before the ALP3000's release, but it wasn't trivial for just anyone to do beforehand. Now it is.

In a similar vein I think LLMs trivialize the process by which people can "steal" concepts. It's pretty damn demoralizing to know that you spent months to years working on a game, start promoting it, then someone with a Claude subscription can make their own clone of your game then sweep the rug out from under your feet. You're trying to build a good and successful game, then you could easily have legitimate claims that you're the clone since someone else released something similar several weeks before you did.

That's not even to mention all of the code and other assets GenAI stole without consent in order to enable these vibe coders to steal your ideas your ideas.

No it's not going to be the end of the world (but it sure will enable climate change) but it's going to make things a lot worse for the people who actually care to craft something good while enabling the people who only care about having that thing done.

Have you seen what’s happening with piracy?

No shit. This has been a problem with movies for decades. Somebody starts on an idea, and there's already another studio trying to clone that idea. Blade and Vampires. Antz and A Bug's Life.

And then when it comes out and is successful enough, you have all of the straight-to-video clones, and a couple of porn clones.

I don't think you can own ideas and concepts (outside of very specific circumstances) and I'm willing to die on this hill.

It would be hypocritical of me to change my mind just because piracy has become mainstream.

I don't disagree with that, but my point is more along the lines of enabling low effort "theft" (or if you so dislike that term then perhaps "cloning" would better suit your tastes) demoralizes and thereby disincentivizes high effort creative works, on top of making high effort work harder to find by muddying the waters they're both going to be put in.

Suppose I put in the work to craft a brand new style of game. Something that nobody has ever seen before. I now have to promote it in order to get sales, but by promoting it vibe coders now see it and can make a low effort clone. Because these particular vibe coders are trying to cash in on the hype I'm trying to build up they don't necessarily care about quality, only about getting a return on the investment I put in on designing my original idea, so they're able to produce something functional and ship it within the weeks of time I'm trying to use to build up a fanbase.

Depending on the success of my marketing, how much time I dedicated to marketing before release, the technical requirements to execute my game design, etc then I might still have a successful game and people are able to recognize the difference in quality between my games and the slop cash grabs but I also might now be fighting an uphill battle against the reputation the slop cash grabs have created around my original game design. What incentive do I then have the next time I come up with a new idea for a game?

Getting back to reality, I think many people can recognize a cash grab when they see it but I still think that LLMs enabling them made the already existing visibility problem for indie devs so very much worse.

If something built an Automatic Lock Picker 3000...

Just an interesting tidbit: something similar to this already exists. It won't pick any lock, but it makes picking the majority of locks dead simple.

Yep, I'm familiar with it, though I've never used one before. I don't think it's as accessible right now as LLMs are considering its a fairly bulky physical device one would need to bring with them to any locks, and to my knowledge I believe it'll still struggle with security bits which I believe are fairly common.

I guess a better comparison would have been something like some "Pickless Lockpicking App" to emphasize that such a thing would have similar accessibility to LLMs, but much further than that and the comparison starts to break down.

Savvy enough to use Steam? The company that rules the PC marketplace due to their philosophy of making games extremely easy to acquire and play?

It took me a few moments to work out what the feeling was looking over NextFest. Once I did, I joined the groaning online discourse. But a lot of people view Steam browsing more casually, and don’t have such forums.

The exact moment of “I’ve been fooled!” is unclear too. Many genuine indie devs have traditionally put out half-functional games, so it’s nothing new, and sometimes you just get what you pay for.

But Steam’s gotta do something about this or it’s going to degrade the value of the store.

I understand his sentiment but only now mentioning that something is broken? Something has been broken for a very long while already.

Only now bigger companies are feeling the results of it. However, very unfortunately also smaller companies, developers/ indie-developers.

i am just tired with the narrative that people were awesome then ai came along. i wonder how many of these anti-ai folks pirated games before.

Honestly, the thing that is broken is people's intelligence. The people propping up the mobile games industry, Mr. Beast videos, AI music, "Verticals", etc. are all people I've never met, and yet somehow represent the vast majority of our population. Those are the people who don't care about the difference between novel artwork, and a half-assed slop recreation that's designed to poke their dopamine receptors. Those people are why we can't have nice things.

Someone will inevitably argue, "no, it's the billionaires who are thrusting AI on us, we just need to stop them". And while I agree they showed us the path here, I think we could erase the lot of them from existence, and the remaining population would still use the knowledge leftover to keep going down the same path.

I don't know if it's just that the existence of AI will curse humanity to always very efficiently optimize to the lowest common denominator, or if this will pressure the LCD to not be so far down there, but whatever shakes out I don't think will be in our lifetimes...

Children mate. They exist to scam children who don't know better.

And you highly overestimate the average user's "tech savvy"-ness. That bell curve skews a lot lower, friendo. Way too many people have no clue how to use a computer beyond "point and click".

Yea. There have always been half baked indie titles for Next Fest. They are indie devs, not every title is going to be a hit. Some people are just starting out.

But the real big issue is that a lot of the "indie devs" this season have begun to lean heavily on AI generation, so now there is a massive inflation of half-baked titles from people who really have no business publishing a game making it that much harder to actually find the diamonds in the rough.

As am I.

And so the solution is to enable more people to be able to do this faster with lower quality end products?

I'm not going to argue clones or even slop are new problems caused by generative AI, but this counterargument feels like saying "people killed each other before guns, therefore guns aren't the problem and its fine to give every person one".

Regardless of if the problem existed before, it's still enabling people to do worse.

Anti-AI people have turned off their brains. An AI cannot replicate the logic behind game mechanics without digging into the code, nor can it see inside the brain of a creator and understand their philosophy nor personality from a mere demo.

AI is impressive and very useful, but it ain't witchcraft. I have been trying to vibecode assorted projects, and my local AI failed three of them - and succeeded at a bunch of others. Every time, no matter the result, a lot of QA had to be done to figure out the guts of the target program, and how to get the intended result.

Just because the bar is lower to get things done, doesn't remove the need for effort and thought. No different from a forklift, hand mixer, or a word processor.

The problem isn't that they are making high quality clones. The problem is that people crap out shit-tier clones en masse before you can even release, making the good original game basically invisible in store fronts and creating an association of the genre with low effort asset flips in the customers minds.

We already have a mountain of asset flips anyway.

Personally, I think it is a good thing: 95% of what humanity produces is crappy or forgettable, the stuff that is good is likely to be remembered. The bigger the crap pile, the greater odds of finding gems after the pile has been sifted through.

If a million monkeys can eventually produce the works of Shakesphere, and you can get a trillion monkeys, you will get even more masterworks. Even better, our monkeys understand the goal, their purpose, and become ever more capable over time.

Speaking as a consumer of media with niche tastes, this is an improvement over the old way of doing things. We may get an adventure game based on the Rankin-Bass Hobbit's aesthetic, an remake of the entire Quest for Glory series, or something we have yet to conceive of.