Smartphones, social networks and search engines are being flooded with “smart” new features as the tech industry bets that artificial intelligence will revolutionize every facet of life. But in one segment of the digital economy, a growing pocket of resistance from consumers is holding back the AI flood.
Video game developers are, like companies in other industries, experimenting with AI tools to help workers be more productive. But as more studios have released games with AI-generated art, characters and dialogue, a growing number have later backtracked or sworn to limit their use of the technology. The reversals have come after aggressive pushback from gamers online, who argue that AI threatens what they love about games if it replaces the creative work of human developers.
Last month, Running With Scissors, a game publisher known for the Postal shooter franchise, scrapped a forthcoming title after online accusations there were AI-generated graphics in its trailer. The role-playing game “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” won Game of the Year at this year’s prestigious Indie Game Awards, but had the accolade rescinded after its developer Sandfall Interactive said it had experimented with AI-generated images but ultimately didn’t include them.
Some players and industry employees say gaming’s battle over AI could foreshadow the rise of resistance to AI’s encroachment into other spheres. Despite survey data showing a majority of Americans have negative feelings about the technology, use of AI is surging and many people are being compelled to adopt it at work, school and home. If gamers can leverage online communities and targeted campaigns to keep AI out of their favorite products, perhaps other groups could, too.
Others suggest the protests are a doomed campaign against the technology’s inevitable adoption. For now, gaming companies must tread carefully — or face a brutal dressing down from their most vocal and internet-savvy customers.
“Our whole professional careers got canceled in one hour,” Artem Korovkin, co-founder of game studio Goonswarm, which made the recently canceled Postal title for Running With Scissors.
Sandfall did not respond to a request for comment. Running With Scissors co-owner Mike Jaret-Schachter said it is grateful to its community of fans for flagging concerns with the art in Goonswarm’s Postal game. “Their initial concerns allowed us to kill a project that would have done irreparable damage to our brand,” he said.
Gamers are better positioned than most other consumers to influence the companies they patronize. Their habit of forming online communities around specific titles on Discord, Reddit or Twitch makes it relatively easy to drum up coordinated resistance to unpopular moves by game studios. The industry’s stalled growth after a decade of rapid expansion also gives fans leverage.
Adrienne Massanari, a professor at American University who studies gaming communities online, said players’ deep emotional connections to their favorite titles and genres and these games’ rising prices can make for intense backlash. Last year, many players expressed surprise and outrage after Nintendo launched its latest Mario Kart game with an $80 price tag, about $10 more than most games of its type.
“There’s increasingly a sense of, ‘If I’m asked to pay for this game, I want it to be created by humans,’” Massanari said.
Artificial intelligence has long played a role in video games, with earlier forms of the technology powering background characters and dynamic environments. The generative AI behind recent chatbots such as ChatGPT is being embraced by game developers to help fill imaginary worlds with interesting characters and visuals.
But some gamers worry the technology will reduce the work needed from artists and voice actors, or lead to low-quality games filled with AI-generated “slop” that lacks a creative touch.
In November, when Everstone Studio launched the role-playing game “Where Winds Meet,” some players noticed that its background characters appeared to be powered by general purpose AI chatbots. While the game was set in 10th-century China, these characters were totally familiar with present-day commodities such as ketchup, prompting players to complain online that it compromised the game’s historical feel. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Other companies have run into trouble just for suggesting they will use AI. Last month, Swen Vincke, chief executive of Larian, producer of the popular Baldur’s Gate fantasy games, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the company was using generative AI to “explore ideas” for its upcoming release, “Divinity.”
The outrage was immediate, with gamers taking to Reddit and X to criticize Vincke for what they saw as a blanket endorsement. “Well Divinity is AI slop so all my interest in that game and Larian as a studio is dead now,” one user wrote on X.
Vincke quickly took to X himself to respond. “We’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI,” he wrote. He added that Larian’s artists only use generative AI to make reference images, in the same they would use “art books or Google.”
But the most-liked responses to his post were largely negative about AI. Larian executives ended up vowing in a January Reddit thread that the technology would play no role in the images its artists use as reference material. Larian did not respond to a request for comment.
Vincke and Larian’s response illustrates the unusual influence gamers have over the industry, which — although bigger than Hollywood — has a history of responding to pressure from its customers.
In 2012, players were so unhappy with the ending of intergalactic war story Mass Effect 3 that the developer, BioWare, released an expanded version that catered to fans’ demands. In 2019, gamers offended by Paramount Pictures’ film adaptation of Sonic the Hedgehog, the beloved video game character from Sega, led Paramount to delay its release for a redesign.
“There’s been a lot of outrage in the gaming community for a long time about a lot different things,” said Steve Zatzke, a chemical engineer in Michigan who’s active in gaming corners of Reddit. AI is “just one more thing added to the pile.”
In its State of the Gaming Industry report released in 2024, the Game Developers Conference reported that a majority of developers see harassment from consumers as a major problem for their work. A track record of successful pressure campaigns emboldens the online gaming community to ask for what it wants and ridicule what it doesn’t, said Joost van Dreunen, author of the book “One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games.”
Gamers have consistently rejected anything that feels like a cash grab. Pushback against in-game payments, for example, led major franchises including Elden Ring and Star Wars: Battlefront to avoid that business model, according to van Dreunen.
There’s a feeling that AI is causing “a cheapening of the experience overall, and gamers are uniquely attuned to that,” he said.
For the targets of these campaigns, the consequences can be severe. Goonswarm Games, which developed the recently-canceled Postal game, shuttered entirely after AI accusations tanked what the studio said took six years of work. In a post last month on X, the company said it had been flooded with “false AI accusations” and would be forced to close. “We’ve received a large number of threats, insults, and mockery, which pushed us toward a very difficult decision,” it said.
A day later, the company posted another update that apologized to players and said an internal review had found their concerns about AI-generated images were “valid.”
“I don’t think we deserved all the hate we got,” Korovkin, Goonswarm’s co-founder said. “But when someone writes to you and says you deserve to be skinned alive, for me, that’s a reason to stop.”
Gamers’ streak of recent victories against AI is unlikely to last, said Matt Workman, a digital effects producer for movies and video games. If new technology can make game development faster or easier, he said, companies will adopt it even if that means weathering a storm of player discontent.
“Every major game studio in the world is using it. They’re just doing different PR spins,” Workman said.
Nicole Greene, an AI industry analyst with the consulting firm Gartner, said how the video game industry navigates this terrain could guide companies in other sectors.
“This is a passionate consumer group,” she said of gamers. “They don’t want to go in and see cheap AI backgrounds because a company wanted to cut costs.”
Seeing how developers find ways to make AI acceptable to that tough audience could help companies in areas such as enterprise software or consumer finance, Greene said — if the gaming studios can actually pull it off.
The post Angry gamers are forcing studios to scrap or rethink new releases appeared first on Washington Post.
