The sales aren’t quite apples to apples. Very few WNBA players have the same marketability as a decent NBA player. Clark is a generational talent and the face of the league, but adding up the revenue of a bottom tier NBA roster dwarfs her. For reference, she brings in about 26% (!!!) of all WNBA’s $200M revenue, while the lowest revenue NBA team (the Pelicans) brings in $272M.

You are right that the compensation doesn’t match up however. Clark’s rookie contract is $80k/yr for her $52M contribution compared to (minimum) $1.1M/yr for those Pelicans players contributing $18M.

You: “I don’t think the small team argument holds any water, [lists examples of popular minimalist indie games, argues for cutting scope and following their style]”

Me: “My project, at the modest scale I designed with my resource restrictions, was only possible by using Gen Ai to speed development of some assets”

You: “No you’re wrong, that’s not what I said, you’re a shill, gaslighting, strawman, narrative framing, etc…”

If you’re not defending your argument at all, I’m going to interpret your position as not worth defending.

Right, so everything you said is hot air. If you’re not going to bother defending your position and applying it to a simple non-hypothetical situation then I guess you concede that it’s bunk. Clearly you’re interested enough to repeatedly assert that you’re right, but just saying “gaslighting” and “strawman” isn’t convincing anyone.

It’s not a tool? If I plug it into Blender and get a skeleton of an asset I wouldn’t otherwise be able to make with my resource constraints, that’s not a useful part of the process? Just because it has tradeoffs doesn’t mean it has no applications.

I understand people who argue against it on ethical grounds, but I’ll never understand arguing it always makes everything 100% worse. Telling people “just spend X hours learning to make it” or “just pay someone on fivver” or “restructure your project so you don’t need it” just to protect the sanctity of the artform is thinly veiled elitism.

I’ve personally used Gen AI in projects and found some useful applications. My own personal experience is corporate propoganda? Or am I just a filthy plebeian because I couldn’t dedicate multiple days to learning other tools?

If I followed your advice those projects wouldn’t have been finished. You can scroll up and read your own comments, I was on a shoestring budget and wasn’t willing to cut into other responsibilities or shrink the project into a toy. Or is this just “framing” as you say, when really I shouldn’t have pursued my art at all because I wasn’t willing to risk my paycheck?

These are genuine questions, what should I have done? Why would it have been better to do it another way? I don’t want to make a strawman, I want to know how your pontificating results in anything useful outside of an internet discussion.

Strange to not qualify the last one as theft. If it’s out putting code, it’s from the same kind of training set. If it’s out putting character responses, they’re from that same literary training data.

I’m not perverting any argument, you’re just arguing something completely orthogonal to the point people above are making. We all understand creativity and that having more control and agency in a project is a good thing.

My argument isn’t framing, it’s reality. Time is a resource and the creative process is irrelevant when you’ve got bills to pay. The vast majority of people don’t have the luxury to maintain a passion project, much less the chance to recoup a portion of what they poured into it.

Yes, in a vacuum with no regard for money or other responsibilities, the creative output is better for working through those problems. There are examples of this: Transport Tycoon, Undertale, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, etc… Usually games made in spare time over years by someone with a well paying tech job or game dev experience.

These indie games having success is very much the exception. The growth of the indie scene came from the wide availability of dev tooling and distribution platforms. Cutting out those hurdles massively expanded the pool of people who could now make games, thus we get more gems.

Not everyone needs to use Unreal Engine or Steam, but having them as an option is the only way that many games get made. That doesn’t have any correlation to quality, they can be masterpieces or shovel ware. Gen Ai is the same, it just lowers another barrier of entry.

The choice isn’t “Gen Ai or flop”. The choice is in how you allocate your limited resources to make your project. It could add no value to a small project or be the key to unlocking a larger project. If your goal is to make some money from your efforts, it can be great at adding that veneer of polish that gets eyes on your game. I’m not one to judge someone for that just because lazy people can also do lazy things with it.

You’re certainly free to lovingly craft every byte of a game but that doesn’t automatically make it a better product. You’re describing a creative outlet, not something that needs to appeal to some random customer in the 10s they skim your store page.

Regardless of how important it is to your creative vision, there are some boxes you need to check. Visual texture on an otherwise forgettable wall is that exact case. If you need some background wall art your options are:

• Spend X units of time putting something together. Most likely a poor use of time unless you’re already proficient
• Fundamentally simplify your art style to keep X manageable (your game ends up in the pixel art bin, sales plummet)
• Sacrifice other parts of development to free up X time (content, mechanics and other features suffer)
• Pay somebody else (literally never in the budget for an indie game)
• Gen AI gives something passable in a few minutes

Or everyone could take your advice: if you don’t have the time or money to approach your dream game, don’t even try! In my opinion, more people making their art is a good thing, even if it doesn’t pass everyone’s purity test.

If you’re (rightly) worried about the livelihood of the displaced background artist that’s fine, but complain about the economic system and not the tool.

To be fair, wells and aquaducts are fairly clean ways to get water (read: animals haven’t shit or died in it yet). Rivers and other surface water were as bad as today, if not worse because it was a de facto village sewage system. Water quality issues were also mitigated by a diet very heavy in stews and soups, so less extra hydration was needed.

I think Daggerheart is interesting in some ways but I think it’s very much tailored to what CR wants to perform rather than what makes a fun game at a table. The mechanics make for predictable narrative peaks and valleys, which give guardrails to DMs with weaker narrative skills. The tradeoff being a more narrow range of outcomes, which is most of the fun in rolling dice.

CR productions have a lot of issues, but I don’t think Daggerheart inherently has those deficiencies baked in. Their main problems stem from trying to scale voice-actors-at-a-table into a multimedia empire with sprawling IP. They can all make and perform a good character, but a bag of strong character concepts doesn’t turn M. Mercer into R. R. Martin.

Publishing a system without that IP baggage was a good/necessary step, Daggerheart will flourish or flop on its own merits. Hopefully it at least breaks DnD dominance a little more and gives room for more independent publishers (can’t resist a bump for Quinns Quest here)

What am I, some kind of fae creature?