The glory days of Epic Games are long gone and Tim Sweeney is a god damn moron.
Some of us want quality over mass produced crap stolen from others.
He doesn’t sound very epic to me.
This guy is just a straight up villain.
It does make sense, because I’ll boycott nearly all future productions.
Nothing epic about the guy or his company.
Epic fail.
Sounds like Epic needs to try to make a online game store to compete with Steam, but filled with AI slopware.
Wait a minute… lol
I don’t know how long it’s been since I even bothered claiming the free game of the week. Like a year.
I got a few epic games to be claimed on epic store. I just don’t. I don’t have an account and I also do not have a will to make one. Nothing of value is there anyway.
My Steam backlog is 600+ games deep so I don’t have to swim in that Epic shit. Sweeney can suck a nut.
I’d rather buy a game on Steam than get it for free from Epic. Seriously.
I claimed the first few games and their launcher was shit. Now, to be fair, Steam wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of achievement when it first came out, either, but it’s been refined and honed to a razor. Epic is just “let’s throw shit at the wall and see what happens”, with no coherent strategy or marketing beyond “we’re not Steam!”. Their client, as I understand it, is still shit, and their CEO is a jackass. Haven’t had it installed in years now. Meanwhile, I have a backlog on Steam of like 1000 games.
Why would I ever use Epic? It has no value.
And yes, that goes for games sold on Steam with the “have to use Origin” bullshit, too. I’m not launching Steam to then launch Origin. This is not Inception. Let me play my damn game and stay out of it. Ya know?
And i bet you don’t even touch the free game you claimed because Epic launcher take forever to launch.
I’ve never even installed the Epic Lawnchair. I just use Heroic, which works very well.
Nobody wants to give their computer AIDS for a free game.
His expectations are just Unreal.
A man of culture, I see.
He’s right though it’s not a very useful label in general. The AI process is unavoidable as you can use it as a coop tool or inspiration or thousand different ways where AI is not a direct generator.
Personal anecdote: I do quite a bit of visual design these days and always start with some ai prompt to give me some inspiration as subjects I work with are highly corporate and unheard to me. The final product is made by me in Inkscape with some parts being manual traces of AI generated images but it would be dienginous to say that I didn’t use AI here and silly to say that it some “mindless slop”.
Your anecdote isn’t as against expectations as you seem to think. People just also think that what you’re doing is grody.
If you traced a design you found from a Google result, people would object to you saying it was “your” creation. In the ai case, it just also isn’t anyone else’s.
People used to do your job by learning a bit about what they were designing and applying some creativity. You’re quite literally describing the AI enabling you to be less informed and creative as a creative worker.
No one much cares when the button layout for an accounting firms CRM is rote, but people do care when they hear that the designers for the game they’re playing kinda phoned in the art design and it’s significantly a mathematical approximation of other designs.I disagree, people fundamentally don’t understand creation and art process if they think it’s an artist in a white room doing everything from the blanks of their mind.
It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up.
Saying people who disagree with you are childish is a sure sign that maybe you’re not giving their argument proper consideration.
Particularly when you’re arguing that the consumers are wrong about their feelings towards the product and need to grow up and adapt to how the producers want to make it.You’ve got a situation where people are seeing the assets, coding, design, and writing of games being moved from being human endeavors to being human supervised endeavors, while also being asked to pay higher prices.
The producers and vendors aren’t entitled to consumers happily letting them do less work to deliver an inferior product for more money just because the graphics card manufacturer says it’s the way of the future.I don’t think anyone thinks you’re spending your time doing corporate graphic design putting yourself into your work. No one calls you an artist either.
People buying art though have a reasonable expectation that the person they’re buying it from isn’t tracing ai content or random things from google.Keep in mind that if the “vocal minority” “grows up”, it means people stop paying you, because you’re the one not really adding anything to the equation.
You’re building a strawman as thats not what I said. Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process, period.
I make casual games and most of the time you are looking for inspiration by copying stuff - this is a fundamental part of the creative process. But americans are brainwashed by copyright and IP law propaganda into thinking that copying and tool assistance is somehow “impure”.
The public sentiment will grow up and shift and I’m willing to take a long term bet here of real money to prove my point. I’ve been a creative since the 90s and seen this same story a dozen times at least.
I apologize if I misunderstood your point, but I truly fail to see how
It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up.
And
public sentiment will grow up
Isn’t calling the opposing view childish, which is a pretty strong sign that you’ve failed to actually consider what they’re saying. Same for calling them “brainwashed”.
Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process
Do they need to? You’ll find that most consumers don’t know how a car works or how industrial design is done but they still have justifiable opinions and concerns about the impacts and quantifiable attributes of them.
If you actually look at what consumers are concerned about you’ll find that IP and copyright concerns don’t even make the list. People are concerned about the errosion of human connection and the diminishment of creativity. Privacy. Data usage and accountability.
And what’s more, even if they were opposed for those reasons the consumer is still intrinsically correct about what they value. If consumers respect your work less because you trace AI art it doesn’t matter if you still creatively contributed, the value has been reduced.
