Gamer sind extrem verrückt nach KI: Der Slop im Spiel war schon schlimm genug. Jetzt treibt KI auch die Preise in die Höhe.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/gamers-are-extremely-mad-about-ai.html
Gamer sind extrem verrückt nach KI: Der Slop im Spiel war schon schlimm genug. Jetzt treibt KI auch die Preise in die Höhe.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/gamers-are-extremely-mad-about-ai.html
27 Kommentare
Article text:
You don’t have to look very hard to find examples of AI backlash in creative industries: Authors are pissed, and so are readers; an AI-generated chart hit is causing a crisis in country music; filmmakers, anticipating criticism from professionals and fans, are preemptively disavowing AI use; even Saturday Night Live, which was recently accused of using AI to generate some “Weekend Update” graphics, can’t escape the chatbot culture wars. AI-generated material is appearing all around us, and quite a few people aren’t happy about it.
But perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers. This week, after mentioning AI use in an interview, the CEO of Larian, the company behind Baldur’s Gate 3 and the forthcoming Divinity, tried and failed to quell massive pushback from fans:
Holy fuck guys we’re not „pushing hard“ for or replacing concept artists with AI.
We have a team of 72 artists of which 23 are concept artists and we are hiring more. The art they create is original and I’m very proud of what they do.
I was asked explicitly about concept art…
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) December 16, 2025
This episode is just the latest of many. Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was “overwhelmed with negative responses” from the “concerned Postal community” after fans spotted AI-generated material in the game’s trailer. The developers of Arc Raiders were accused of using AI instead of voice actors, leading to calls for boycotts, while the developers of the Call of Duty franchise were called out for AI-generated assets that players found strewn across Black Ops 7. Games that weren’t developed with generative AI are getting caught up in accusations anyway, while workers at Electronic Arts are going to the press to describe pressure from bosses to adopt AI tools. Nintendo has sworn off using generative AI, as has the company behind the Cyberpunk series. Valve, the company that operates Steam, now requires AI disclosures on listed games and surveys all submitters. Perhaps sensing the emergence of a new constituency, California congressman Ro Khanna responded in November to the Call of Duty backlash: “We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits,” he posted on X.
Gaming’s part in the AI culture war is characteristic of the industry and its fandom. Among the workforce, which has been demoralized and radicalized by poor working conditions, game development “crunch” periods, and a general sense that their work is undervalued as game budgets and sales grow by billions, AI is often seen as a tool for managers to extract more productivity and justify layoffs. Among players, it can foster a sense that gamers are being tricked or ripped off, while also dovetailing with more general objections to generative AI. It can sometimes be hard to tell whether gamer backlash is a bellwether or an outlier, an early signal from our youngest major creative industry or a localized and unique fit of rage. The sheer number of incidents here suggests the former, which foretells bitter, messy, and confusing fights to come in entertainment beyond gaming — where, notably, technologies referred to as “AI” have previously been embraced with open arms.
Now, though, gamers have another grievance with AI. This is less complicated: It’s making building a gaming PC prohibitively expensive. According to Tom’s Hardware:
The ongoing structural change of the DRAM market caused by the shift of manufacturing capacities to production of high bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI accelerators has already caused a massive price hike of commodity DDR and LPDDR memory — but the worst is yet to come.
According to the general manager of Chinese memory giant TeamGroup, contract prices of DRAM and NAND products have almost doubled recently. Supply of commodity memory is set to worsen in early 2026, and normalization is unlikely before 2027 – 2028 when more production capacity emerges.
Translation: The price of the sort of memory PC gamers most want to buy has skyrocketed, with DDR5 units often more than doubling in price, and demand for AI chips is the cause. Memory chipmaker Micron recently announced it would shut down its consumer brand, Crucial, which has been selling components to gamers for decades, citing “AI-driven growth in the data center.” Downstream from memory prices, the consequences for gamers are stacking up: Building a PC is more expensive; prebuilt PC stock is running low; devices like Valve’s Steam Machine could be facing delays; and graphics cards, the prices of which have only recently started to normalize after years of inflation from crypto-mining, are threatening to run back up, as demand for video RAM runs up against similar supply constraints.
As a culture and an industry, gaming is genuinely divided on how to handle the rise of generative AI, with disagreements being hashed out in public. This part of the story, though, is cut more cleanly. The rush to build data centers is making it much more expensive to game. Nobody’s going to be happy about that.
Stop blaming AI… start blaming rich people that are funding this bad behaviors.
Gamers don’t like woke, they vote for con man that now cause this whole thing.
Gamers finally getting anticapitalism.
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Short cuts are short cuts and people notice most of the time
Publishers trying to say „Since gamers don’t want us to use AI, we need to hire more devs, which increases prices.“
I care less about AI-slop in games than I do about Nvidia’s recent announcement that it’s cutting 30-40% of its production of consumer GPUs so it can concentrate on building enterprise-level cards for AI data centers instead. That’s going to massively spike prices and kill availability for GPUs for all gamers, both PC and console.
PLUS this isn’t going to be like the crypto gold rush where miners bought consumer-grade products to build mining rigs with, then when crypto crashed we got a glut of used cards. This time, they’re not even BUILDING the consumer-grade cards in the first place, so when that hardware ages out at data centers they’re not going to be the kind of hardware a gamer can buy used and put in a PC build.
