At a Glance
Netflix Games feels generative AI will completely reshape game development–but stopped short of explaining exactly how.
This is the only corporate game left. Convince clueless investors that they’ll make more money if they give you money. No real innovation or even a real goal. Just buzzword after buzzword to get those investors on board.
Capitalism doesn’t breed innovation. It eventually eats it.
I’d like to think some things will change once not every major investor is clueless after just being rich their whole lives, but given how generational wealth works, I’m not holding my breath.
“mindblowing new experiences”. Fuck me, imagine if that guy got outside and touched grass.
What does it mean to touch grass?
The Netflix exec talking about how generative AI is going to create “mindblowing experiences” reminds me of a Mondelez Executive for the Oreos brand talking about a slight tweak to the Oreos product line with a new line of Oreos, how it was going to “take snacking to a new unbelievable level”. The reality was a slightly different Oreo cookie that helped increase obesity rates, with the same shit.
This is even worse, because most people see through all the AI slop, what we’ll get are cheap ass AI produced mobile game clones, and this guy’s talking about them being “mindblowing experiences”. In reality, if you go out and get some sunlight and touch grass, you’re getting a far more rich experience.
Are you an … AI?
GenAI is good at word salad, so that part’s sorted at least. Now, to the rest of this dumpster fire
When I read your comment, I internalized “sorted” as “sordid.” I guess either one works!
You know, I’m okay if an indie dev wants to use an LLM to generate lore text to save time, effort, and/or sanity. I sometimes feel bad skipping that stuff, because I know a small team of people worked really hard to write multiple pages of a “book” in some hard-to-reach corner of their game.
On the other hand, these giant corpos have the resources to pay for writers and artists, and I think they have an ethical duty to society to provide jobs.
I’m not sure how you’d solve the problem of big corpos becoming cheap content farms while avoiding harming the people who use these tools to make something rich and beautiful, but I have to believe there’s a way to thread that needle.
Lore books eh you’re giving me ideas. Hard to justify spending budget on that kind of stuff even if you have money to work with… how would one even get one’s hands on a woodprint artist? You know, the chisel and printing press kind? Imitating it is going to be hard indeed and figuring out how to do it not worth for a couple of one-off images you could just as well do without so either generating from prompt or telling the model to re-paint an input image in that style seems like the obvious solution.
I think a similar rule applies as when it comes to code, and NIH syndrome syndrome: Whatever it is that is your primary focus you should write yourself, use libraries for the rest. If you write a shooter, you’re going to write the gunplay, but can take the renderer off the shelf. I you’re writing a walking simulator that happens to have a gun somewhere but is generally focussed on graphical atmosphere, go grab the gunplay off the shelf but write the renderer yourself.
So unless the focus of your game is rummaging through books in an ancient library, go use that model.
I’m not sure how you’d solve the problem of big corpos becoming cheap content farms while avoiding harming the people who use these tools to make something rich and beautiful, but I have to believe there’s a way to thread that needle.
Easy, local AI.
Keep generative AI locally runnable instead of corporate hosted. Make it free, open and accessible. This gives the little guys the cost advantage, and takes away the scaling advantages of mega publishers. Lemmy users should be familiar with this concept.
Whenever I hear people rail against AI, I tell them they are handing the world to Sam Altman and his dystopia, who do not care about stealing content, equality, or them. I get a lot of hate for it. But they need to be fighting the corporate vs open AI battle instead.
A lot of people can’t really grasp the idea that Pandora’s box is open. Toothpaste is out of the tube. Covering your ears and crying about it just lets the most aggressive people make their wishes first.
Note: the reason I shared this article here instead of the games community is because of the intersection of different topics in technology in this article.
Crypto and ai attracted so many grifters
I didn’t even know Netflix had a games department, and I have a Netflix account. I’m assuming this is just another effort on their part for further enshittification of that service. Perhaps it’s finally time I unsubscribed from Netflix.
Ai magic money tree will keep printing money out of nothing and we save on headcount!
