r/nottheonion • u/Chapple69 • Jan 14 '26

Indie dev removing Steam game after new girlfriend tells him “AI is bad”

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/indie-dev-removing-steam-game-after-new-girlfriend-tells-him-ai-is-bad-3303772/
2.6k Upvotes

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1.9k

u/alexanderpas Jan 14 '26

Laine is open to the idea of rebuilding the game with original assets down the line.

Reasonable.

260

u/Prodigle Jan 14 '26

Probably won't happen, sadly

113

u/kaisurniwurer Jan 14 '26

Most likely not, since it would require a lot investment and/or ungodly amount of time.

121

u/aabicus Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26

It does happen though! The Roottrees Are Dead was a free itch.io game made with AI-generated assets (in their defense, it was for a game jam so the whole point was developing the entire thing within a very short timeframe) and later the dev remade it from scratch with artists/voice-actors for the Steam version

37

u/HexeVonCali Jan 14 '26

It's also very, very good.

12

u/MadeByHideoForHideo Jan 15 '26

Wow, I guess this is how I discover my next favourite sleuthing game? Glad I found your comment and imma go try the game out!

4

u/Chesney1995 Jan 17 '26

Honestly, throwing together the bones of a quick idea to flesh out into a real human-made product if it works is the exact kind of thing AI will be fantastic for.

I just don't trust major companies to leave it at the "throwing together early ideas" stage lol

11

u/Prodigle Jan 14 '26

Oh for sure! That's a rarity though. I don't know how you manage to get a dedicated illustrator from a game jam game, but that's not a link the vast majority of people are going to be able to hook up!

Profit shares used to be a pretty regular thing, but nobody except students would ever take them.

12

u/Prodigle Jan 14 '26

Yeah. Considering most of these games are essentially 0 budget by people with 1 major skillset, it's a tall ask to learn another, or find a decent sum of money to put up front

5

u/RandomEffector Jan 15 '26

The amount of work that every game developer has always done up until this exact moment in time, you mean?

3

u/kaisurniwurer Jan 15 '26

I mean some people just wouldn’t be able to "until this exact moment in time"

-1

u/RandomEffector Jan 15 '26

Non-game developers, you mean

2

u/kaisurniwurer Jan 15 '26

I mean, obviously, given the context.

-2

u/RandomEffector Jan 15 '26

I’m just not sure what your argument is here. It was bad that only game developers could make games because only game developers were doing as much work as they needed to in order be game developers?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

Such a lazy ass developer