[STEAM] “A natural, ugh, why?” Palworld lead plants the flag on the right side of the AI discussion

[Steam 0]

Pocketpair, the studio behind Palworld, and one of the latest to hit it really big out of nowhere, has always been quite a peculiar phenomenon in and of itself. Still, communications head John Buckley just shed light on the company’s take on AI.

This year’s Summer Games Fest showcased a lot of cool stuff, but then disappointed many by revealing that games such as Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and the new Crazy Taxi are using genAI in their development, prompting journalists to ask many devs for their take.

When

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asked Buckley regarding player suspicions that Palworld had been using assets generated by AI, he quickly shut it down and put it as bluntly as possible. He said, “Gamers don’t want it,” he says, “and if the gamers don’t want it, I guess that’s it, right? Not much of a conversation to be had.” He concluded, “We have a lot of artists in-house. They like doing stuff themselves. There’s no reason to get rid of them for the sake of an AI doing it. Just seems pointless.”

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Image via Pocketpair Buckley also tried to figure out what’s in the head of someone who decides to go down that path, “Even I, who is in the industry, I just felt like a natural, ugh, why? The rest of your game looks fine. Did you need to…? I think that’s going to be the attitude for quite a while. I think people will look at it and say, did you need to do that? Couldn’t you just do it yourself?”

The industry’s coexistence with generative AI is a bafflingly unpredictable affair. One day, we see titans we’d expect to be vehemently against it embracing the tech—even if only to

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a few days later, like

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. Steam requires all games in the platform to disclose their usage of generative AI, while the Epic Games Store opposes the idea of such disclosures. So, it’s nice to have some nice surprises coming from the other side, this time from a studio that capitalized on a game that many would describe as Pokémon + (more?) cruelty, take a stand in the name of games, developers, consumers, and art itself.

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