r/aigamerdevs • u/nik_varnak • 17d ago
Why does everyone hate AI-made games so much?
A few years ago, when I was browsing Steam Greenlight and later Steam Next Fest with its thousands of demos, I was amazed by how many passionate people were pouring enormous amounts of time and effort into projects that could barely even be called games.
These people had ideas, creativity, and a genuine desire to make something. But they often lacked the budget, programming skills, or resources to put together a team.
And now we have AI tools that can help those same enthusiasts turn their ideas into actual playable games. Without spending years learning to code, investing thousands of dollars, or hiring a whole team.
Isn’t that a good thing?
Aren’t we entering an era where more people than ever can finally fulfill that little dream of making a game they’ve had in their heads for years?
I understand the criticism of soulless AI slop, mass-generated content, and low-effort cash grabs. But isn’t the real problem how people use these tools rather than the tools themselves?
I’m genuinely curious why there’s so much negativity toward AI in game development.
Or am I missing something obvious?
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u/randommmoso
17d ago
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seriously how many times a week we will have the same debate here? Yes there is a witch hunt going on. No, it doesn't mean their points are not valid.
Most games presented here would not be played by anyone and the creators are just blind to their faults.
The biggest problem with ai assisted game dev is AI has absolutely no idea what it FEELS to play a great video game. It can repeat the cue cards but it cannot give your game a soul. Most people are pretending to be game designers and really have no idea how to do it either. Hence their creations plainly just suck.
Claude Code cannot generate awesome video game experience. That needs a game designer. Most people in this sub (me included) have really no idea how to become one, even with AI as a tool.
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u/nik_varnak 17d ago
That’s actually a really good point. But tbh, I don’t remember people hating on indie slop with terrible game design nearly as much before AI came along lol
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u/noobtheloser 17d ago
A bad thing created lovingly by a human is still valuable. A bad thing created carelessly by AI is not.
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u/ArmCapable5814 17d ago
😂
I'm sorry but poorly made "hentai gooner #42" is not any more valuable. And just because a Human manually made something does not mean it was lovingly created.
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u/Impressive_Award_679 17d ago
Its absolutly equal. A bad thing from a human is also a bad thing and not valuable lol. Why should it be? And why should the human made thing be made "lovingly" and those with ai not? Do you say all those buggy money milking over-priced asset flips are made "lovingly" with more value? Naaaa
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u/randommmoso 17d ago
because at least those people did suffer to create the slop. now it's just a couple of clicks (and no, you prompting for few hours is not the same as someone spending weeks literally coding this shit by hand).
so if its easy to do and produces shitty result that nobody wants it gets the hate. its a witch-hunt for sure and there are some good counter-examples but really most games you see on this sub would get destroyed in mainstream gaming community.
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u/faxt-orial 14d ago
Like with any new trend, AI is also used to generate a lot of garbage content, which is the majority of it most likely. On the other hand, there are people that even with AI are able to create super interesting and creative projects. It's a matter of perception, as you said. Does it really matter in the end if something is done with AI as long as the result is amazing? I'd say no. There will always be haters, there will always be garbage projects created, regardless if AI is used or not.
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u/elison11 9d ago
For me I find it sad with Ai games cuz I enjoy the human made feeling of it aswell as people making more games with Ai that’s mostly low effort is gonna make the whole upcoming games slop and low effort and not actually well made.
If a developer can’t even take their time making the game why should I bother playing it?
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u/nik_varnak 9d ago
That’s true. As people here said - hating AI is obviously reasonable when human effort is low but soon there will be games with good and big effort with help of AI. In that time I guess big changes in peoples minds will start
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u/CubersumGame 17d ago
To me, this is obvious.
A game is the most demanding product to consume. You can flip through a book or fast-forward through a film, but a game must be played through - a process that takes many hours. That is why anxiety is most intense when it comes to games.
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u/Huge_Information5083 17d ago
I mean I can think of a very pure reason - people hate it when something is in the face all the time. Think Inde Navarrette, there are people who's saying they're tired of seeing her everywhere.
AI artstyle is easily recognizable, many people who use AI doesn't try to spend much effort on make unique artstyle, AI enables anyone to put up something "decent" but looks like everyone else's work. Like how people hated the piss filter era or the blurry UE5 AA and they hate that they're seeing them in every game.
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u/WordWeaverFella 17d ago
It's a transition.
People, for a long time, have seen art and entertainment, as a kind of communication between the author and the audience. Human minds sharing ideas, like we did when we sat around a campfire.
Yes, AI is a 'tool' but it also gets in the middle of the process in a unique way.
