@Bot_Bot_69 That's the pretty typical argument tactics of AI boosters. I don't expect a response but publicly showing them as being unwilling to address any counterpoints has its own value.

@axelhander Game engines, 3D modelling tools, music and audio editing software and literally years worth of YouTube tutorials on how to make games are completely free and have been for years now. Many smash hit indie games were made by people who had nothing but an old laptop and the drive to create. The difference is they MADE something and put in the effort to learn how. They didn't delegate it to a heavily subsidized third-party tool trained on stolen content then put what it spat out up for sale while calling themselves a creative. If you want the glory and satisfaction of creation, you put in the work to do it.

Having a chatbot generate something for you objectively does not make you a creator or an artist. Comparing this to the rise of electronic music or films for not being theatre is asinine. If you're OK with gaming being flooded with this soulless crap, that's your choice. But don't delude yourself into thinking that using a chatbot equates to talent.

Once OpenAI and Anthropic either fail or have to start charging what their products actually cost (one or both will happen and is already starting to), a lot of this will normalize anyway.

@Futureshark But also fully generate it in AI for peak ironic commentary. 🤣

@SecretSeashell I think the "old school" asset flips and the like had a lot of that involved. Certainly possible a lot of this AI slopware does too but I do think a lot more of it is people just seeing the ability to generate something and maybe make a few bucks off it or use it to say they've shipped a game. The fact that there are armies of people defending this practice where a few years back, you couldn't find anyone defending assets flips I think speaks volumes.

@SecretSeashell It's not a new issue, no. Lazy people who want to try to make some money off the gullible (or launder money, which I think a lot of previous asset flips were about) have always existed but AI takes it to a whole other level. Asset flips were always a problem but they were a minority of titles and easy to spot and avoid if you were an even slightly savvy games buyer. Generative AI has turned this into a volume problem now as well.

@breach187 You're right, AI isn't going away. Heck, I use it in my IT job sometimes, even if four years in, I still have to reprompt it for half an hour to make a relatively simple PowerShell script that doesn't break.

The thing is though, you need frontier tools to do this stuff right now and that's not changing any time soon. Large scale code and art generation is ruinously time consuming if you aren't running on a data center's worth of Blackwell chips. Most of these slop makers can't afford a 5090 even if the prices were normal and even then, it would take orders of magnitude longer to generate what they're posting on Steam. And that's assuming they have the technical knowhow to setup and maintain local models which as someone who works with an IT company that's playing with local models for automation stuff, is not easy let me tell you.

AI isn't going away but whether through the outright failure of frontier model providers or prices having to massively increase to reflect the economic realities of the business, a lot of this stuff will get attritioned out anyway in my opinion because anyone who can afford it is probably not going to want to spend that money putting slopware on Steam. Even if you bought a 5090 at its original retail price, the vast majority of what gets listed on Steam doesn't sell enough to even pay that back.

@Bot_Bot_69 Valve needs to do something but in no small part to the way their company is structured, they very much prefer to take a "market approach" to most things. But that only works until it makes your market a headache for the people you want spending money on it. But they're not only a de facto monopoly (even though they've generally maintained a good relationship with their customers in spite of that), virtually every other option is worse so no matter what they do, people aren't going to leave.

Though they aren't perfect at it, they do still seem to overall be interested in providing a good customer experience so I hope they'll take this community sentiment on board and figure out something to do with it.

When I used to stream, Next Fest was such a fun time. I'd download literally dozens of demos and then take suggestions from my chat and we're go through them all and discover new stuff together. My Steam wishlist is over 750 titles (seriously) and in no small part because of that.

This Next Fest, even after spending more than an hour browsing the official event page, I only found about 15 demos that even looked appealing to me and several of those I ended up skipping because their AI disclosures showed heavy generative AI use. Code doesn't even bother me that much (even though it almost certainly means the game will run like garbage) but art, voices or writing is a hard line for me.

