Submitted 21 hours ago by Rheinish@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.thegamer.com/epic-games-founder-tim-sweeney-complain-steam-ai-disclosure/
Isn’t the entire Unreal Engine just AI slop at this point? Like the engine itself is now vibe coded?
Kinda the same with the new Unity? Might not be vibe coded itself, but they just redesigned it specifically so LLM agents can be plugged into it, right?
I mean to be honest every engine is going to be like that now at least partly.
I do kind of hope valve update their AI policy at some point to actually clarify what the label means. Both open source and closed source engines are vulnerable to AI code so unless you also build the engine your game might include AI code without your knowledge. So who’s responsibility is it at that point to check the little box in the store to say this game includes code made by AI?
Age ratings tell parents what’s in a game so they can make informed decisions for their kids. These AI statements are just as partisan as mandatory political essays or forcing developers to list their voting history to drive cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions.
Absolutely fuck this fucking guy.
Since when the fuck has AI been partisian? It sounds like he’s trying to make it partisian. In reality, everyone hates the data centers. The only thing that’s partisan-adjacent is that the Trump administration (Trump specifically) loves it, but that’s just because he’s a boomer and boomers, for some reason I do not yet understand, tend to like the shitty photo/video generative AI more than others.
People like this have two reasons to make it partisan:
The only reason Trump loves it is because it’s propping up our entire economy.
As aggravating as this might be to hear, there is at least one state where workers unions have been pro-datacenter under the belief that the work to build them will at least bring them some contracting/construction jobs. Some states are destitute enough to accept anything, even if it’s only a short-term bandaid for their economic troubles.
It’s a great “better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt” moment. He can’t help himself, it’s like the more power and money someone has, the more time they have to imagine how they’re victims.
But I like to know who is an awful person so I can avoid them, so thanks Tim.
just as partisan as mandatory political essays or forcing developers to list their voting history to drive cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions
Just as partisan as these things I have made up in my head!
There’s a real economic cost to [blah blah crybaby way of saying AI disclosures]
Yes. There is. Because informed consumers vote with their wallets. As it should be. Moron.
At this point he has whined about it so much that everyone’s going to know the game uses AI, even if they don’t disclose it. He would have genuinely being better off shutting up about it.
The Epic Store has always been anti-consumer so it’s no surprise he defends that kind of practice.
Every 10th item on rhe epic store is soft core FMV fantasy girlfriend porn.
It gives consumers free games and takes a smaller cut from the developers than steam. All corporations have mutually exclusive interests with the consumer tho.
He calls it an “anti-technology smear campaign”, and claims that it’s akin to Valve forcing developers to list their political affiliation, i.e. whether they vote Republican or Democrat
Billionaires and false equivalencies, name a more iconic duo
I mean, if we’re going to compare apples and oranges, how about with a metaphor that makes sense? Like how if you sell food you have to list the ingredients used
I would very much like to filter developers by affiliation and not give fascists money, actually. Thanks for the idea, good guy, Tim Sweeney.
This. He wants to fabreeze a turd and sell it as sausage.
At least Gabe, a billionaire, doesn’t do that.
Bombs and painted “truths”?
Does everyone remember how Steam banned NFT games and Epic allowed them and how that absolutely catapulted them into success over their competitor? … no?
OK, well, but maybe this time?
AI disclosures are the compromise. If they’re not contempt with the compromise, then AI may as well be gone from art creation.
Tim should have been shoved into more lockers.
Go away Sweeney-weenie. Go away.
Sweeny-weenie take your beanie and quietly floss away
He is a great example of CEOs who would help their company image more if they never made themselves known.
More he talks the more insufferable he comes off and in return so does the company.
If it weren’t for how he chose to make his personality so prominent, Epic would probably not be as hated among PC gamers.
You either get ousted a gaming hero or stay on the board long enough to become the CEO villain.
I think only Croteam has managed to exist as long as they have without going evil or being bought out, but they’ve never quite been successful enough for that to happen.
Fuck Tim Sweeney.
I’m rather not that you do you :3
Tim Sweeney billionaire weenie. Even fucking rhymes.
with a salty cactus
Can someone ask this dumb fuck is he's also this upset about ingredients labels on food?
News flash, Timmy: people want to know at least a little bit about how the sausage is made, otherwise we'd all be forced to eat Soylent Green by greedy, unethical capitalist billionaires like you.
Valve doesn’t give a shit either
ROFL Given the vibe-coded disaster of the Epic Store on Linux, he has bigger things to be concerned about. Like fixing his own mess. By hand, with actual humans programming and resolving issues. Catching a vibe won't save Epic, real human effort will. What a loser.
Idiot could have made bank on goodwill if he donated to Heroic development, but chose to shoot himself in the foot with a hallucination gun instead lmao
Well, he's a dumpster fire capitalist, there was no other outcome for him. Just another cooked in the head CEO that worshiping a nonexistent God to gain infinite wealth, which happens to be the idea of AI. Trying to manifest so hard he can't think of intelligent business strategies...
He just had to be quiet and not say anything for Epic to be seen in a positive light. He hasn’t caught on to how much charima he lacks and how offputting he comes off as a person.
