Game Dev

Data about AI usage in Next Fest

AI is everywhere and people are finding more and more ways to use it, sometimes in good ways and sometimes in bad ways. Steam a while ago introduced an AI disclosure that states on the game page whether the game uses AI or not and how does it use it.

Steam Next Fest has just wrapped up and someone made an extremely detailed report on the games in the fest, how many use AI and how exactly do they use it.

There were about 3000 games included in the October Next Fest, and 507 (17%) of those used AI in some way.

This graph showcases how the AI was used, with the biggest use case being In Game Art (56%) followed by Marketing (26%) and then Voice Acting (12%) and Music (11%). However most of the games that used AI art also made sure to include in the disclosure how the AI art was curated and refined by humans.

Interesting is how 53% of developers used AI in just one category, but 47% used it in multiple ways. Meaning developers are finding AI is usable in many different use cases, not just one single thing.

In terms of Code, this is one area that is likely widely underreported since it's not really visible in the final product, according to this study only 8% say they used AI coding.

But of course what really matters is the final result. With AI being such a polarizing topic many people (myself included) have wondered what is the result of this disclosure, do players look at it and actively avoid game with AI disclosures? Or do players not care about it at all? I tried doing some research myself a while ago and the answer seems to be that players don't care. Just like assets, all they want are fun games to play.

And actually a great recent example is ARC Raiders. This is the new hot game that people love, it is out on Steam and it has the AI disclosure saying "During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team." and it has Very Positive reviews.

Also on this topic there is a recent hot take by Tim Sweeney (Epic CEO) stating that the AI disclosure on Steam doesn't make sense since in the future AI will be involved in every single game production.

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Game Dev

s&box Game Engine goes open source!

Have you played Garry's Mod? What about Rust? Those are excellent games that have been massively successful. The company behind them, Facepunch, has been using all that money to build an engine called s&box (read "sandbox") which they have just open sourced!

It really seems we are in a golden age of game engines. There are so many great engines, all of them very good and all of them free and some of them open source. More competition is always great for all game devs.

However the open source part is the s&box code itself, this engine is actually built on top of Source 2, which is Valve's proprietary engine that is not open source. They describe it as a long term project meant to take all the best things of Source 1, Unity, Unreal and put them all in one game engine.

You can get s&box from their website which then lets you download it from Steam and from there it basically works like a Platform where you can play games that were built using it.

Looking at the list of games that have already been created it does seem clearly that this is very capable, there's a lot of variety in game types.

The engine runs on C# 14 with .NET 10, sharing your games is effortless within the engine, multiplayer is baked in, it includes hot reload, cloud assets, shader graph, visual scripting and tons more that you expect from any modern engine.

There is also a Play Fund where you can earn money when people play your games and they have already paid out $250,000 to developers, so this could be a good reason to explore this engine to try to get into it and make some money while the platform is small.

Tech

Blender 5.0 is out!

Blender is one of the heavyweights of the games industry, at least for indie developers. It's impressive how completely free open source software is so good.

The new massive 5.0 version has just been fully released! It includes lots of new modifiers to place objects and modify meshes, UV selection has been greatly improved, Sculpting got various improvements, animation and rigging updates, geometry nodes, rendering and more.

It is a massive new version that brings lots of improvements, again whilst keeping the software free and open source. If you use it a lot consider sending a donation their way.

Fun

Can you guess AI art?

AI art is everywhere nowadays and it is constantly improving. The days of guessing AI art by looking at fingers are long gone, now it can accurately draw almost anything.

Some people hate AI art and have a tendency to accuse people of using AI to draw something, although in many cases that assumption is incorrect and leads to false accusations which can ruin someone.

Do you think you can identify which art is AI or not? Here is a website to do just that.

It shows you 50 works of art, it's up to you to tag them as AI or not. Go ahead give it a try.