I don't care what AI boosters say, you're not a creator if you use generative AI. Even disregarding that the models were trained on stolen human work, using it means you want the glory and satisfaction of creating something without having to put in the effort to actually learn and refine a craft. I've wanted to make a game since I was a kid but because of ADHD and other reasons, never got good at coding or art when I was a kid. I could do everything with AI today and put something shippable out pretty quick. But I won't do that because I'd know I didn't make it and I would have no pride in the creation. I'd still like to try making a game one day but it will be because I put the time and effort in to do it myself, not prompt a robot to do it for me and claim it's my own.

I don't know what the solution is to this. I'm glad Steam has AI disclosures but they don't enforce them strongly and developers big and small get away with lying about that all the time. Steam's also been notoriously hands off with discovery and even before AI, there were 10 garbage asset flips on the platform for every one crafted game. This totally hands-off method isn't working but neither is the opposite, where you have out of touch twits like Tim Sweeney who not only embrace AI but think requiring its disclosure is a disservice.

As someone who works in tech and follows the AI industry very closely, the ray of hope I cling to is that right now, generative AI is so massively subsidized (both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending over $2.50 for every $1 they bring in) that eventually it's going to have to start costing what it actually costs as the bubble starts to crack (already happening) and investors start demanding these companies develop some concept of a plan of how to be profitable. Once the subsidies go away, this tech will be so expensive that only large companies and rich individuals will be able to afford it. Your average Reddit AI Bro that's using a $20 a month Claude subscription to crank out games or even AI slop for YouTube will lose their economic viability. I don't know when that's going to happen but the economics show it will have to.

Probably going to write something on my own blog about this tonight. I love Next Fest and the idea of it but this one has just made me sad.

@Deway Sadly, that sentiment is everywhere. I can't find a discussion about AI use that doesn't immediately get swamped with AI bros who love to complain about how people just "refuse to embrace the future" but also immediately either ghost, deflect or resort to personal attacks the second you take apart any of their arguments, which isn't hard to do.

But just like crypto, it's important to remember that this is the vocal minority, who need to scream loudly because they know their arguments can't stand on their own. I was at a concert last night and the musician made a comment about AI. They weren't defending it and it was kind of a throwaway line in another story but as soon as they mentioned AI and creation, you could hear the entire place groan collectively. Real people don't want this stuff, don't believe what boosters tell you.

@16bitGeneration This has been a frustrating problem with so many Retro Games Ltd. releases. A bunch of them just never shipped in North America, meaning you had to pay absurd third party markups if you wanted one. You're working with Plaion, you have worldwide distribution capabilities! I don't know why they like hamstringing their market like this.

Like with delayed games, I'd rather they get it right rather than fast but a near year's delay is a lot. I'd normally have more of a raised eyebrow at that but as someone who works in IT, the components shortages are very real and worse than many realize. I'm not surprised they are running into this issue and we've already seen many smaller manufacturers and even the likes of Valve get slammed by this (still no word on the Stream Frame). I'll keep my pre-order in place for now and see where things go.

This is the thing that's always confused me. You would think all these things the administration has done are blatant copyright violations, along with all the major artist music they've used at rallies without permission. But they keep doing it and very few if any entities have sued over it so is the government in power just exempted from this? I can't imagine at least a couple of companies wouldn't have tried to go after them for it at this point.

I am really not in agreement with these constant and more frequent reminders of how old I'm getting.

RIP to our favourite Space Communist. May you finally reach the socialist stars!

I see Strategy First as Steam publisher, I raise an eyebrow on quality.

But one of the developers is also listed as ZOOM Platform, who have done some good work making older titles work on new systems. Apparently they're adding in quality of life things like a sprint function as well. I'd always meant to play the original Slavjank version and this would be a nicer way to do so.

@Shred Couldn't agree more on Truxton Extreme. I first started it up and wasn't sure about it but then it clicked and I think they did a great job with it.

