Game Developers Revolt Against Microsoft's New AI Gaming Tool (wired.com) 68
Microsoft's newly announced Muse AI model for game development has triggered immediate backlash from industry professionals. "Fuck this shit," responded David Goldfarb, founder of The Outsiders, arguing that such AI tools primarily serve to "reduce capital expenditure" while devaluing developers' collective artistic contributions.
Multiple developers told Wired that the tool is aimed at shareholders rather than actual developers. "Nobody will want this. They don't CARE that nobody will want this," one AAA developer said, noting that internal criticism remains muted due to job security concerns amid industry-wide layoffs.
The resistance comes as developers increasingly view AI initiatives as threats to job security rather than helpful tools. One anonymous developer called it "gross" that they needed to remain unnamed while criticizing Muse, as their studio still depends on potential Game Pass deals with Microsoft. Even in prototyping, where Microsoft sees AI potential, Creative Assembly's Marc Burrage warns that automated shortcuts could undermine crucial learning experiences in game development.
Multiple developers told Wired that the tool is aimed at shareholders rather than actual developers. "Nobody will want this. They don't CARE that nobody will want this," one AAA developer said, noting that internal criticism remains muted due to job security concerns amid industry-wide layoffs.
The resistance comes as developers increasingly view AI initiatives as threats to job security rather than helpful tools. One anonymous developer called it "gross" that they needed to remain unnamed while criticizing Muse, as their studio still depends on potential Game Pass deals with Microsoft. Even in prototyping, where Microsoft sees AI potential, Creative Assembly's Marc Burrage warns that automated shortcuts could undermine crucial learning experiences in game development.
Re:"Reduce capital expenditures" (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's all just classism and economic exploitation. The sad part is how so many people willingly enslaves themselves by becoming indebted and by supporting the very economy that's using them as wage slaves. Slavery is alive, doing well and growing in America.
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It's one thing to sail the high seas because the pricing, microtransactions, and other bullshit has gotten all out of control. I won't lie; I sometimes do this when I'm kind of iffy on whether something is worth it or not. Now you have shit like Denuvo which I refuse to put on my machines. So the result is that a lot of people just don't buy some of this slop at the gate. Look at the new Civilization VII game. As a fan of that series, I was kind of looking forward to it. Then they dropped a $70 price tag on
Games on the fly (Score:2)
It will get worse before it gets better (Score:2)
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We're already in the "much worse". Just the engine saga alone. Almost everyone is either on Unreal or Unity at this point. Because of all the shovelware premade assets you can just buy. They're in everything. That's why so many games made on those engines all look the same. And don't even get me started on Unreal being made for a third person shooter with constantly dynamically changing environment, so it's optimization is utterly abhorrent for games with static environment (which is overwhelming majority o
Anti-DEI dog whistle (Score:1)
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That means that even Chinese are now MAGA by this logic, as NetEase boss specifically decried wokeness in Western gaming studios in their latest policy shift of closing them.
How soon until the whole world is MAGA at this rate of growth? Because if Chinese Communists are now MAGA, that's a hell of an inclusive movement.
5 Stages Of Grief (Score:3, Interesting)
The light bulb just turned on for these guys. They are at the second stage of grief.
1. AI is bullshit. It's a fad. It'll never succeed.
2. Fuck this bullshit. This is only to take jobs. Nobody but CEOs want this. Fuck AI!
3. Well, AI will eliminate the bad developers. I'll use it to enhance my productivity. You still need me. You need my creativity.
4. Wah! I lost my job. I have no prospects. What will I do. Woe is me.
5. AI took my livelihood, I need to find a new career or end it all.
Re:5 Stages Of Grief (Score:4, Insightful)
0. I love capitalism! I have all the cool toys with my tech job money.
[...]
6. This endless running of a rat race for the basic essentials of life while the owners buy multiple yachts solely so that they do not have to wait for their boat to get someplace before they fly out to it when they want to do a weekend on it in another specific country isn't healthy, is it?
Once upon a time, businesses had longevity, so at least there was stability. Now they are bought and sold and headcount reduced at the whim of corporate raiders.
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You might say I'm in denial, but not the kind of denial you pictured.
I'm old enough to have seen this cycle before. When the desktop computer itself was born, people worried about all the people who would lose their jobs, replaced by computers. When the dot-com boom came, people worried that self-service web sites would cause millions to lose their jobs. Now that AI is here, people are again worried that millions will lose their jobs.
The reality is, self-driving cars haven't made a dent in Uber and Lyft job
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AI will make things easier, more efficient and in the end also more advanced.