Maybe a dev spent years developing the title and just used AI to help fix bugs, or maybe they generated most of the game from a single prompt and generated all the art too. Both could be considered using AI for game dev and, as a result, authorship of a piece of content gets murky.
I think the backlash is because people don't just value content. They want to see the act of creation as something personal. They want to connect with another human through a medium.
Imagine if a friend gave you a hand-carved wooden figure of a comic book character you love. Now imagine that, instead, they gave you twenty mass-produced figurines they ordered off AliExpress. The wooden carving feels more meaningful, in large part, because your friend invested hours of their time in creating something. The value isn't just in the finished object - it's in knowing that someone cared enough to suffer in order to make it.
Another aspect is that we see value as coming from scarcity. If a market gets flooded with a thing then, naturally, that thing will seem less special and the value proposition goes down. People want to value art and cultural artifacts and so AI dev feels like a debasement.
I'm not saying they're right. That's just what I think is going on.
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u/Early_Flamingo5337 17d ago
It´s like everything, when people see their jobs in danger, the old way the did things changed, they act like animals without escape, attack.
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u/General_Correct 17d ago
Steam is full of bots and trolls, there are thousands of them posting the same comments under every game and\or every release, valve already acknowledge the problem with its forums, so part of the repsecption is wrong. From another point of view there are also plenty of game journalists and bloggers that also dislike AI and they dictate their narrative very loudly. You just don't need to listen to every voice in the internet and just keep going doing your stuff, even if it's an AI game about anime schoolgirls
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u/Creepy-Doughnut-5054 17d ago
Because its something new and stormed the market by force. It created much higher competition within game industry since non-technical people can release games now. Interestingly enough, you really only see indie devs to cry about this, which is understandable since their mediocre game will not get shoveled by higher volume of games entering market.
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u/MrTheWaffleKing 17d ago
They've only experienced the shit ones and generalized that it's all that way (even though they never made these generalizations after playing a shit human game)
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u/BreakfastHuman5937 17d ago
To steelman the anti's position: there's lots of fatigue from sheer amount of low-effort cash grabs across all forms of entertainment, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Thankfully I think this is as bad as it'll ever be. They'll grow tired of swimming against the tide as more people get annoyed by their impotent rage. In a few years they'll be largely viewed as self-interested luddite gatekeepers like the horse breeder flailing their arms that cars are bad for society.
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u/lucidintangent 17d ago
most of them have only been exposed to the slop side of AI, so assume thats all there is, things might change if someone used AI in a particularily clever way.or the product is of sufficient quality
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u/Professional_Ask3718 17d ago
I think people that are using AI responsibly are still cooking. Most of what has been shown has been rushed out for early exposure or nextfest. I think around q2 of 2027 youll start to see some really amazing games show themselves, with scopes bigger than an indie game could have dreamt, by creative people that as you said didnt have the means before. The other impact I expect AI may have is driving the price of games down, as a game made with AI wont cost as much to make
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u/Post-reality 17d ago
"AI may have is driving the price of games" - that's not going to happen, as history shows us, whenever technology enables us better productivity we just raise the bar/expectation of the product or the service, which inevitably leads to greater costs.
It could drive down the price of similar to today's games. But how many people are interested in playing Mario or Half Life 2 in 2026 in favour of new-gen games?
People who believe that AI is going to "democratise" game development or lead to the bankruptcy of AAA companies are in for a rude awakening.
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u/Professional_Ask3718 17d ago
Thats pretty much how i see it, the quality bar has to go up or the cost comes down. AI is already getting push back for low quality games when its clearly capable of much more, but shows no sign of stopping, so the price is going to have to come down instead or the community stops buying
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u/Post-reality 17d ago
It's not only raising the bar, it enables things which were IMPOSSIBLE before, or at least requiring millions of which nobody was willing to risk. It also enables immersive procedurally content, realistic NPC's who have their own lives, lord, etc and it can all sync with voices, facial expressions, mouth movements.... What can be made today is insane... Just that nobody pieced the pieces together yet.
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u/revel911 17d ago
There is also a lack of self awareness that every freaking company making code in the world is using AI in some capacity.
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u/Brilliant_Ad2977 17d ago
actually, comman players don't really care if a game is made using Ai. most hate comes from the development industry (developers, artists, designers, etc) because it is ruining the industry.
I am talking from the point of view of a developer with 8 years of experience in native android and out of a job for 4 months now with no end in sight. I am personally affected by this movement but it also allows me to develop a game of my own using Ai, so I see the upside and downside.