I bought Shinobi: Art of Vengeance on day one and did enjoy the couple of hours I played with it, then got distracted by something else and haven't gone back to it yet. Not sure why to be honest. I could tell right away that it wasn't a "traditional" Shinobi game but as someone who played and loved those too, I also didn't see the problem with trying something different with it. The DNA was still there in my opinion. I guess some people could have seen the name, thought it was a new game that played more like the old ones and felt duped but I don't buy any game without either a demo or looking up actual gameplay videos to see if I'll like it first so it's kind of hard to plead ignorance these days.

I've never liked the gatekeeping mentality behind a game with a certain name always needing the "identity" of its first iteration define any subsequent releases of it for all time. Truxton Extreme is clearly modelled after the original Toaplan games but if it took some wider creative liberties, I wouldn't write it off for that either.

@Yooka-Laylee Cheaper than the $580AU to buy the actual Neo-Geo cart? But yeah, $26 for a shmup without much promotion I don't think it going to get a lot of attention.

For what it's worth, I bought it and...the PC package from the Xbox store is incomplete and doesn't run. So you know, there's that.

EDIT 4: And he's got a fix ready to go! Had me try it and it works great. This game's quite good, though it will beat your ass. 🤣

EDIT 3: Dev said he's working on a fix so hopefully all will be well soon. 🙂

EDIT 2: The dev got back to me immediately which is pretty cool. He sent me a code for the unreleased Steam version, which works fine for me. I found some interesting logging into that I sent him so hopefully a fix will be coming soon. While it's happening on both my main PC and my Claw, it might not be an issue that impacts everyone. And turns out, the PC version actually is that small!

EDIT: OMG, I think they didn't properly deploy the game on PC. The Xbox build is a couple of gigs to install. The PC version is...20MB. 99% sure what you download from the store is not the complete package on PC.

Not sure if anyone else has bought this yet but I picked it up through Xbox so I can play it on my main PC, Xbox console and MSI CLAW handheld.

Trying to run the game on PC just results in "The game has crashed." when it's starting up. Anyone else run into this? I'm emailing FULLSET now but I don't know how good their support is.

This site owner will get his when his token prices start going through the roof as is already starting to happen.

@Penguinpengy Oh you're in for a treat cause this one, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the MachineGames titles all range from a good time to an out and out blast!

I'd be surprised by this as if I recall, it didn't sell great at the time because it was the beginning of the era where Activision wasn't putting any marketing into games that weren't Call of Duty and at the time, Guitar Hero. I remember enjoying it though so I'd definitely be down for a remaster that's done well at a reasonable price. I miss pre-CoD Mines Raven Software so much.

@firenze I've seen nothing about death threats. Not saying they didn't happen and I certainly don't endorse them in any way, but that's also par for the course with being a person of note in the games industry and they're never credible. I'm not saying that justifies it, it's just sadly the way it is. One of the reasons I barely use any social media anymore.

Maybe scumbag was too loaded a term, but Josh Fairhurst's shall we say, controversies, are well documented and based on those and the fact that he hasn't even denied many of them, I'm inclined to think he's not a good person and I don't have a problem pointing out what many with actual journalistic cred have reported on the subject. I'm not accusing you of cherry-picking, but I'm not just talking random people on Twitter and Reddit here. Companies that have practices such as bad support or missing deadlines or the other things that LRG has done often tend to have bad leadership and/or toxic cultures in them that cause people to have weak morale and at best, not put in their best effort. I've worked at a few places like that myself and seen it first hand. In IT and not gaming, but the concepts are the same.

Of course, if you or anyone else has had good experiences with LRG and wants to continue buying from them, have it it. You do you. I've never claimed that anyone who still supports them is bad or wrong to do so. But my experiences have been awful, as have many others and I do not intend to stop pointing that out, so that others can make informed decisions.

He's not at LRG anymore, which I think is a good thing, though the company's attempts at reforms seem at best, glacial. But he keeps chiming in on things, so I'll keep pointing out why I think is credibility is shaky.

