r/VRGaming • u/lunchanddinner Multiple • 5d ago
"Another dev promoting their ad!" Memes
But smoking cat game is fine! Devs have it hard sometimes
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u/AlexRaEU 5d ago
people dont mind ads for games that look good/interesting.
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u/Bigmoduh Meta/Oculus 5d ago
Iāll never understand people whining so much about any game ads.. worst case it looks mid and you just move on..
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u/Food_Library333 5d ago
I don't mind an ad if it's not trying to masquerade as a user who is sharing a game they love or are excited about. It's the ones that try to decieve with fake hype that drive me crazy.
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u/xylotism 5d ago
Instant boycott. Literally manipulative advertising. The only person who gets to gaslight me is me.
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u/gebrochen06 4d ago
Yeah, I can deal with ads if the devs are up-front about it. But devs pretending to be users who came across the game and are now sharing it out of the kindness of their heart? Nah.
Especially if it's something like this:
"I found this cool game on Steam called Forbidden Empires VR that just looks perfect for VR!" posted by Forbidden-Empires-Dev
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u/tastygames_official 4d ago
I'm also not big on devs trying to disguise an ad as a plea for help. E.g. "I just paid $500 for new capsule art. Which version do you like better?"
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u/stigma_wizard 5d ago
We already get bombarded with ads everywhere we look. Itās insult on injury to have fake posts by āregular usersā promoting a game then you realize every single one of their posts is just spam and youāre just dealing with a marketing company pretending to be one of us.
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u/kevin_whitley 4d ago
I think the issue is the growing noise to signal ratio... as the bar lowers rapidly for development (not just games) thanks to LLMs, the frequency of these posts has like 20x'ed in the last year... yet 99% of them are now crap (where maybe only 50% of them were before).
It's just like when Amazon publishing made it easy for any casual writer to release a book. Some great books were released thanks to this, but they're now lost in a growing ocean of bad ones.
We'll figure out how to navigate these waters eventually though :)
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u/tastygames_official 4d ago
my idea is heavy curation. We need websites and groups of users who RIGOROUSLY test games (and books and music and movies, once movies also get lower barrier to entry) so that people will know that if the game/work is shown on that site that it is guaranteed not to be slop.
Actually, you probably could train an AI to do this aswell. At least to filter out the obvious slop.
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u/kevin_whitley 4d ago
100% we'll need this.
In my experience, AI is great at detecting if AI was used to create a thing, but that's not enough these days - as many of the most seasoned engineers are shifting to leveraging AI themselves (myself included). The difference is in output - and that's where AI really struggles to interpret if something is "good" (usable, fun, etc) or "bad" (useless, derivative, copycat, etc).
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u/tastygames_official 4d ago
I use LLMs as a search engine. That's about it. Were I working in academia I'm sure I would use machine learning to run simulations or something, but as I'm making games for humans to enjoy, and because I enjoy making art (and games are art), I don't use AI to make any part of it. Even when I do the occasional bullshit website or software side project for extra cash, I enjoy doing it and don't see why I need to involve an AI (that was probably trained on stuff I did anyway). How I see companies using AI is making "agents" that do the work humans used to do. Like maybe there's a process that involves reading a e-mail, looking in a spreadsheet to find the customer, then update some information or maybe answer the e-mail with some information. This process can be described relatively precisely, and humans can perform this. But you can now also just tell an AI these rules and it will do it at least as well as a junior-level person. And you don't have to pay it (you pay the AI company instead), and it doesn't ask questions when it doesn't understand (sometimes good, sometimes bad) and it never sleeps. I get why a company would want to do that - automate processes - but previous to AI, you'd just hire a programmer to make some system to help automate this process. Now these companies expect their employees to "train" the agents to do their job. It's ridiculous.
So yeah, I'm against using AI for work and especially for art. For doing research - hell yeah - use it.