I first read it as Germans are extremely mad and was very confused…
Everyone besides tech CEOs are mad at AI.
Headline the next day:
„*Pre-orders of the new $600 AI-developed COD game cause servers to crash, set record single-day profit for Activision*“
Gamer rage is nothing more than ineffectual, impotent, petty grandstanding.
See Also: The Nintendo Switch 2 „boycott“
The problem is the argument we used to get was.
„Things are expensive because of the time and effort put into creating these things.“
Now we have AI which is doing things in a fraction of the time, slop or not, but prices haven’t come down and we all know they won’t come down.
Honestly people just don’t want crap, AI or not. People are using ai slop as a catch all for things they don’t like and most can’t tell the difference
EVERYONE SHOULD BE MAD ABOUT AI!
And theres literally nothing we can do except wait. Good thing I already upgraded recently and have a huge backlog to get through
I don’t like the idea of AI use either. But the simple fact is, it’s here, and it’s here to stay, no matter how much us gamers cry about it. And it’s only going to become even more popular the better AI becomes. It’s inevitable and something we just have to accept at this point.
AI is a worse scam than NFTs. It has literally zero uses, no one wants it, no one is using it, and it will never be accepted. Yet big tech sure likes to throw about billions and maybe trillions eventually for the most useless thing next to snake oil.
This is creating a feedback loop.
People were told that AI would either increase the amount of content OR make it cheaper due to lower production costs.
Devs/Publishers are then jacking up the costs which then causes people to blame AI because they were promised that it would be cheaper/better/richer and we’re still getting the same thing for more cost.
The bubble we’re going to see burst is the trust bubble that is being created for creators to maximize profits without giving anything extra back.
AI is going to take the blame because of the intense focus on it and it will be deemed a failure.
Whats really funny is the AI chatbots slowly pushing the narrative further to minimize the actual disdain people have – overall the AI industry has just created more problems than its solved currently.
The people implementing AI have no interest in helping people – their main goal is to eventually use it to control people to a higher degree. If the world was run by nicer people, the world wouldnt be the way it currently is.
I’ve been a PC gamer for 25 years now, and even though it’s certainly had its ups and downs during that time, I never felt as close to being treated like a second-class citizen as I have in the last six months.
The weirdest thing about this is that it’s not coming from within the hobby itself. We were in a rough spot for a bit there between 2008 and 2013, doubly so if you love RPGs since barring a few exceptions they were woefully underrepresented. Both the types of games released and a lack of good ports signaled that gamers and manufacturers favored consoles. Things improved dramatically.
Now there’s this weird situation where technically it’s never been better to be a PC gamer in terms of variety and playability (the current state of AAA notwithstanding), but things seem to be spiraling in a direction that, if left unchecked, could herald either the ending or a paradigm shift in the hobby.
First the crypto mining craze hit and GPU prices never recovered, not to mention how (NVIDIA’s) generational gains have been lackluster for two generations now.
Then the pandemic hit and Microsoft introduced artificial obsolescence with their BS Win 11 hardware restrictions. Then RAM and SSD manufacturers pivoted towards servicing AI growth and NVIDIA became an AI-first company practically spitting on its roots.
Now, even effin Firefox, whose loyal user I’ve been for 20 years, is also pivoting away from privacy and embracing a whole lot of AI features no users asked for.
It’s like they decided that human consumers have been nuisances long enough and are conspiring to squeeze us out little by little. Great games are still being made, no doubt, but I feel like the hobby in general is becoming alienating.
Yeah, they’re so mad about „AI slop“ they made Arc Raiders one of the best selling and best reviewed games of the year, even winning Multiplayer GOTY a couple days ago, lol
All the AI BS is going to be putting a dagger into the gamer PC market for 2026 too, with SD and RAM manufacturers cutting back so they can devote all of their output for datacenters.
Wow, maybe the marketing strategy of telling everybody that AI was going to take their jobs and ruin their lives, wasn’t a great plan.
We live in the era of corruption. These tech companies are operated by greed monsters that only care about themselves.
AI is garbage except in very specific and tailored use cases. But the C Suite is so fucking frightened of it that everyone is racing to create, market and implement it without it being nearly mature enough for almost every use case.
It is also ludicrously resource intensive to a comical degree. Global warming? Fuck that we need to put resources into shitpost image and video generators!
AI isn’t as good as a humans creative mind yet, so why the push for it? Maybe in 5-6 years or if it’s SLIGHTLY present.
I don’t think your average shmo really cares, plus it’s a moot point anyway because it’s just how things are going to be made from here on
It’s like getting mad your carpenter uses power tools, AI makes people more productive with less effort
That being said though, it is annoying when massive budget games like COD use generated assets in game instead of using the generated image as a base for a real human to go on and make something themselves
But yeah it doesn’t matter, AI is happening regardless of if we like it or not, one upside is that soon you won’t even be able to tell because these tools will keep improving
I don’t understand what the long term plan is? Everything is getting converted and invested into AI, to the point entire companies make themselves completely dependent on AI-companies. But AI isn’t making any money, is it? How are they planning to keep this up and not sink the entire technology industry in a few years when even OpenAI isn’t making money?