@firenze I call him a scumbag not because of his company's awful track record, but because of the many reports out there of the toxic work culture he created, how he drove many talented people out of the company and the frankly very aggressive means he's gone to in order to defend said company's awful track record.

If you don't care about those things and want to keep buying from LRG, fine. I'd consider buying from them again if they got their act together. They claim to be trying with no real results yet that I've seen. But I don't accept your whataboutism regarding other companies because a) I've never bought from them so I can't speak to personal experience there and b) Even if they are just as scummy, not only are they not what this article is about, but LRG is considered the poster child for this business and they should be raising the bar, not lowering it.

Based on my experience, they have not improved their practices recently. The last thing I ordered from them before writing the blog post I linked in another comment was only a couple of years ago and it took close to two years to receive it. It was a reproduction SNES game, something that companies a fraction of LRG's size like Retrotainment Games have no problem fulfilling much quicker. And while it's good you agree on the CD-R fiasco, this is a boutique publisher selling premium products at premium prices. That should never happen, period and it shouldn't take massive community backlash for them to own up to it.

Kind of embarrassing to be associated with “gamers” who bootlick corporations and their ethically questionable owners like this.

@CopyX1982 On Josh Fairhurst you mean? He's just been known to run his mouth on a lot of things and was known to be a toxic leader who drove a lot of talent out of LRG. And well, this is a link to my own blog (no ads) about why LRG generally sucks: https://geekbravado.com/limited-run-games-sucks-heres-my-reason-why/

I'm at work at the moment so I can't find the best summary of things but if you Google "josh fairhurst controversies", it should point you in the right direction if you want to do a bit of research into it.

In this case, whether one likes the guy or not, I think there's validity to the point he's making.

As a matter of course, I don't give a damn what that scumbag Fairhurst says about most things, but he's probably right here. Boutique physical publishing is just that, boutique and though the fans of it are passionate, it is a very tiny piece of the industry and there are probably more people doing it that it can sustain.

I am curious what the killing of physical games (at least for PlayStation but let's be real, it's coming for Xbox too and I'd be shocked if Switch 3 or whatever has a card slot) is going to do to these companies. I wonder if the other things they tend to bundle with their editions will be enough to keep fans interested when it's just a code in the box.

I get the idea behind this and New Commodore's want to not just be a retro products company, but they've made this "digital detox" thing part of their corporate mandate and it just comes across as a bit pretentious to me and not really something in line with what they're trying to achieve. If Parafractic wants to start a new brand around this idea, cool but I feel like he's diluting the purpose of Commodore that people associate with that brand with initiatives like this. But if people don't buy it, they'll learn the lesson quickly enough. I definitely won't be. I have a regular smartphone and it's easy enough to uninstall apps I don't want and I just avoid the cesspool of social media by and large.

That's because it is. The models largely being used today were trained almost wholesale on other people's stolen work. It may not be generating exact copies of the stolen work but without it, it wouldn't be able to make anything. Yet somehow, blanket theft is OK when Scam Altman and Wario Amodei do it.

@mariteaux Breaking news: Look in the mirror. At least some measure of actual effort went into the article.

Were one to come out, I'd definitely love to hear a behind the scenes of how it ended up this way. I covered a lot of ININ's releases on YouTube back when I did that and most of their stuff is usually decent, if not pretty solid. There's definitely an untold story here.

Still have my copy of Gradius Advance. Love that game! Looking forward to trying this out.

@h3s I've ordered plenty of AliExpress stuff reliably, but I find when looking for "brand name" stuff like these drives, many people often either get the wrong model or a model that doesn't have the right firmware, despite what was advertised. Not saying you're guaranteed to get scammed, it's just a risk, especially when they're still charging $150+ for the drives.

I'm from Canada, but every listing I could find for these drives on Amazon, Newegg and elsewhere shows unavailable. LG and ASUS still have product pages for the drives, but they don't seem to be active SKUs anymore.