Telling consumers their preference is wrong because you want to be able to copy and trace AI content while viewing yourself as a creative is some backwards boomer shit. 30 years making casual games doesn’t give you lofty insight into the nature of the creative process. It’s just “trust me, I know more”. Same for trying to bolster your position by talking about betting on it.
Yes, a consumer criticizing a process they don’t understand invalidates their criticism.
At the end of the day I don’t have much trust in a consumer being a good custodian of market ethics in general, especially in gaming where AI use is really at the bottom of the list of ethical issues. To me this seems like a pop culture fixation rather than a rational decision making.
Those darn consumers having opinions on things that affect them without being experts in it. Next thing you know they’re going to want to ban smoking in restaurants despite not having medical degrees or knowing first hand how this will impact the tobacco industry! Or carbon emissions, food safety, or anything really…hell, cold calls are just part of the reality of marketing. Eventually consumers will grow up and realize that unprompted phonecalls at 7pm are just part of the reality of effectively offering them products.
If it’s not clear, I think the notion that people can’t have an opinion on something that impacts them without understanding the process that yields the impact is silly and paternalistic.
Attitudes like yours that are dismissive of consumer concerns are very much part of the reason why consumers are starting to increasingly reject AI products.
I think a better example is that programmers use AI to autocomplete text. They could write the exact same text by hand or use a dumber autocomplete but there is no reason to. The product is exactly the same just delivered with slightly less wear on the programmer’s fingers.
That’s really just scratching the surface of what AI is doing these day in creative workflows. All game tests will eventually be replace with AI and tests often drive new feature development. Refactoring of not only code but assets is also done by AI these days.
Reality is that this label is fundamentally unsustainable and will go away anyway. Willing to bet money on this.
I believe there will be people who let LLMs only do untrusted jobs. Human writes a specification, AI writes an implementation along with a proof that it adheres to the spec.
Epic Games had glory days?
Epic Megagames certainly did.
Jill of.the Jungle was fun
Unreal 1 was a milestone, and Unreal Engine always has been very popular, now more than ever.
Unreal Tournament 2004 was a spectacular arena shooter back in the day before Battle Royale and MOBAs completely took over. Aged like fine wine too.
Yeah, I’m old.
An it included linux native binaries! on the disk! It was absolutely fantastic, i played a lot in invasion servers for years and years.
Godlike
That was fun!
Some people don’t like to hear it, but Fortnite is basically the new Unreal Tournament… in the same way it’s the new Rockband. For the latter, it’s easy: Epic acquired Rockband and Guitar Hero creator Harmonix, and Fortnite Festival is just the latest version of that code, only you can’t use instrument controllers with it, only gamepads (or, I suppose, keyboards or touch screens). So what Fortnite really is, it’s a free-to-play showcase of the Unreal Engine. It’s meant to show off what it can do and anyone can pick it up and play for free. Of course, it doesn’t have all the features of Unreal Tournament. It’s pretty much just battle royale with base building. But it’s the newest version of the same engine and it’s a shooter. Not the same thing… but your skills with older UT definitely translate. My nephew got me to play it. I’d never played it before, and he had spent money on the skins and the extra stuff, so he would go around making big purple explosions and he’d attract attention. Me, I was blown away by the detail, but I found the movement just as fluid as I remembered. Once I got the hang of weapons and their grades, I was scouting out the best pistols and SMGs I could find, and shadowing his character, and when he got into fights, I’d circle around, flank his enemies, and we’d win every fight. We won our first match and I don’t think we’ve lost a match. If we did, we finished in the top 5-10%. We have an unconventional playstyle, and it’s really all me. He plays like most Fortnite players, and they engage him as such. I play like a UT player… or, more accurately, I play it like a Deus Ex player (which was based on the same UE1 that UT99 was). I pick my shots and I shoot to kill. My nephew doesn’t think I’m playing the game right, but he’s having fun and he likes winning.
That said, I don’t love the game. I keep it on my Xbox, but I only play with him (or, I suppose, I’d be open to playing with anyone who asked). Even solo (I did that once on my iPhone when Fortnite came back to iOS this year or last) I still do alright for myself. Rarely take the top spot though. I need a decoy. But if there are 100 players, there’s no shame in being in the last 5 of them.
only you can’t use instrument controllers with it
Not 100% on drum compatibility as I have no interest in Festival, but it not only supports guitar controllers, but PDP even made new models for it.
RIP Rock Band, fuck Epic.
Oh, so you have to buy new ones? Yeah, no. I have Xbox 360 and Xbox One (RB3 and RB4 era) instruments and neither generation work. I’m not buying a new guitar for Fortnite. That’s crazy.
I heard there’s a new guitar controller out (Gibson?), some like 20th anniversary thing? And I’m wondering who this is for. These games are dead.
YARG and Clone Hero (and others) exist, they’re obviously not as big as Fortnite but big enough. Also the Gibson thing you’re referring to is from CRKD, who started putting out new guitars over the summer, plus the already mentioned PDP Riffmaster. So it seems there’s at least enough demand out there that 2 companies started making new controllers for these games.
ut99 > 2k4! But it is a close call, admittedly.
