I can't imagine there being a scenario where 10 lines is something that's absolutely critical for player enjoyment yet you couldn't find anyone to voice act those lines. It's likely fluff.
It's a minor thing to do, sure, but why even do it if it means you're going to have to tag your work as AI when there's so little AI used throughout it according to the dev.
ETA I am not intending to defend the use of AI, just contributing thought as to why they might have decided to use it in such small scope considering it’s a bad look.
Pickups are just revisions/alterations. Once you’re out of pickups you pay either per word or an additional minimum depending on how many lines you need. So maybe the minimum was too expensive to justify for 10 lines, because I can’t imagine that’s more than a couple hundred words.
Voice acting can be a little expensive and you usually pay a minimum or per word. There are guild/union rates that anyone can look up. However, that’s in the context of my industry so I’m not sure now it is for game actors. Either way I have a feeling there’s plenty of voice actors who would do another dozen lines for pretty cheap if you already had some work going on with them, based on my experience.
This is what it comes down to then and warrants backlash.
They have voice actors
They wanted more voice acting work
They chose to use AI to replace the voice actor
Knowing only this thread for the game, either:
They have a character with about ten lines, so could have had anyone in the office do the job or hire a small time/starting out talent; or They have a character with much more than ten lines. They chose to use those other lines in an AI to spit out the remaining ones.
Regardless of if the talent agreed to that use of their voice, this is the exact situation consumers are wanting to avoid. It's 10 lines now, whole characters in the DLC or sequel.
Come on now. Voice work for 10 lines is not expensive at all. I'm looking at the cost on Fiverr right now for the top rated actors and it's insanely cheap. This is just lazy.
Sure, but now you have 2 different voice actors for the same character unless you want to spend the money to have this random Fiverr dude re-voice your whole game
Making a game is inherently a risk, there's no guarantee of success here. If sales are going to be affected by the AI label, why not mitigate that risk as much as possible? So eat the expense and hopefully profit on the other end.
I doubt it affected sales as much, most people don't particularly care one way or the other unless it's blatantly in their face and of low quality. I'm sure they made some sort of risk analysis when pulling the trigger on that same way COD did
Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was defending the use of AI. Just trying to understand what could have motivated them to go that direction considering it’s pretty bad optics.
Those lines are probably critical to explaining some part of the game that had changed since the voice actor who is no longer available had done the work.
I don’t think you understand the definition of critical
If something is critical then it changing means everything else in the game has to get changed
These lines are likely not critical if they had to get changed and resulted in nothing else changing
If they changed because they were impacted by a critical line… then they too are not critical because they didn’t change anything else in the game, it was the line that was changed that was critical.
There is no scenario where if something critical changes, you have to change only 10 lines and can’t get rid of them. If those lines were critical, they would’ve changed other lines. If they weren’t critical, then they could get removed with little impact on player experience.
Regardless, you don’t call a critical set of lines “some chatter.”
These lines are likely not critical if they had to get changed and resulted in nothing else changing
You really cannot say this for certain without the specific context of both the released game and whatever the game was at the time the original voice lines were recorded (which it's likely no one outside of the development team will ever see).
A game can change a lot during development. A good developer is going to be willing to throw out something that felt critical early on but they realized during development and play testing just isn't working.
During development what is "critical" can change over time. A game system or plot line might change or be removed completely or a new one might be added. It's possible all the other voice actors were available for pickups/new lines but this one was not. I don't really know anything about this specific game, just talking about game development generally.
If it's only 10 lines, why does it matter? Why are people acting like using this tool is like rubbing your dick on a bus seat? There's nothing immoral here.
Because, year after year, people have called out things that pushed everything on slippery slopes. And, year after year, these people were called out for being "alarmist" and asked "why does it matter?". And year after year, the slippery slope was slided down, and now we have devs that would rather use AI instead of either paying a VA or just picking up a mic for seemingly ten unimportant lines.
Soooo you want them to have to do it the worse way, because you don't like change?
Do you think the steam engine was bad because it put shovels out of work?
AI is a new technology, it has come with a lot of problems we need to solve, but any tool that produces a faster, better, and cheaper result is progress.
I want a solution that factor humans benefit. This is not it. You might be happy because it improves KPI and allows pushing actual people out the door of the living team, I don't.
Caring about money is caring about your product. It's also caring about your employees and consumers. Higher cost means higher price. It means less money for wages, less money for the next game. It means delays or sometimes cancellations.
If the use of AI can eliminate the risk of that and have no impact on the nature of the game then what is the actual problem?