@Lanmanna $150-$250, even on places like AliExpress. I haven't looked super hard, but that was the average after about 30 minutes of looking into it.

@DanijoEX Let us know if you can find one and at a semi-sane price. I haven't had any luck so far.

@ddlevine I personally don't care about violating an outdated law written by people who didn't understand the technology they were regulating, but from what I can tell, you are right. You are legally allowed to make backup copies of media you own, but you aren't legally allowed under the DMCA to bypass encryption to do so. I'm Canadian so the DMCA doesn't apply to me, though our copyright law doesn't allow it either. Not the case worldwide though.

@h3s Yeah, USB-based peripherals are always tricky like that because as you say, the USB chipset introduces its own layer of communication that isn't always standards compliant. It sucks cause I have a barely used Pioneer 3.5" drive, but it's not compatible. The only ones on the supported list I can find for anything approaching sane pricing are on AliExpress, which it's a crap shoot if you'll get what you order and they're still like $150.

If you still have a PC with one of these drives, hold onto it because you're sitting on a gold mine. I tried to find one of the models in the compatibility list for this project and they've all been discontinued and are already selling for massive markups, if you can find them at all.

Wish there was somewhere to pre-order the Ultimate set in Canada. I had to order it from Plaion, which is already a gut punch for currency conversion and the import fees will be worse.

@sdelfin OK thanks. I couldn't tell from Plaion's site soci wanted to make sure.

Question that maybe people here would know: Does the Ultimate package include a memory card? It doesn't look like it based on the web site. If not, are you able to save games and scores directly on the console or do you need a separate memory card? Really hoping that if you do require one, that they didn't fail to include that in the supposed "Ultimate" package.

@NeonPizza Can't argue with you there.

@Bod2019 I so wish they'd do this. I really want a physical edition of Earthion, but LRG is an instant no go.

LRG is a terrible company, in no small part because Josh Fairhurst is a terrible person and had an iron grip on the place. Everyone deserves a second chance, but they have a LOT of work to do to earn my trust back before I'd give them a dime again. It is interesting to me though that they announce this shortly after Fairhurst left so maybe they can finally do the things they've known they needed to for years.

My story and one of MANY with this company: https://geekbravado.com/limited-run-games-sucks-heres-my-reason-why/

Nintendo being as notoriously litigious as they are, I would love to see them go after this the same way they go after fan emulators that do essentially no brand damage. There is no way this classifies as Fair Use and as far as I know, government entities are not exempt from copyright law.

As it should be. I'm frankly surprised that Google cared to deindex them given how much AI slop dominates results now. Meanwhile, my hobby blog that is completely written by me is completely unindexed by Google despite meeting all their requirements (and Bing having no problem indexing it) and they refuse to tell me why.

I didn't know The Escapist got sold yet again, but that site has been under a constant string of failed management almost since its inception. I think literally every company that has owned the brand has either gone bankrupt or is very close to it. I'm amazed it's still going at all.

Picked up the Amiga and C65 versions last night. Really looking forward to trying this out on my Amiga 1200.

It wasn't a failure in terms of unit sales. However, a lot of game developers and publishers do consider it a failure and many abandoned it for the second half of its life because piracy became so easy and so rampant that developing a commercial PSP game was almost guaranteed to be a money losing proposition. I used to have friends who sold jailbreaking services on local classified sites. They weren't techies at all, but it literally took them like 20 minutes to soft mod a PSP and they could sell the services for $50 a pop.

I have one of these on order that hasn't shipped yet. I'm curious if they'll change this to units already in production or not.

@SpacemanSpliffz Oh yes, I know those well.

@SpacemanSpliffz Legal trouble?

Horrible company made that way by his horrible leadership. Maybe with him gone, they'll become a place I'd remotely consider giving my money to again since publishers keep partnering with them for some baffling reason.

Well, this is some Mandela Effect stuff right here...