itch.io

I think that the stock assets are a separate issue. Like I’m not saying that just because a game was made by human, that makes it automatically good. It doesn’t. There are ways you can fail all on your own, and one of those is overuse of stock assets, basically just slapping together stuff from the Unity store, or anywhere. I’ve found plenty of games on here where I’m like, wow this is slop. It’s all about how you put it together, though! There’s nothing wrong with using other people’s assets, as a rule. I mean most people do, to some extent. An uninspired game is just that, uninspired.

I view games as works of art, especially in the small indie space like itch.io. So I just evaluate it on its own terms. And that’s where I think we differ is I do get entertainment even from objectively pretty bad games. AI is capable of making things that are technically more ‘good’, but I have no interest in them because the human element has been erased. Even if the game is quite bad, I like to think about the person behind it, and how it came to be that way.

I do think you might have a point that, theoretically, an indie game that was made with a lot of AI assets that someone tinkered with to be what they want, could be better than a straight asset flip that looks like nothing new. But I can’t really think of a game that heavily uses AI that was actually good or inspired, either. Like if you can point me to one that is fun, and also artistically better than an asset flip, i’d perhaps reconsider.