Yeah I feel like it's the difference between broader intentional adoption and things slipping through the cracks.

Was happy to play through all of Claire Obscure and am chipping away at the Alters. Meanwhile I found the trader voices in Arc Raiders grating to a point I fell off it

Having not seen the original movie in like 15 years, nor either sequel, you really don't need any knowledge of Avatar beyond the basics.

Also for the record: amazing environment art. The open world just looks stunning.

Oh yeah it's never been sufficient for what was needed. Heck, one of my earliest newsletters back in 2024 was arguing it needed to be more thorough.

2) I believe Valve will de-emphasise the AI disclosure. I don't think they'll get rid of it, but they'll remove it from store pages.

AI is now a branding issue, and I wonder if AAA studios will pressure Valve into hiding it from the public to minimise blowback.

www.aiandgames.com/i/183536510/...

1) I'm really worried about Steam this year. Even more so than before. Over 4000 games were released in 2025 with the AI-content disclosure. There's hundreds of AI shovelware games coming to market each year.

This will get worse for sure.

www.aiandgames.com/i/183536510/...

It's what we're looking for in our heroes: authenticity.

Between increasing prices for consumer hardware (be it RAM, consoles or otherwise), the ever rising cost of development for such large and often bloated projects, I do wonder what state the AAA industry will be in by 2030.

Meanwhile generative AI is now the solution to poor production processes and the drive for constant content to monetise.

And players are kinda reaching a breaking point.

It really feels like a turning point where indies will begin to hold the sway of an increasing number of players.

All because the industry spent the past 40 years insisting graphics are gaming's frontier: more pixels means better gaming.

Now their customers chew them out if they don't meet these ever ridiculous standards. And big AAA titles can't launch on 2025's most popular console without DLSS.

DLSS and other AI upscalers are increasingly a requirement to maintain the push for graphical fidelity when customers can't afford the hardware necessary to achieve native performance.

We have games that can't achieve stable performance on the average consumer's system at industry standards.

One would hope so. But in my experience I've found the average person knows absolutely nothing about how AI works in its variety of forms - including a lot of devs.

Hence we keep having these big conversations about AI without any context. And it normalises misconceptions and false narratives.

But hey, we'll keep pushing back on it. And I think in the long run we'll win.

Besides I still have a massive backlog of topics to cover on the YouTube channel. 😅

It's pretty disgusting to me that considering the really amazing ways we have used AI in game dev over the years, the big talking point of 2025 is using it lay people off and ship games full of slop .

It's sad, desperate, and not what so many people who work in AI ever wanted to see happen.

Meanwhile my YouTube work continues to be a celebration of good practice in the industry. That and @conference.aiandgames.com too.

And then we use the @aiandgames.com newsletter to combat misinformation and bullshit narratives.

We're gonna keep showing the way forward and push back inch-by-inch.