But also, epic released some absolute bangers in the 90’s, though admittedly as a publisher. eg. Castle of the Winds, One Must Fall 2097.
I remember one must fall 2097!
First game I ever bought.
Mailed a freaking cheque internationally, and got a box of 3.5" floppy disks back about 6 weeks later.
Wild times.
I only ever had the Shareware version with a few fighters, but played it so much.
I’m gonna get the freeware version just for the nostalgia. I used to beat the piss out of my little brother in this game.
only played the shareware, until I found out that the full game was eventually released as freeware.
Then years after I went to game store and bought One Must Fall: Battlegrounds on release day… mistakes were made.
Lesser known, but I cannot recommend enough going back and exploring the worlds of ZZT (and by extension, MegaZeux) as an early, amateur game engine. The projects are raw but endearing and an absolutely wonderful time capsule that still has a niche but dedicated following.
Some day when I have the time, I’d like to make an extended engine similar to this. Something with a simple scripting language, extreme flexibility in character and color sets. Ability to run and host your own game worlds over SSH or something similar. Just like a real spit in the face for triple A and going the complete opposite direction of minimal but super accessible.
somehow missed zzt entirely, never played it, seen some random screenshots back in the day and thought it was some kind of weird nethack -clone with occasional ascii graphics. But also the only few screenshots I recall looked like nethack, with ascii smiley -character instead lf @ as user avatar.
So… it’s some kind of game engine which you can script to make any kind of game, kinda?
That’s it exactly.
It’s unfortunately a lot more limited than you may expect, it’s designed around very limited ideas, but that said it’s still incredibly flexible and seeing how people have designed complex games around those limitations is half the fun.
MegaZeux is a fan extension of it (skipping over SuperZZT) that expands it further and breaks a lot of those limitations, but still has certain odd assumptions about gameplay very much from its era.
You can actually play right in browser, try Zeux 2: Caverns of Zeux, https://www.digitalmzx.com/show.php?id=182
It’s the first game released by the developer on the engine which is intended to show off a bunch of the ideas they had. It has a surprise ending that leads into a very bizarre Zeux 3 (which I haven’t beat yet). Zeux 1 was on ZZT but I think was remade for the engine at some point.
Spend an afternoon poking around the site and just trying a few games in your browser, see what it’s about! Then check out the help files and look at the scripting. The biggest downside for me is that if/then statements can ONLY EVER lead to jumps. You can’t process simple logic without jumping to a label to do so …
that does sound quite cool. I’ll have to check this out, feels like something I would have really enjoyed as a kid.
Thanks!
FuckyeahZZT!!!
So good.
Objectively yes. From the 90s to the early ‘10s.
Gears of War was huge.
Unreal Tournament was pretty big for several iterations.
Unreal engine is STILL used by half the video game industry.
If Sweeney can read this, I just want to tell him something. As someone who made games with ZZT as a kid and thought it was the best thing ever, you need to understand that no AI could make something like that, even if as a kid using copied and ‘inspired’ code from other games (and learned how to hexedit out the protections from other ZZT worlds so I can see how they worked) the cycle of just working through a rudimentary coding language was the reward in and of it self even if I never did finish the game I had in mind.
BTW, that game just involved an adventurer in a kingdom that is being troubled by… Hitler’s ghost, and your objective was to send his ass back to hell. I found a boss fight in another ZZT world that I thought was too cool not to reuse for that purpose, too. But sadly it was never finished.
That being said, we DO need ‘AI generated’ or ‘AI assisted’ as a tag. There isn’t anything weird or wrong with that. In online art spaces like deviant art you can tag stuff as ‘traditional’ art (meaning done on paper/canvas with whatever media you used, like pencils, various paints, etc) or digital or a combination thereof, like a hand drawn sketch that was completed and colored with photoshop. Why the fuck would anyone be against telling people what tools were used?
I’m not surprised. People thought he was a good guy because he sued Apple and Google, but he did it for his own profit, not for the principle. And now he wants AI slop games for his own profit, too.
Him not ordering support for Fortnite on Linux says it all about how serious he actually is about wanting to escape OS ecosystems like Apple, Google, and Windows. He doesn’t care about alternatives.
His only goal is getting more profit, since when it comes to supporting movements that would help Linux grow that might allow him to not be at the mercy of other corporations he chooses to do nothing. As long as he makes profit he is happy to be on copilot riddled Windows and spyware Google Android. He considers Linux a waste of money to put resources towards.
This is like Jared Leto giving Daniel Day-Lewis acting advice 😂
Go back in your hole, Tim.
He’s not wrong about the main point, but I think it just means you need to be clearer about the AI disclosure. Was this AI generated images, text, or voices? Was the codebase just using small amounts of AI tab completion or substantial portions of AI generated code?
That’s nuance. Don’t make the MBA decision maker’s heads explode.
Headlines where I have to remind myself not to downvote the OP for sharing news even when I despise the person being reported on.
I remember seeing a joke once about what if Reddit added left votes and right votes with no explanation in addition to up votes and down votes.