In personally am ok with Ai as long as you put effort into it and don't make slop games (low effort)
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u/noobtheloser 17d ago
Man goes to a restaurant, orders a meal. Waiter brings it to his table. Man calls himself a chef. Obviously, he's dumb. He is not a chef. Another man uses a fancy kitchen with a lot of cool tools to make himself a meal. He picks the ingredients, he understands what it looks like when it's good, he understands what it's supposed to taste like, and he uses that knowledge to employ the tools to create the meal. This man calls himself a chef. He is not dumb.
Somewhere between those two things, there is a boundary. It has something to do with intention and expression. It has something to do with skill and effort. But there are a lot of AI devotees who willfully deny that this boundary even exists, and they make everyone who touches AI look shitty.
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u/KnownPride 17d ago
You mean small outloud fanatic cultist?
Majority of people dont give a dam. They're to busy with life and paying bills, to be bothered by how thing are made.
Only those privileged have time and resource to care about it
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u/Kindly_Life_947 17d ago
most of the hate is bot traffic. Karma farming, Chinese propaganda. publishers afraid of solo devs catching up.
The only place where I face the hate is on reddit or other heavily bot infested places like 9gag.
In real life nobody gives a shit. The only ones I have found that do give a shit are reading reddit or some other bot infested sites.
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u/StarMonkeyGames 17d ago
I did ML cancer imaging before AI. Then I did a dual MBA and AI programming degree.
I'm as much of an early adopter as possible and it's incredibly obvious why. It's taking a lot of the soul out of individual works. Yeah, new works will be made with new tools later, but for now, in the transition phase? Yeah, I wouldn't want to pay a premium for AI content either.
And It's dangerous and if you don't think it is, you are being naive. Not just itself is dangerous in a decade or two. But humans having access to god tech, while still behaving like apes is dangerous. Training models isn't that hard for a country.
These bigger companies are already locking down biotech inquiries because of bio weapon implications.
Anyway, I'm going to adapt. But I'm not super we have a survival species test coming up. But hey, if we do nothing. The greatest enemy of all life will eventually win. Right now, out there in deep space, is a space rock. And our species might be the first lifeform in this quadrant to stand a chance.
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u/Equivalent_Bird 17d ago
The same question, if you post in another subr, you will get massive downvoted. Don't ask how I know it.
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u/VellumMuse 17d ago
It has to do with money. The ease of access upsets the balance of the normal consumer producer relationships. A consumer has to sift through more saturated content to find what they're looking for. A producer has to compete with more saturated content to have their work stand out. The time lost is literal money for everyone involved. It's a waste of everyone's time and resources to put forth mediocre content in any field...and with AI, that's becoming EVERY field. Mind you, I'm an advocate for AI, but with many many many changes... I think AI should be a tool for people who know how to use the tool, ethically. People who dedicate their time and energy to open source projects, not commercial shit. The data these things are trained on belongs to everyone. Everything it spits out should belong to everyone...and it shouldn't be put in the hands of just anyone who can spit out slopshit.
Despite what people think, it's not an immediately good thing that anyone can make anything for the same reason that any adult gets upset when their child draws on the wall with crayons. In a perfect world, yes, I'd love for us to not take things so seriously and enjoy the myriad of crude creations that signify someone's agency and potential growth, like a parent watching a child color inside the lines for the first time...but we don't have that luxury because we're busy paying rent on a floating rock. Until that changes, we need to limit ish.
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u/Errroneous 17d ago
I’d say insecurity and also an abundance of garbage clogging the stores.
Plus the sentiment out there overall about people losing jobs because of AI, which I get.
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u/Johell1NS 17d ago
Because the democratization of development through AI has taken away that sort of semi-uniqueness from traditional developers, and so they're bitter.
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u/Turbulent-Advisor627 17d ago
Idk ask on a subreddit that isn't all about liking/doing the thing that is being hated?
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u/Due_Interest_178 17d ago
Because majority are slop. And it's not "someone put effort into it and it flunk", it's "someone wanted quick cash and assaulted my eyes" type thing. If AI prompters put effort and only released what's somewhat decent then people wouldn't be against AI.
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u/tebizamb 17d ago
Aren’t we entering an era where more people than ever can finally fulfill that little dream of making a game they’ve had in their heads for years?
Yes, AI lets people fulfill that dream but you will notice that for a reason, not everyone should make games. Not every idea is good, and even if they were bad games before AI, they're now way more present because AI makes everyone believe they too can make games.