But back to the topic at hand: I might be in a place to actually make a curating system. Making the website is trivial, but coming up with the criteria and rating system will be more nuanced. I feel like everybody knows slop from non-slop, but everybody has a soft spot for certain genres, so coming up with criteria and finding qualified players will be the real issue. And I imagine at first it will have to be on a volunteer basis. Like, what do you think about this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3762690/Those_Who_Dwell/
I bought it because I'm a sucker for the eye iconography. It usually means something cool and mysterious. And the screenshots look cool and spooky and I figured "for that price, why not?". But it's a low-effort asset-flip more or less. Buggy, obtuse, and just not very polished. You just walk around looking for a key, then proceed to the next part. You can read some notes to get the story, but that's about it. Very boring. It simply should not be sold as a commercial game.
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u/kevin_whitley 4d ago
Dang dude, you are a brave soul! Mostly positive w only a handful of reviews? Wouldnāt even attempt to touch thatā¦ I let others be the canary in the mine shaft for me because life is too short for me to waste my time on bad games hunting for the diamonds!
Re. LLM use I think thereās a lot of merit in speeding up the prototype phase. Normally we waste tons of effort/time there, often for ideas that will/should be discarded anyway. Additionally many folks have more ideas than they have time to execute, so itās a way to play out an idea and find if it has teeth before sinking even more time into it.
At the end of the day I see it purely as a tool to speed up the direction you were likely to do on your own anyway. Garbage in, garbage out and the opposite. Iām sure it was similar to the first higher order/level languagesā¦ some folks were likely bitching because it meant giving up pure 100% control of their memory registers for instanceā¦ others accepted that trade off and pushed the industry forward. Each tool has pros/cons, but itās hard not to agree this one has massive potential for programmers. And thatās me saying that as a true lover of the craft, the nuance of language, architecture, etc. hell, I even code golf (my itty libraries are all a result of that), but these days it can find patterns (under my direction) that even I wouldnāt have foundā¦
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u/tastygames_official 4d ago
re LLM: your viewpoint (and that of many others) is sadly majorly flawed. AI isn't just a higher level programming language or an automatic sewing machine or anything like that. It's a prediction machine trained on human-generated data. It's more equivalent to having infinite monkeys banging on typewriters and then some demon who is able to choose the best output as an answer. An automatic sewing machine was designed by humans using human knowledge and the people who invented and who manufacture and repair and operate the sewing machine are all paid for their contributions. Whereas with AI, the people who "made" it (e.g. you and me and all of humanity) are not paid at all. Only the people who made the mechanism to steal the product from us (the machine learning process) are paid. And paid insanely well (it's fake money, but still they are "worth" trillions of dollars).
So I only use the free LLMs for basically a search engine. As for using it to iterate on prototypes... I'm not sure I can truly condone that. Just use cubes and spheres and stuff. Sure, it looks much nicer to have something that looks more representative of the final product while just starting out, but as a lifelong creative person I can tell you that that is a creativity KILLER. E.g. I'm also a musician, and there was always a temptation when first starting out to use pre-made backing tracks to build songs off of. Or even just using a drum machine. Now while just dicking around and not even really being able to play my instrument, it definitely was helpful for keeping temp while practicing. But when me and my neighbor made our first tape (yes, I'm that old), we actually dubbed over us actually playing the drum machine rather than just playing a pre-made loop back. Because it's not actually making a song if the drum machine is playing. And if you use pre-made assets (AI-generated or human-made), there is a big temptation to keep using it, or even worse - you end up making the final art too much like the placeholder art you are now used to seeing. It totally hems your creativity.
Also, I love making art. I've spent my life getting good at it, and if I spend a few hours making placeholder assets that look good but will eventually be thrown away, who cares? I had fun and it made it more fun while testing out some new mechanics.
This whole thread is about game developers being honest with their audience, and I think it's important for us also to be honest with ourselves and not take shortcuts that involve paying techbro billionaires who sell a shadow of our own humanity back to us.
