alt Hacker NewsA couple years ago I opted out of the new game release rat race because I realized they're costing more and I'm getting less and I don't find recent AAA games any more fun than older games (and often quite a bit less fun). I was also just sick of all the bullshit like many games being released in a buggy state, content being held back for the inevitable DLC, and having to sign up for an online account on some publisher's site after buying the game from another online service.
I've switched to retro gaming and find I enjoy it more. For example, exploring 90s Japanese games that never saw wide release in the US. Recently I've found some real winners exploring the X360 and PS3 back catalog of indie games via emulation. I'd never seen many of these because they were only released on their respective online services. Of course, with the shutdown of those stores, these titles would be lost to time were it not for the preservation and emulation communities archiving them. This is why I'm a fan of publishers like GOG who're at least making an effort toward perpetual availability.
As games push the limits of gambling ratio addiction mechanics, social and psychological coercion, sunk cost fallacy, and a host of other tactics as best exemplified by pay to win games made by machine zone aand others,
Games are getting definitively worse. You are a revenue stream, not a customer or a person to app Al to in any way but the most lazy and base ways possible.
Each successive graphic generation places additional production cost to build models and world's, arguably to the artistic detriment of any game: first, since there is so much labor, corners are cut and artistic vision can't be applied everywhere to an army of graphic artists, many outsourced. Second, the overall production costs, much like movie production, makes producers conservative and cookie cutter in pursuit of a reliable return on investment.
The emulation community is preserving not just games, but an entirely different culture of gaming.
Perhaps AI can help with better mass generation of artistic assets, but really an AI is a mass averager of it's inputs: artistic vision is fundamentally a deviation from a norm, and large AI models are anything but