As I like to say: Sucks to suck.
Tim Sweeney is a professional cryer.
Him complaining is all the proof we need that even he doesn’t believe in his “fight”.
Because he wants to be able to reap money from the ocean of slop games but he doesn’t want his store to be the only one trying to hide the sloppiness.
Hey asshole, you’ve got your own store, and you can do whatever you want with it. But no, you can’t expect to drag your competition with you at rock bottom because you think being better than you is unfair.
Valve is the big meanie that continues to give their customers more value, and they heavily invest in research and development which benefits the consumer. Steam link, steam controller, steam deck, Proton… all of these were part of Valve’s sinister plan to continue serving customers.
This concept stands in the way of Epic’s business model, which does not include giving value to customers, they just see games as a commodity like wheat.
Steam Frame is an awesome piece of kit too.
“Why do we have to list ingredients, you can’t even taste the poison!”
Now you just made me think that at some point, there’s going to need to be a The Jungle for gaming. There’s going to be some kind of exposé on different major game developers and how they use AI and other shitty practices to make the most addicting games.
I think the time has come to divorce ourselves from content that can’t have its provenance proven.
Truthfully I rather like the idea of having a small but very heavily documented and curated collection of media than the tidal wave of ‘content’ we have now.
It may take longer to get stuff but when you have something you can have all of the information about how it was made. Personally I think that would be much more fun.
Yeah, and the word ‘content’ never sat right with me, either. It describes something that fills a void, not necessarily with any purpose. And being ‘content’, not having any demands, just accepting whatever you get.
Yeah, we should all consume less content and more art.
He’s the Trump of the video gaming industry
Epic is tripling down with AI features in the next Unreal Engine - it makes sense that he wants to do away with the disclosures. It’s not the dumbest business play ever, I’m pretty confident it will help further cement Unreal Engine as the “go-to” for games development (I’m not happy about it though). Don’t like the guy, haven’t since they dumped UT for Fortnite, almost nothing good has come from the success of that game.
I don’t know. “Made with Unreal Engine” is starting to be seen as a bad thing by players too, objectively or not…
At some point that’ll have to become a consideration when choosing an engine. Maybe using UE will end up meaning too many lost sales, like using obvious “AI” generated assets.
a couple months ago I was bitching (just to myself, not online) about all the shit I hate in modern games, when I noticed a lot of what i was bitching about was the same shit in different games.
and then i did some poking around, and found they were all UE5 games, and I hated the same shit in all those games because its the same UE5 shit thats in every game. games looking like shit because they want to use whatever quasi-software raytracy thing that UE5 has, and to make it work they force you into using resolution scaling.
I play at 1080p. It just makes every fucking game horrible, when I should be able to play them at good quality settings if it wasnt for the forced bullshit.
Its literally to the point now that, no matter how much I might want a game, if it has UE, I’m not buying it.
One can hope. I think with 5 and it’s poor optimization in most cases it took a big reputation hit, but I think it also must be such a good deal that it enticed a lot of developers to use it. Hell, AFAIK, the next Witcher games are going to be UE-based. Things like the traversal stutter amongst other long-standing issues sure did some reputational damage, but does that mean studios will actually care when they’re getting such a good cut to use the engine (over others)?
I don’t care if a game is made with AI as long as it’s good. I also don’t care if there’s a disclosure so others can make their own decision. Tim is an idiot.
I think ol Tim had a lot of slop in the pipeline and this will force him to delay everything due to quality control so there aren’t any six fingers and deformed faces in the background so he won’t be able to release a “new” slop game every two months but considering how much of an asshole he is he still might go for it and just take the backlash.
How do EGS’s investors let Tim use Twitter?
If I was at Tencent, Sony or whatever, I’d take his phone away. The sheer toxicity of this one person is unreal, and honestly just shutting him up would eliminate so much drama.
Unless it somehow has changed in recent years Sweeney still owns the majority of the company. Other investors can complain all they want but Sweeney gets the final word and if he wants to continue being the Elon Musk (not the 2020s ketamine fried Musk but the 2010s main character syndrome and savior complex Musk) of gaming he can tell the other investors to suck it.
Tencent bought 40% afaik, and they had several rounds since then.
Maybe Sweeney owns a controlling portion with a privileged share class, but I would be surprised if he owned a majority.
…You are not wrong though. I guess this wouldn’t be happening if he didn’t have absolute control.
Yeah, I’m done. I kept Epic Games around for the occasional cool free game drop, but I just deleted my account. There are better ways to get a game every once in a while.
His games aren’t even on Steam. What problems does this guy have? Users should know about Ai usage in the games, and decide themselves if they want it or not. It’s not up to Tim to decide. Thank god its not up to Tim to decide.
Kiss my ass, Tim. You probably would have ZZT banned today if you could.
I’m not sure if constantly talking about your competitor is a sign of strength, but Tim seems to think so.
Punchable, that face is.
I don’t want to hear anything about Tim’s Weenie
Retire
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
At this rate, all games made in Unreal will automatically need AI disclosures.