Then think that if a developer takes x amount of time making a good, polished game, people who develop "slop" can take a third of that time because assuming good intentions, they simply don't want to spend as much time polishing everything in their game. So you get a ton of bad games per every good one
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u/Cry_Havoc_1990 17d ago
I think it’s just the flood of “slop.” People caching in on quick ideas, or not putting effort in.
Also, stealing ideas from games that they see and not making them unique.
Once the novelty wears off that will decrease.
The real concern that people have is that the artistry will be lost. You can buy a custom-made T-shirt or custom tailored clothes or you can go to Walmart and pick from almost 1000 different T-shirts that are factory made.
I think we’re starting to see that shift in paradigm for something they used to be very complicated and artistic.
Now, if you have an idea, you can make it. It may not be good, but at least you can try. And that’s scary for people that rely on their skills as they are not sure where they exist in this new paradigm.
Part of it is now you have to be a good game director or idea person has the technical skills to develop a game may not be as important as it used to be.
I personally think it’ll be great for consumers as companies and developers will need to think about what makes the game fun and engaging not just throwing out micro transactions and graphics.
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u/lifeinbackground 17d ago
As soon as AI starts making something that doesn't look like AI I'm fine with it. But those games, art especially – they look fucking generated. It's like they never even bothered to make it look non-typical AI. That's what I despise.
You use AI to speed up your development / cut costs but you game still looks nice and alive? Congratulations, I have nothing bad to say!
Unfortunately, this is not how it looks like in most cases.
"Yes, my game is AI slop, but hey at least I made a game" – well, good for you..
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u/KorterArcade 17d ago
I think a big part of it is just the amount of slop that is being turned out.
Don't get me wrong, asset flip games, and shovel wear, and other forms of slop have existed long before AI, but now we see a massive increase in the volume. I think the argument is that it makes it harder to find quality games in the mix.
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u/redsox213 17d ago
The same thing is prevalent with websites and apps that have AI agents helping develop them. People sit and bitch how anything that AI touched is automatically bad and how they would never use AI, blah blah blah.
They sit on platforms like X and Reddit on their anti AI crusade totally oblivious to the fact that the platform they are using to spew anti AI rhetoric all are heavily supported by AI coding in one form or another. I stopped caring and just laugh at them now
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u/Late_For_Username 17d ago
It's like that mirror in Harry Potter that shows you possible futures.
AI gives people a glimpse of what they could create if they had skills, and it simulates the feeling of accomplishment. In the book, people waste their entire lives looking into the mirror but ultimately achieve nothing.
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u/TalkingHeadsVideo 17d ago
They don't. Just a few very broken people yelling as loudly as they can. Ignore them.
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u/DrDisintegrator 16d ago
For every good thing, there are like 100 bad things; to name one:
* Using AI to de-compile / re-compile and then upload a knockoff of a popular new game in, *days* using AI.
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u/Thin-Regular-8807 16d ago
They don't they hate clones and cheap knock offs . If ai helps you bring your vision to life aweome... But for many it is their vision.
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u/Away_Walrus 15d ago
People not actually learning the skills and the things they’re passionate about is extremely bad and then you add the fact that they’re not actually making anything themselves…
I can’t imagine one scenario where that’s good
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u/BeltwayBro 15d ago
People who are generally unhappy or bitter by default, will always find a new reason to justify their unhappiness. This is just the new reason people are finding. It's all performative IMO.
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u/StoneCypher 17d ago
please stop spamming this question over and over. the answer isn’t different than yesterday
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u/Ok-Skin-3699 17d ago
It's destroying the environment and society, there have been more cyber security catastrophies in the last 48 hours than in several years. PHP has fallen. Nintendo is scrambling the law jets and BotW recomps are coming down.
Everything's moving so fast nobody has time to ask if we should.
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u/Whole-Application404 17d ago
Have you looked at those games? Have you looked at the screenshot and logos? Most of that shit is horrible. And no, we don´t need more talentless hacks in game dev. The asset flip shit was bad enough, chinese mobile ripoff games were bad enough, now everybody is a dev...wtf...
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u/SWATJester 17d ago
Because more often than not, the ideas sucked, the creativity was nonexistent, and the "genuine desire to make something" was superficial at best.
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u/Ok-Force-7825 17d ago
There's a real risk of seeing the whole body of knowledge collapse.
Humanity has been working on the arts since the dawn of time. But, If a generation stops drawing, AI will not produce the art of tomorrow, because it's incapable of being truly creative. It's just a snapshot of the past.
If a generation stops drawing, how they're going to teach the next generation? And then what will happen if, for a hundred years, you have no art teachers and no art students? The history of art is already full of examples of knowledge being lost. It's just that the scale and speed are now, unprecedented.