Doesn using python instead of assembler speed up your development? Does it now take less time? Are you now jobless, or do you have more time to create the high-level logic because you don't need to do the low-level stuff yourself anymore. Are assembler skills worthless now? No, but nevertheless most people are happy they won't need that skill for programming.
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6. Learn to mine.
AI must replace EVERYTHING (Score:2)
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Ah. The 5 stages of "what Kübler-Ross pulled out of her butt. [psychologytoday.com]"
Can we do the horoscopes of dealing with it next? I'm a taurus.
"Fuck this shit" (Score:2)
When you're iterating on a predictable formula... (Score:3)
The whole AAA industry is ripe fodder for AI disruption.
They shoulda stuck with passion rather than profit.
I'm not gonna lie, the schadenfreude payback on ~10 years of paying for $h1tty reductive regressive gameplay has me cracking a major smirk about now.
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... rather than innovative gameplay, you're a prime target for AI disruption.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. From what I've seen so far, derivative and uncreative results from AI will led to derivative and uncreative results in gameplay.
They might want to think about it as well - If games are AI generated, there really isn't much need for the big actors in the game world. Indeed, the people who play games can easily roll their own.
That's nonsense (Score:2)
If innovative gameplay was King the Titans of the industry wouldn't be a mediocre multiplayer third-person shooter and the same spunk gargle wee-wee modern military shooter
Wake me up when (Score:2)
I use ChatGPT to help with Unity C# scripts, it's pretty helpful.
I'm not even against the idea of models being used to generate maps and assets - procedural generation in games has existed for a while, why not extend that to the assets as well?
That being said the generation of art assets using models that were trained on other people's assets is a completely separate conversation - a dubious one at that if the models were trained on anything other than '
Re: Wake me up when (Score:2)
Worst Summary in the history of Slashdot (Score:3)
The summary is just a bunch of random insults. Not a single sentence about what this is about.
This isn't just a bad summary: this is a bad mindset. It's the same mindset that produces TV and radio news where you hear nothing but "This is a radical leftist DEI program!"Or "These right-wing fascists are destroying our country!" But no discussion about the actual topic. Slashdot needs to be better than this.
Re:Worst Summary in the history of Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
"These right-wing fascists are destroying our country!"
They're mostly destroying Ukraine. But America's turn will come soon. The United States is siding with Russia by demanding Ukrainian resources and threatening with action for refusal to comply. They are being robbed by the world's two largest nuclear powers. Welcome back to the 21st-century Molotov-Ribbentrop reality
The hilarious part (in a macabre way) is how Trump thinks Russia will agree to security guarantees. I mean, they'll agree to them, sure, but they already made security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for de-nuclearization in written treaty form back in December of 1994, and then almost exactly two decades later in March of 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Russia's security guarantees aren't worth as much as the paper that the formal treaties are written on, and anybody who says otherwise doesn't know history.
The problem is that President Trump doesn't know history. His party is the party of people who failed history in school. It's the only way to explain about half of the things that they do.
Thanks MAGA for voting in Orange Hitler.
See also "people who failed history in school", or at least people who failed to actually understand what they were learning. You never ever elect an authoritarian. It always comes back to bite you in the a**.
But to turn this thread back on topic, and yet stay oddly political, the reality is that throughout history, technology was always promoted as a tool for making workers lives easier. Workers always assumed that this would mean that they didn't have to work as hard. In practice, the reality was always that their employers expected more, and the workers had to work just as hard, but produced higher levels of output. AI tools are just another in a long line of these "improvements".
The problem with this is that their wages haven't kept up with increases in productivity. If they did, then workers could work less and produce the same amount and have more time for themselves. But the system is very deliberately rigged to prevent this. Ever try to find part-time employment in tech? No way. Not gonna happen. Why? Because if workers were allowed to work part time, they couldn't be exploited as easily.
And this is largely caused by the same sorts of greedy people who you're complaining about — the rich billionaires who have no qualms about exploiting workers for their own profits. People like Trump and Musk, if they had to start from nothing, would probably be working in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant for a little bit over minimum wage, because they have little or no people skills, and would not be able to survive without "f**k you money". But because they started off wealthy, they got the opportunity to exploit others to enrich themselves. And for the most part, they give very little back, using charitable organizations more as tax dodges than for any sort of actual charity.
I don't know how to fix this, but a good start would be ramping up the capital gains tax for the ultra-wealthy, treating any capital gains over a million dollars per year as ordinary income, and taxing capital assets (read "stocks") over $100 million every year to encourage people to take the capital gains or donate them to charity.
