Posted by klaussilveira 9 hours ago
- Splitting your community is a concern. The classic example is multiplayer DLC: if not everyone can access it then it will risk low adoption.
- Presales and first week sales are hugely important to financing projects. Not many games achieve a long tail.
- Developers are expensive. Paying a team of artists and designers and programmers demands that they generate enough revenue to make it worthwhile.
AI opens this door because:
- Its capacity to be constrained fits neatly into mod frameworks.
- It's incredibly cheap to operate, compared to the human team.
- Users are comfortable with its SaaS model and so won't be deterred by a subscription model.
There are exceptions of course.
Leaked source code,flame wars, toxic fanbase making shitstorm why work with this modder but not that one, same idea as secret internal plans .. and unclear legal situation in general with hiring people om the other side of the world is what come to my mind why this is not happening more often. But it does happen sometimes, usually the modders get a individual offer from the company.
Sich doch einmal wegbegeben!
Und nun sollen seine Geister
Auch nach meinem Willen leben.
Seine Wort’ und Werke
Merkt’ ich und den Brauch,
Und mit Geistesstärke
Tu’ ich Wunder auch.
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I like Goethe's German. In general, German does not feel very song-songy to me, but Goethe wrote some really good and catchy poetry.
It's not exactly analogous to a hammer, even though I agree that it is a tool. If a carpenter got the framing all wrong, the hammer wouldn't fix it. If a prompter got the instructions all wrong, or didn't supervise enough, or didn't verify enough, the AI still makes something that appears to pass initial muster.
The issue with using AI as a tool to build software is that the inspection step is not required. I'm not sure an AI-generated description is a sign of bad inspection processes. I think maybe in the case of a game mod, the description is not as important as it would be for some software that someone is selling.
I guess my point is that quality can't be assessed merely by whether something was built with AI. A trustworthy team will have carried out inspections along the way. The question is how can we know that?
Wrong. Lack of inspection is a process issue symptom, not an AI issue symptom.
The project is quite transparent about it, saying it was "proudly vibecoded". The entire "not sure what was hallucinated" narrative seems stuck in 2025.
Some friends of mine play old games that are on community life support with official servers having been shutdown years ago. I sometimes support them when they have some tech issues and whenever I stumble upon documentation of these projects being spread over forums and vintage 2010 era gaming portal websites I'm glad that we have AI now.
Nothing has changed in that respect since 2025, despite the many claims to the contrary. LLMs still hallucinate quite regularly.
Oh, I didn't spot that in the submission, is it behind links? I read a few paragraphs of the description and left because it didn't seem organic. My bad.
> whenever I stumble upon documentation of these projects being spread over forums and vintage 2010 era gaming portal websites I'm glad that we have AI now.
I love AI! The submission title just gave me hopes and the non-organic feel was a bit of a bummer. But nothing against the project itself.
Maybe this is one of the better times to encourage "literate programming" all over again?
If the majority of the source is detailed prose comments instead of "code", you would be able to tell. I think you're correct that this is an information problem (like the law of small numbers).
I strongly believe that if a new project is interesting enough for someone to be reading the source of a literate codebase, the prose that goes with it will be distinct enough that the first publisher would necessarily have to be human.
(Technically not "makes", but I always feel like it's better for both sides to understand each other more completely in order to have a more fruitful debate)