june (commissions open!)

Tim's making a really important point here and I think people fundamentally misunderstand it. Let's paint a scenario. You are an indie developer and you want to make a game. Traditional game development will take you 1 year and cost you $200,000 in outsourcing costs to buy art, animation, and additional programming resources. AI assisted game development will take you 3 months and cost you $50,000 in credits + some additional resources. In a good scenario your game could make $200,000 and break even, but in many scenarios you mortgage your house and no one sees your game and you are out your savings. Now, with the anti-AI mania, Valve is forcing real economic harm on you because you get the equivalent of hate mobs at your door for your choice of tooling. Your economic viability is harmed because Valve chooses to put a label on you that generates negative attention. It makes your economics worse. Anti-AI proponents will point out that this proves their hate campaigns work. The appeal is not to them, because they are morons, but to developers to stand up to Valve and say remove these labels so that we can have livelihoods. And Valve makes money of you either way. Stand up for your rights, devs!