There’s a growing sense that something big is changing in the gaming industry, but not everyone is happy about it. Generative AI has gone from just a curiosity to a full-fledged presence in game development, and one indie publisher says there’s no going back. The floodgates are open whether players and developers like it or not.
mike rosethe founder of No More Robots, publisher of titles like “Yes, Your Grace” and “Descenders,” never let it surface when talking about the current situation. He likens the rise of generative AI in gaming to Pandora’s box being opened, and he doesn’t think anyone is going to close it.
“This is extremely annoying, especially from a publisher perspective,” Rose said in an interview with GamesRadar+, as well as other publishers like Hooded Horse.
“I used to think the number of games being released on Steam was insane, but now that’s just not possible. At the last Next Fest, it seemed like about a third of the demos had AI-generated key art or AI-generated content. So now we can compete with that too. Hooray!”
That frustration is not occurring in a vacuum. Platforms like Steam are already packed, with over 20,000 games dropping every year. Add AI tools to the mix, make it easier than ever to create content, and suddenly that pile gets even bigger. Even with disclosure rules in place, the sheer volume of AI-backed projects is becoming difficult to ignore.
Rose also doesn’t really like the look of AI-generated art, and doesn’t have any reservations about it, saying, “To be honest, don’t you think it’s really disgusting? I just don’t like looking at genAI art. I’d rather not do it, thank you.”
He’s not the only one there. Players have gotten pretty good at finding AI-generated assets, but the reaction hasn’t always been warm. Games like Crimson Desert and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 faced backlash and had to go back and replace AI generation elements.
Even technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS AI filter have drawn criticism. People are aware of it, but many don’t want it near their games.
Yet, despite the backlash, Rose continues to return to what he considers to be unavoidable truths. “I have spoken with dozens of people in the games industry about the upcoming story of generative AI in games and game development.
“One of the things I’ve been asking all along is how people want generational AI to be handled in this space,” Rose said, focusing on the “elephant in the room” here. “It’s probably never going to go away.”
“People can now make things by telling bots to make them. And the truth is that humans are extremely lazy. I don’t even mean this as an insult! We just are.
“So for most people, if you have a choice between spending a ton of time and money building something cool or just typing a few prompts into a program and it builds something for you, the average person will choose the latter.
“And that’s what really matters. Our feelings about it don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that many of us don’t like genAI. It’s going to be used right now, and it’s going to be used more and more. Video games are being cooked, as the kids say.”
Looking at the creators’ reactions, the last emotion is felt especially strongly. Lucas Pope, the man behind Papers, Please, and Return of the Obra Dinn, recently admitted that he is stepping back from sharing his early work in its entirety. It’s not just the use of AI that’s a concern, but the idea that anything published can be scraped, copied, or fed into systems.
“It’s either going to be swallowed whole by AI, or people will copy it, or something like that.”
That’s a pretty tough situation for the industry. Developers are alarmed, publishers are overwhelmed, and players are stuck trying to figure out what’s real, what AI is, and whether it even matters anymore.
The game may not be completely “cooked” yet, but things are definitely heating up.
