There is a lot to be said about the process by which games get made and the tools that can be used to make doing so more productive and efficient, especially in triple-A studios where devs are forced to work grueling hours and meet impossible deadlines. Generative AI is increasingly being used as a tool for game developers, but is a slippery slope that is quickly filling gaming spaces with SEO-driven, low-effort shovelware that is making it harder for honest developers to enter the market, and is already causing frustration with consumers.
A pervasive example of games relying on generative AI to market themselves is within the PlayStation Store, specifically the “Games to Wishlist” section. A tone important to gen AI games is trying to recreate easily made, or viral, titles into seemingly professional-looking games that offer an upgrade or new experience. By looking at the pages of these games for even a few minutes will give obvious signs of low-effort modeling, simplified gameplay, and gen AI images meant to trick consumers into believing the game to be more polished than it is. Even the descriptions for these games are filled with typos, or awkwardly describe the game’s content that seems to be written by someone that has never played a game, let alone made one themselves.
Three examples in the PlayStation Store currently are “Barista Master: Cafe Empire”, “Kebab Chefs! Restaurant Tycoon”, and “Anime Life Sim”.
Each of these examples uses gen AI for their cover image, with obvious mistakes that give them away and take less than a second to notice. In the media images for Barista Master, we see multiple-gen AI images of 3D gameplay. Lush detail and atmospheric lighting filled with morphed coffee mugs and customers with six legs and no face. The last two images are of actual gameplay, showcasing simple UI and flat models found across almost all the newest “simulator” games.
Kebab Chefs! doesn’t even showcase real evidence of gameplay, just relying on overtly obvious gen AI. The game description uses the same language as any of the other gen AI games, overusing “tycoon” and “empire” while vaguely describing game mechanics that can belong to any simulator game.
FInally, “Anime Life Sim” is a direct and obvious ripoff of Animal Crossing, in a way that seems legally actionable. The media uses a mix of conflicting asset packs and gen AI versions of itself that reveal obvious deception and lack of real gameplay.
These titles are among hundreds just like it on the PlayStation Store. Some have no media images and only have gen AI covers and descriptions, while others are almost direct copies of each other, using identical fonts and SEO titles containing “hentai”, “simulator”, or generic military jargon that is meant to attract young and impressionable gamers who might not be able to spot these scams right away.
The question is why is this allowed in the store? At what point does Sony suffer the long-term implications of this business model, where gamers find it harder and harder to want to play new games, knowing they have to sift through pages of fake or low-effort titles looking to use gen AI for a bad-faith cash grab.
If this is allowed to continue it will only hurt consumers and indie developers, who won’t be able to reach each other due to aggressive advertising and muddied storefronts used by con artists pretending to be developers. These games are easy to spot now but not for gamers of all ages, and how easy will they be to spot five years from now? After gamers start to only rely on triple-A titles to satisfy their hobby, how long until those studios start saving profits by relying on gen AI to do the same thing? We have already seen this with major TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, using gen AI to make art in their official books. Coca-Cola and other billion-dollar brands use gen AI in commercials to sell their products and save money.
If generative AI is not restricted and monitored, indie devs and average consumers will begin to slowly suffocate until they are driven from their hobby, or forced to suffer low-effort media that only benefits the pockets of major studios and scammers. Or will it just cause vague, bad impressions in the minds of gamers who have no option but to accept that art is more valuable as a commodity than for what it can bring to their life.
Matthew has been a lifelong lover of video games since he could first hold a controller, and among his favorites are narrative-heavy, singleplayer games like; Divinity: Original Sin 2, Elden Ring, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Hollow Knight. Matthew also plays tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder and Call of Cthulu. He graduated from the University of North Texas with a bachelor’s in Sociology and minored in English.