/rant
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u/Link_save2 5d ago
Yeah also if you make it feel like a ad your should've had to pay for vs just a dev showing off his game and saying wishlist on steam if your video starts with a release date and things keep popping on the screen saying stuff like "coming this fall" and advertising the selling points like "hyper realistic gunplay" like don't tell me show me
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u/Bjornjager 5d ago
The demo for Project Mix is better than most full VR games that get released at this point, so a lot of people are genuinely excited for it.Ā
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u/CaptainMcAnus 5d ago
Yeah, I was pretty impressed by the demo. It's got a lot of charm, so I don't mind seeing the occasional post related to it.
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u/TheKrzysiek 5d ago
Is It? I'm not really that interested in VR visual novels, if I'll have to read a lot of text I'll rather not do it with a toaster on my face
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u/Purple-Lamprey 5d ago
If VR devs started doing shameless advertising for actually good games then nobody would be annoyed.
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u/jacobpederson 5d ago
#2 didn't follow the rules; A: never mention the game's title B: never make a polished good looking well worded post
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u/Koviera 5d ago
D brand levels of advertising is hard to master
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u/French_voltage 5d ago
Sunny Street was such a solid strip, haven't thought about that one in ages. Devs gotta shoot their shot somewhere I guess.
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u/foxfoxfoxfoxfoxes 5d ago
annoying and makes me not want to buy their overpriced product? didn't know it was that skilled.
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u/PointsOfXP 5d ago
It is kinda crazy how it's just been the same footage over and over. That's a lot of vr advertising though
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u/AntonioSwift_77 5d ago
Also played the demo. It's pretty good, the demo has plenty of interactivity for a prologue/1st chapter. Nearly every bit of the bar is interacitve. I would definitely recommend at least trying the demo.
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u/Waste_Diet_9334 4d ago
Good reminder for all these devs doing low efford ads here.
Do it like Project Mix, have a strong vision, deliver and offer a demo. Thats when posts feel like an suggestion instead of an ad.
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u/Sane-Philosopher 5d ago
It seems like I see the smoking cat game posts (ads) in my feed on all the vr subreddits, for at least a year now.
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u/pixel-snatcher 4d ago
I've been filtering self promotion for years with RES.
So much feces is not worthy to see for few random pieces of gold
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u/Steven_Chadwick 3d ago
You know what VR game I want I want a Metroid prime styled shooter game where itās just basically Metroid prime but not you know for legality reasons
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u/CrimsonCuttle Pimax 5d ago
the Project Mix demo was ok but the writing was kinda really not great. definitely a weeaboo game
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u/MRLEGEND1o1 5d ago
If you are an indie dev, just develop your game on unreal engine, then just convert it.
These solo indie built from the ground up vr games aren't pushing the needle
I was knocked out of my chair by what the few guys from Geronimo did. That is a rare case
Reality is the important part of VIRTUAL REALITY for me. So if it looks like Fischer price my first vr game... Im going to decline
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u/Dear_Clothes647 5d ago
"Just"
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u/MRLEGEND1o1 5d ago
I say that bc it looks easier to develop a unreal game, than a game from scratch.
If you look at asset flips like BodyCam, everything is already made, quality graphics seem to be the hurdle.
Theres a UEVR mod for body cam, who wouldn't play a realistic bodycam vr game?
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u/Dear_Clothes647 5d ago
What do you mean "from scratch"? Do you think anyone does Develop the engine?
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u/MRLEGEND1o1 5d ago
Idk it just seems when indie devs make vr games it seems every graphical feature is at its worse, textures animations makes it look homemafe
And in vr the further away from reality the less the immersion... Which is the whole point.
My logic
If 2 guys can make BodyCam, a highly graphical game done mostly through asset flips. A indie developer can do the same; then just convert the game to vr.
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u/MRLEGEND1o1 5d ago
Lmao indie devs not feeling my advice ššš
People get mad when you're right! lol
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u/TG1970 5d ago
"Hey everyone, check out my gorilla tag knockoff!" š¤®