As for AI tools, I haven't ever found them particularly useful, because the output is too low quality for me to do anything with it, and it is usually hard to fix the flaws (unless you're talking about plain text). It seems like any other fad, except that eventually it won't be, because people with money will continue to push for the tech to improve so that they can fire more workers and make more money, because apparently no amount is too much for them. I really don't get it. Any of it.
Exception: Self-driving car tech. That is useful. There are probably other niche uses that are useful. Most are not.
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Russia's security guarantees aren't worth as much as the paper that the formal treaties are written on, and anybody who says otherwise IS NOT 'MERICAN .
ftfy
You're aware that the US coerced Zelenskyy to drop peace talks [politico.com], right? With some gentle cuddling before the big orange badman came back.
what? (Score:2)
Seriously amazing. Link clearly spells out that US thought peace was not being negotiated realistically (Demanding Putin step down) and so US encouraged that condition to be dropped so fighting would not continue & negotiation could succeed.
It then ends with a Trump spokesperson (get this: uneducated, unrealistic and inconsistent), claiming US is wrong to push for better negotiation and s
Re: Worst Summary in the history of Slashdot (Score:2)
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People can complain all they want but generative AI isn't going to go away without a Butlerian Jihad, which isn't going to happen, because the complainers Won't Do Shit(TM).
This should be modded up.
Okay - I suggest listening to Elton John's "Country Comfort while reading this. The Doomscrollers and luddites that have metastasized on Slashdot recently, would probably be the ones bitching and moaning about those those fscking transisters were going to destroy the warm mellow sound of tubes, or that Software Designed Radio wasn't real radio, or any of a million things must be banned. Throw your sabots into the machinery, that is what god wants, because you are owed a lifelong
Another Race to the Bottom (Score:2)
But he was wrong (Score:3)
"Nobody will want this. They don't CARE that nobody will want this," one AAA developer said
A lot of players want this. Consider the popularity of the variously overlapping mining, exploration, and survival genres. A lot of these have procedurally generated content now, and this is just another form of that.
The real concern is as always that it will eliminate jobs and be used instead of human labor, which then gets into talking about our social and economic systems and whether they make sense going forwards. And not enough people seem to be ready for that discussion to make it worth having, especially when there are other immediately pressing issues. But you can't solve the AI taking creative jobs problem by hoping it won't happen.
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"Nobody will want this. They don't CARE that nobody will want this," one AAA developer said
A lot of players want this. Consider the popularity of the variously overlapping mining, exploration, and survival genres. A lot of these have procedurally generated content now, and this is just another form of that.
The real concern is as always that it will eliminate jobs and be used instead of human labor, which then gets into talking about our social and economic systems and whether they make sense going forwards. And not enough people seem to be ready for that discussion to make it worth having, especially when there are other immediately pressing issues. But you can't solve the AI taking creative jobs problem by hoping it won't happen.
No jobs are permanent, I know a lot of people are smarter than me, but having been in the workforce for around 50 years, almost nothing is the same as in the mid 70's. Every time I saw a change coming, I added to my skillset. Even in my last position, only 7 years in, the work has changed dramatically. I changed with it. Lifetime learning is really not an option for technology oriented workers. If superannuated me can do this, imagine what others can.
But without my sarcasm, the idea is to continue to make
Is there a list of them? (Score:2)
Is there a list of these developers, so that I can avoid their games? If they are worried an AI that simulates a game at the video level is a threat to them, their games are probably not very good. There's just no way that you can infer interesting puzzles, mechanics, and metagame from just the video, so there's no way an AI using this technique is going to make a good game. Will it be able to make themed match 3 games on the fly? Sure. But we already have software that can do that, so who cares.
What t
These stories are always entertaining. (Score:1)
Having over three decades of experience, both hardware and software engineering support in the military, aerospace, financial and Fortune 50 companies, Iâ(TM)m always amused at the volume of humans whichb have this absurd faith in technology.
Faith in every aspect of the technological tools which fail, in both minor and catastrophic ways on a daily basis. Iâ(TM)ve watched billions in imaginary value come and go due to âoopsiesâ(TM).
Yes, we can certainly get a lot of things to work a lot o
If nobody wants it ... (Score:2)
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Their employer will want it, for cost saving. And their clients (gamers) will prefer it, for the reduced costs. They're afraid of their craft being their livelihood.
Well in that case, "nobody wants it" doesn't sound like a very good argument then.
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"Digital is soulles and only exists to...." (Score:2)
"Make everything easier you the people who haven't trained their asses off in photography" scream the tin-type purist photographers.
"Nothing will ever beat analog photography onto FILM!" Scream the analog film purists.
"Tape and digital music just don't have the warmth of vinyl!" scream the audiophiles while buy oxygen free gold and unobtanium audio cables that cost as much as their house.
