AI has some useful applications, just most of them are a bit niche and/or have ethical issues so while it’s worth having the tools and functionality to do things, no one can do much with them.

Like for example we pretty much have AIs that could generate really good audio books using your favourite actors voi e likeness, but it’s a legal nightmare, and audio books are a niche already.

In game development being able to use AI for texture generation, rigging, animations are pretty good and can save lots of time, but it comes at the cost of jobs.

Some useful applications for end users are things like noise removal and dynamic audio enhancement AIs which can make your mic not sound like you are talking from a tunnel under a motorway when in meetings, or being able to do basic voice activation of certain tools, even spam filtering.

The whole using AI to sidestep being creative or trying to pretend to collate knowledge in any meaningful way is a bit out of grasp at the moment. Don’t get me wrong it has a good go at it, but it’s not actually intelligent it’s just throwing out lots of nonsense hoping for the best.

Considering it’s technical limitations the game boy had some amazing games. Gargoyles Quest games were amazing

R Type was such a good game

I think it was some asteroid style game in arcade, but first really memorable game was Dizzy 1 on C64. Was a wild time when a couple of quid could get you a magazine, some sweets and a cassette full of indie games and demos.

As a steam user I would love to see that but unsure how they could do it without the keyboard vendors agreeing to a standard, or having some bespoke drivers/hardware stuff like they do for ps4/switch controllers etc.

Also I imagine steam input would just map let’s say wsad to gamepad left axis, but some games will lose their mind if you try to use gamepad for movement but mouse/keyboard for other keys.

I appreciate there is limited benefit outside of gaming, maybe for media players to ffwd/rewind based off input amount etc.

This is a pretty complex topic, as a quick knee jerk I agree AI art isn’t art in the common sense, but one thing I disagree with is that all art has intent or even needs it.

I don’t think AI art is going to or even tries to replace art as a creative pursuit. If anything it’s more likely to replace certain photography related jobs.

Currently the main use cases are

• Generating stock photos
• Generating texture maps
• Generating concept art

None of these things really care about intent, you could argue concept art does, but a lot of the time it’s just there to set a vibe/direction/theme. All of the above will still replace jobs but not the typical everyday artists jobs, maybe stock or texture photographers though.

There is too much to respond to all, will be interesting to see how the wolfire case continues then.

I just wanted to chime in on the last bit.

So as you say steam wins on features, and Epic and MS have both chosen not to compete on features. It’s not that they can’t, they both have the means and money to do so, they just don’t want to invest the money on the infrastructure incase it’s a big flop I guess.

Either way you are making out like the only valid perspective here is focusing on the game price, but as I said to me the feature set is VERY important. Literally the only reason I use steam over other platforms is the features, being able to use any controller and remap it to however I want. Knowing my saves can be transfered to any computer, streaming to the TV so the kids can play games on it etc.

I appreciate not everyone else uses these features, but some of us do, and this is why steam is the better platform. If MS let me stream games to my TV and use controllers properly etc I would happily get game pass, but their platform is rubbish, same for EGS.

This whole thing is just crap platforms complaining they can’t compete when they havent even tried, they just want the free publicity in the hope they can get more users “in the door”.

Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn’t successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.

To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn’t the case.

In terms of what is a “fair deal” we could quibble about the 30% but that’s literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that’s an “industry standard” so by all means lower it if they can, I’m all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.

For example if Valve personally came to me and said “you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features” I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.

Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.

Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don’t see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.

I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front… Why wouldnt you?

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “let’s crack down on steam like other monopolies” as what do you crack down on?

They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).

All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn’t do anything shady to maintain it’s monopoly it just carries on improving it’s platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.

Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?

The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I’m happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.

Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.

Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.

Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.

Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it’s position, but I don’t feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.