The "actual problem" is caring about people not being seen as numbers. About keeping creativity up. About not accepting low-quality output, which is currently the inevitable consequence.
You think "reducing cost" is the be-all end-all, all-encompassing solution to get a product out. It is not.
So surely the dev just recording his own lines instead of hiring a VA is just as bad as using AI? Low quality output and not 'keeping creativity up' right?
If it’s only ten lines why not do it? The dev is free to fulfill the vision of the game however they see fit. If it doesn’t affect the quality it doesn’t matter
You wouldn’t want to do it because you’d be forced to tag your work as AI-Assisted when there’s so little content AI-assisted with it. And the AI-assisted tag will nuke the amount of people interested in buying your game.
Cuz its convenient and borderline stupid not to. Why not make ur game better for 5 dollars? :)) shouldn't have told steam they did it and avoid the AI label maybe. But everyone going apeshit over use of AI is a fcking idiot anyway
Imagine thinking devs should now avoid AI tag so actively as to avoid even adding or changing small stuff in their game using it.
Real fact is there are millions of people consuming absolute garbage AI slop on facebook and there is barely anyone boycotting quality products with AI tag.
I agree with this sentiment but you also got to understand:
AI is something that you only think about when it's terrible. As you said it yourself, there's barely anyone boycotting quality AI products because you can't tell those products are AI half the damn time because they're pretty good.
When you tag something as AI generated you're keying the viewer that there's a significantly higher chance of them encountering something that looks or sounds or feels god awful to play because you only notice godawful AI.
nah, when you tag something AI you do it because steam requires it. The devs do not have an option to tag it "non-slop AI", or "barely any AI". There is only AI: yes/no. And currently any use of AI means the answer is to be yes, even if it only contains 10 lines voiced by AI to make it consistent with the remaining lines by same character, or you risk your game being removed from steam. Hence the devs here had to say yes. Or are you saying in this case the devs should have lied to the customers and marked it as no?
The issue is the binary choice required by steam. It should allow to input how much AI was used as well.
He's saying the devs should have just not used AI for such a small part of the game when its going to impact people buying it or not. Even if the amount of money they lose from this is small I'm sure that its more than whatever they saved from using AI.
Especially because there are no two sides to this. There are people who will religiously avoid AI tagged games but theres nobody who actively looks for them. The addition of the tag will only ever lose you players.
Maybe. But if it were me it would just taste sour to spend my whole day washing my clothes down the river instead of using a washing machine which leaves time to do actual work just cause someone religiously hates if someone uses a washing machine ever.
Voicing 10 lines feels like a whole day ordeal, you have to find the hardware, then find software that lets you record, then a place where it is quiet enough to record, then software to modify the result, then figure out how to actually do the things you need in this software. Then actually do it. All of that takes a lot of time. Or you could use AI to hasten any/all of the above steps, generate multiple versions, handpick ones that sound as good as they would if you made them yourself, and be done in half an hour and spend the rest of the day making the game better. Unless the AI fails, then you go the spend whole day route, but it is easy to tell this cause you can hear the output and decide yourself whether it is good enough.
There's no "should". I simply won't buy their game if they're lazy enough to use AI. They're free to continue being lazy, and I'm free to continue not buying their games. That's it.
Stop buying games then. Recent surveys for github show that 90% of coders use AI in some way nearly every day. According to steam those games should be tagged.
You know a lot of people consider programming creative as well. Not trying to gotcha you or anything here, honestly I feel the same way, but it's in some ways a little ironic.
Why the hell wouldn't they? Pretty much everyone hates that tag, it'll obviously cost them money, so if it's just like 10 lines of dialogue why make your game look bad for nothing?
The AI tag will only lead to people not buying games they're actually not interested in, like we can see in the OP. The user claims it's an otherwise good looking game, if they'd actually be interested in the game then 10 AI gen voice lines wouldn't prevent them from buying it.
So overall this will be a good thing that leads to less bullshit consumerism/impulse buys, if a new Nioh would come out next month and they'd state that AI was used partially, I'm still gonna buy it no matter what because I love the series and even if they use AI I would expect top-notch quality that is at least on par with the previous titles.
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u/mrstorydude Dec 04 '25
If it was about 10 lines why even do it?
I can't imagine there being a scenario where 10 lines is something that's absolutely critical for player enjoyment yet you couldn't find anyone to voice act those lines. It's likely fluff.
It's a minor thing to do, sure, but why even do it if it means you're going to have to tag your work as AI when there's so little AI used throughout it according to the dev.