Oh well, dinosaurs are gonna dinosaur instead of learning the new technological tool. It will end up the same way as alwa
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"Make everything easier you the people who haven't trained their asses off in photography" scream the tin-type purist photographers.
"Nothing will ever beat analog photography onto FILM!" Scream the analog film purists.
Yes, and let's look at photography today. Billions upon billions of images already "out there" on the internet, and now AI can spew out even more variants of that. Took a picture which everyone likes and is novel? Well guess what, millions of copy-cat images will pop up [petapixel.com], AI will train on it and spew tons of very close variations of this image, and leave your original wonderful image drown in the "noise" and fade immediately into obscurity. Leaving the photographer wondering "why am I doing this again?"
Most games aren't about art (Score:2)
For games that place a premium on "artistic contributions," AI is not a threat. AI will be a threat to the many crappy and mid-quality games that people try for a while and delete a few days later. For these games, nothing of value is lost.
As for those that do place a premium on artistry, I would ask, do the game companies behind them pay appropriately for that premium art? Probably not, the game industry is full of abusive practices towards employees. If art really matters, then the companies that produce
The 80% rule (Score:2)
We software engineers know that 80% of the functionality is achieved with 20% of the code / effort. The last 20%, is a killer.
This is where we are with AI. AI can do the 80% of the functionality now, but 80% of the work to make it truly *viable* as a tool that could potentially "replace" people, has yet to be done.
There is a long, long road ahead for AI to be adopted widely *beyond* just experiments. We've seen company after company dive in, and retreat. Wendy's tried it for drive-through order taking, and
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the sky is not falling
The sky is falling in the field of games development [obsidian.md] and things are only going to get worse.
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Sure, if you look at a list of companies who are laying off people, it looks bad. But this list doesn't prove a trend, or that the "majority" of game companies are laying off people. Maybe they are, maybe not, a one-sided list doesn't give us that information.
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The game industry has been a crappy industry for employees since at least the 80's, when I started my career. This is nothing new. Every teenage gamer dreams of working for a game company, and when they get there, they find out there are so many other dreamers that they have to take bottom dollar and terrible working conditions, just to get the job. You can't blame AI for that. Sure, game executives claim they are using AI to improve efficiency (i.e., reduce payroll), but there's a large gap between CEO cla
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Who actually cares? (Score:2)
99% of IT people knowingly create programs that "take away jobs" and then try to ex-post-facto justify what they are doing by claiming it helps the overall economy (it might, but that's not relevant to someone's morality and ethics if it was unintended consequence). Would you give up 90% of your income if you knew your job took away other people's jobs? 100% guaranteed none of you would do that. Note: I said 99% at the beginning of the paragraph because I'm the ethical and moral 1% of people .. we're discus
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Would you give up 90% of your income if you knew your job took away other people's jobs?
90%? Did you pick that number specifically to be absurd? Or were you trying to make a point about the highest tax bracket previously being 90%, and you thought you were setting a trap? Because the CEOs would still go play golf and eat steak dinners and fuck expensive prostitutes even if they got taxed 90%, and the rest of us who make much less and have less to tax in the first place could pay a significantly lower rate like we do now. They would still make way more than the rest of us, and do less work than
Visualization (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong (wait - this is Slashdot, so flame me if I'm wrong), but this tool is merely to visualize potential extensions and modifications to existing games. It is purely visual (IE video) extrapolating what a game would look like if you made certain changes to it, and is like watching a stream of someone else playing the game that you cannot control.
It is not actually creating anything useful, like meshes, textures or maps. It could be useful to test certain concepts quickly without having to
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If that's true, then congratulations on actually understanding the subject matter at hand. Sadly that is not a prerequisite for discussion.
From what I've read... (Score:2)
...gaming is already in trouble
Games have gotten too expensive to make, so studios cautiously demand remakes and sequels instead of originality
Politically motivated writers, directors and consultants jam their politics into games, while ignoring stability and good gameplay
Other developers insist on cinematic visuals, while ignoring stability and good gameplay
Studios routinely lose hundreds of millions, over and over, as gamers reject their stuff
Like so many other things, games used to be made by people who
What about the users? (Score:2)
> Multiple developers told Wired that the tool is aimed at shareholders rather than actual developers. "Nobody will want this. They don't CARE that nobody will want this," one AAA developer said, noting that internal criticism remains muted due to job security concerns amid industry-wide layoffs.
The developer talks about himself, management and shareholders, but doesn't even seem to consider what users might like. Shouldn't users be the most important group to ask about what their future games may look
Antitrust violations (Score:2)
If we had a proper government, this would be an open and shut antitrust case.