Summary
- 68.6% of players are okay with or indifferent to games disclosing AI use.
- 31% view AI disclosures negatively; 8% say they’d refuse to buy.
- 89% check or glance at AI labels, and 56% think AI coding tools should be declared.
The acceptance of AI use in video games is a bit of a gray area. Some people are fine with it, some people loathe it, and some just don’t care. Then there are the gritty details: do you care if a game used generative AI to make images? What about using it for voice acting, NPC dialogue trees, or coding?
To help people make purchasing decisions, Valve has allowed developers to disclose if they used AI in their product. And as it turns out, around 68.6% of people quizzed in a survey said they’re either fine with buying a game with a disclosure or they just don’t care.
Only 31.4% of survey respondents see Steam AI disclosures as a negative sign
8.1% said it would ruin a sale
As spotted by GamesRadar, the survey was performed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. GameDiscoverCo focuses on researching what consumers do and don’t care about when discovering a new game, allowing indie devs to give themselves the best chance of getting into the spotlight.
Part of the research covered what Steam users thought when they saw the AI content disclaimer. After all, if the majority of people clicked away when they saw it, it would mean that indie devs would need to abandon using AI tools for fear of backlash. However, the survey told an interesting tale:
Firstly, what do the fans think of buying games that show any type of AI disclosure? (PSA: all Steam games have to disclose this when they submit.) Well, it’s quite a mixed bag even now, with ~43% of players having no big issues, 26% being neutral, and around 31% viewing it negatively. (With 8% of those saying they just won’t buy…)
From this data, GameDiscoverCo’s takeaway stated that 31.4% was a considerable chunk of players that indie devs can’t risk alienating. And while I do agree with that statement, I also feel that the percentage is a little low. Given how people can react very negatively to discoveries of generative AI asset use in games, hearing that 68.6% of gamers, at worst, don’t really care for the disclaimer is strange.
What’s even more interesting is that this isn’t a case of people ignoring the AI disclosures. A whopping 89.1% of respondents said they’d either deliberately check for or at least glance at an AI disclosure, and 55.7% of them believe that AI coding tools should be declared. It just seems that people don’t really worry about it as much as we may think.
