I'm not a fan of that either but that wasn't the point.

The point was the complete lack of microtransactions and ensuring the game jam packed with content was a great step forward. We need more of that to scare big publishers so they at least have second thoughts about screwing gamers over.

Also I feel like gacha mechanics are far worse and predatory than Ubisoft or whatever Blizzard does. Just saying. I understand gachas are usually free on download and modern AAA western games are full price, but one is clearly more predatory than the other.

[rant begins here] if I can think of it properly,the industry is at a thin ice situation..and don't ever forget the hardline zealots who wanted to shout out a GOTY for just about ANYTHING these days..

these nobodies...who do they think they are?! they DON'T HAVE THE AUTHORITY!!! they're just scum noises wanting to roleplay as "mr. all-powerful",hiding in a sub-par "battle station" with an internet connection from a local coffee shop (because of their "I'm poor,plz don't help me!" as a backstory is too prevalent)[rant ends here]

now that's out of the goddamn way..I want to ask you guys a very important question.

who is IN CHARGE of all this...is it the chairman of the corpo? the anchovies (shareholders/investors) at the board room? the creators of the game? or the goddamn zealots? or something else?

Yeah… I, too, am adamantly opposed to the fucking stupid term “battle station” to describe nerd computers.

Franchises lose they charm

Macrotransactions are everywhere

Good devs leave the industry

But emulation, IS ETERNAL!

Amen

There's still plenty of hope, I don't see it so grim. One major and still rather recent change is the fact that development becomes more and more accessible.

Plenty of great engines - Unreal ("commercial"), Unity ("indie"), Godot ("moral"), Renpy (for novels) or even GameMaker (remember Undertale?). All of the best ones support C++ (UE) or C# (U, G), most of all engines support a secondary "non-coding" option.

Can create sounds and music? Grab Reaper, find free VSTs (fft ask) and go ahead. Can't create sounds and music? There's plenty of great assets for very cheap (fft ask, I could recommend some), if you can spend $100 for Steam listing, you can afford SFX and music.

The last hurdle between (You) and your game today is graphics - this will drastically change soon thanks to AI-assisted (generate parts or generate and refine) or even AI-generative (one-shot generation from scratch) art. If you can run it, most tools are free, but there will be more and more AI-a tools available as a service, plenty of competition, plenty of price drops. You can do the graphics yourself or buy them on the cheap, or easily find artist team-members who can do them.

Overall, all games both indie and AAA will be developed faster and cheaper (more competition, less tolerance for bullshit), development will become a smaller financial risk (less push for bullshit from investors or marketing dept.) and more people will be developing games - I can assure you there's plenty of people with great ideas who simply cannot develop a game because of the previously unavoidable hurdles and financial risks.

I know people hate on AI "art", but that's because they mostly see the one-shot generated stuff, and even that can be much better than your average "{{{{{best quality, trending on artstation}}}}}" prompts. I like to generate art for myself using NovelAI, and the mere months old V3 model of theirs can absolutely produce imaginative and distinct art you would never recognize if I were to hire someone to do a few touch-ups or dusted off my drawing tablet and did that myself. The way we develop games is unsustainable - better and better graphics done by the same "human hardware". Something has to give - in this case it was the dwindling number of games with a soul and focus on new ways to make money off of the huge and hugely expensive game you've just published.

Yeah no, AI art is good as novelty.
You learn nothing if you can't do it yourself.

Sounds like you think of AI art only in terms of static pseudointeresting images done with ChatGPT and Dall-e.

What I talk about is already here, and you most likely played a game with AI-assisted content without knowing it. On top of that, you probably played a game with AI upscaling, your TV likely uses that too. Look at this little trailer for AI-assisted art integration in Unity.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNrLvTGGJZA

It's anything but a novelty. You can #remindmein 5 years and let's see how it goes. But I'm pretty sure what I say above is more or less correct.

I never played a game in my life that was made by a AI. The only good use for AI is when used on NPCs like FNaF, FG or Bomberman games which was there since gaming's inception.
Tools is one thing for what you showed.
AI Translation good riddance, the industry doesn't need communists from USA/UK.
A whole new assets made by AI? It's only good for a shitpost, whetever or not it's made by resource other than Dall-e.

Right, we're not completely talking about the same thing.

If you played anything by Insomniac within since ~2020/21, you've played a game that used AI-assisted graphics. Here's a video from Insomniac, where one of their guys talks about using AI-assisted graphics to prepare textures. From what he shows and talks about, they take a photo of some texture - e.g. leaves, wood - and then let the AI paint over the areas they don't want, filling it with whatever they do want. They also use it to make textures seamless so that they could be tiled. All of that infilled content is AI generated. And he says it saves them up to 75% of time.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGzScMl_5d4

This might be interesting to you - some random guy used 100% free AI tools to fully generate all textures for Team Fortress 2's Gorge map, everything except models. Seeing the result, I don't think I'd ever suspect it's generated with basic AI tools - if this was an indie game, I'd have no issues with it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFkTOXE6_io

Obviously, if you were arguing about copyright issues and all that, different question. But AI tools are not only inevitable, but already used. And us gamers can only win here, the biggest reason for shitty games is greed, but the second biggest reason is that games became a HUGE investment. Anything that cuts down development time and cost without hurting the quality will bring us better games. Even though some greedy publishers will keep everything the same AND cut down costs, making even more money... but competition should hopefully help us here. Especially if more indie teams become able to produce AAA games.