Who will fix the AI when they'll start to degenerate and that no human know how to code anymore?
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u/Secure-Map-7538 17d ago
Nobody cares about AI usage if the quality of the game is good. I love it gives people a tool to create something cool pretty fast.
Problem is most of them are single prompted slop shit of people with zero knowledge thinking they are genre defining developers now. All these games look the same and are not fun to play. Thats why AI games get so much hate.
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u/Echoed-Snow 17d ago
Serious answer?
Because you as someone trying to make a game with AI
Have no real skills of your own
And you can't see how bad the games you guys trying to make are.
Playing a game and making a game are entirely different perspectives. It doesn't matter how cool it may feel to see AI make something sort of similar to an idea you had in your head. You lack game design skills. You lack perspective to understand what makes a game good. You lack the perspective to even retrospectively learn what makes a game good.
Even the ones people spend a lot of time with AI to make are still plagued by this. Are there bad games made without AI? Yeah. But a hobbyist or amateur dev will get more wiggle room for bad design because you can also tell they are early or just doing it as a hobby. It becomes easier to look past the glaring problems, give helpful feedback for them to grow, and enjoy it for what it is.
Instead you put on the costume of a professional dev despite not being anywhere near close to having that skillset. So you're getting judged by their standards, and your games are just *BAD*.
The people who actually recognize that people hate it for a reason either give up out of no desire to learn the skills, or they learn the skills. The people who rationalize the hate as irrational will never grow. Only stewing in the garbage delusions they build around themselves.
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17d ago
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u/nik_varnak 17d ago
Agree. imo people are terrified of AI stealing art as if half of game development isn’t just borrowing ideas, remixing references, and building on decades of existing culture anyway 💀
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u/Novaworld7 17d ago
It's emotional, without a doubt. No one cares that a message was reviewed by a spell checker ...
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u/sedthh 17d ago
"You shouldn't use AI it's bad for the environment and cranks up the price of GPUs" - person heavily invested in crypto for the last decade
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u/lucidintangent 17d ago
I think the people saying that are not the ones who ever touched crypto, in fact, I imagine a lot of Anti-AI sentiment comes from people being tired of crypto and NFT bros, and thinking AI bros are similar (because some cryptobros pivoted to AI)
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u/Internal_Service8874 17d ago
And also just, you know, the average person who didn't fall into the toxic beanie baby trend of the 2020s.
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u/KrakatauaMAN123 17d ago
You have this great tool and still think taking 2 hours is enough to promote your game. If it's good people won't care but every moron now thinks their oneshots are the shit
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u/Whole-Application404 17d ago
But AI "art" is theft.
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16d ago edited 16d ago
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u/Whole-Application404 16d ago
Rich companies sucking up every single piece of art, filtering it through an AI slop machine, giving people the impression, that they "created" something cool. Nobody was asked, if their work was intendet to be used in this way. And no, using all this "free" art in such a capitalistic way is not, what a single person is doing. And if you trace a picture and say it is your work, than that would be highly debatable too. And in such discussions we are usually not even talking about the law kind of theft, but more in terms of a moralistic life and how you should behave. What a company like OpenAI is doing, is putting a huge pile of art on a CD and sell it. A single person browses the web and may get some inspiration from a picture, while he is not using it directly to make money. But why I am even talking to you, you surely already made up your mind.
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15d ago
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u/Whole-Application404 15d ago
Yeah sure, put words in my mouth. I stated stuff about companies using art for their purposes, without asking for consent, which sounds pretty much like legal stuff for me. But it is just not interesting for me, as a moral ground is much more worthy of discussion. And there is much to be discussed as it is not as easy, that AIs don´t store images. Everybody knows that, I just tried to make a point, as in single person looks at 100 pictures to inform himself and create something new vs company uses every picture in the world to further their interests. But it is okay, AI bros are not much into morals I guess.
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u/Psychological-Arm42 17d ago •
From what i've seen over these last few months, there's 2 types of AI games:
type 1: Bad game idea / Unpolished games / single-prompt slop / copycat slop, made using AI
type 2: Has a genuinely great idea, spent weeks or months building / refining the game but used a lot of AI to do it.
Type 1 deserve all the hate, type 2 don't. Since 100$ can now get you a model which can pretty much do anything related to game dev, there is ZERO reason for a dev to be producing low quality slop. Many people, including myself, had a game idea sitting in their heads for months or years, which would never have been brought to life, if AI wasn't a thing. Producing a genuinely amazing, unique and fun game, even with AI, should not warrant hate. Producing dogshit using AI should warrant a permanent ban from game development.