This drama is so stupid..

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]A game launched 10 days ago, made $14 million, then got hit with the nastiest controversies in recent gacha history.

[00:00:09]Streamers quit, voice actors quit, sponsors pulled out, and players kept playing. I want to talk about what that actually means because I don't think most people are asking the right question about this whole situation.

[00:00:24]So, for anyone who missed it, here's the short version. Indie launched on April 29th. Within days, players started finding what looked like AI generated assets inside the game. Billboards in the city, a short film playing on in-game screens, and one of the assets looked almost identical to a scene from Withering with You, a beloved.

[00:00:44]>> Oh, and by the way, like I've played this game a lot.

[00:00:48]Like, these are like the most inconsequential, meaningless elements of the game that literally nobody cares about. It's not like this was like core gameplay mechanics or a functionality.

[00:00:59]This was like just literal random [ __ ] film that is very popular and I personally like really similar. Side by side screenshots were everywhere. Then Iron Mouse, one of the biggest streamers on Twitch came out and said that Hot Studio had told her team directly, "No AI is in the game. None." And she found it midstream. So she uninstalled the game, called it the fastest uninstall of her life, cancelled the sponsorship.

[00:01:26]Other creators followed a voice actor in the game said she found out the project she worked on had been using AI and being dishonest about it. Shy Lily ended her stream early when she found out and then Hot Studio eventually responded and they confirmed AI assets tool were used on a small number of background and environmental assets. Not characters, not story, just some background. They said they're reworking the flagged assets. One of the devs said a week before launch a little bit of AI. So, it's kind of public from the start that they use some AI in the back.

[00:02:00]>> Here's a bit of advice. If a game's made in China, use AI.

[00:02:08]That's it.

[00:02:10]That's the advice.

[00:02:12]Here's even better advice. If a video game's made, it probably used AI.

[00:02:20]grounds. That's the drama. That's what happened.

[00:02:23]Yeah.

[00:02:24]>> But now here's what I actually want to talk about. Every video I've seen about this covers the same ground. Aramas was right to be upset. Hot should have been transparent. AI bad. Okay, we know. But here's the thing that I can't stop thinking about. The players didn't leave. Like, not only did they not leave, a huge chunk of the community actively defended the game. They said the backlash was performative. They said AI in background assets isn't the same as AI replacing artists. They said nobody cares about AI. Here's how you know nobody cares about AI. Scroll Instagram reels, scroll Tik Tok, scroll, you know, like Twitter or YouTube shorts. You're going to see dozens of videos that are super viral and they're totally AI generated. Nobody actually cares about this. It is just artists and other forms of creative people trying to manufacture a false consensus, trying to make people afraid to use AI because they don't want AI to cannibalize their job. That's what all of this is. That's the entire thing. It is a completely selfserving uh movement of people that are trying to make you pay more money, make products harder to make in order for them to keep their job. That's it.

[00:03:42]The game is genuinely good and a few billboard textures don't change that and the numbers back them up. And he is still pulling massive concurrent players. The Twitch viewership didn't collapse. The game didn't die. So, who actually won this drama? Now, I kind of won the moral argument. Clearly, she was lied to. She had every right to be angry. I'm not disputing any of that.

[00:04:06]But when I see that the devs actually said publicly that they used AI, I don't know where this statement of them saying that they didn't use AI came from. And despite >> I I don't know how she like I mean I think this is definitely an L on her agency because or or whoever's getting her deals because like they've openly stated in a public disclosure that they've used AI. So how did you need them to tell you that? Weren't you able to research that and find it out yourself?

[00:04:37]>> As winning the moral argument has won everything else.

[00:04:42]>> I think this controversy exposed something that's been true for a while, but nobody really talks about directly.

[00:04:49]Creators and players are responding to completely different things when they look at the game. When Armouse looks at NTE, she's thinking about her reputation, her audience, the artists she knows personally, the contract she signs. She lives in a world where AI is a direct threat to people she cares about and she was literally lied to as far as she says. But when a player looks at NTE, they're thinking about whether the game is fun, whether the city feels alive, whether pulling for a character feels rewarding, whether the story goes anywhere interesting. The billboard in the back pulling for a character in a gotacha game feels rewarding. Check yourself into a [ __ ] psychward.

[00:05:26]There's something wrong with you.

[00:05:27]background of a side quest. Most of them never until someone put it on Twitter.

[00:05:33]Neither of those reactions is wrong.

[00:05:35]They're just coming from completely different places. But what the drama >> I think that it is wrong. I think that whenever you're trying to manufacture outrage about something in order to protect your job, I think that that's a fundamentally bad thing and it's reductive for society and the progression of technology. I think that if you look at history, there's never been a single point in time where people who actively tried to obstruct the development of technology were viewed as the good guys or the good actors in any sort of a situation. It's regressive.

[00:06:08]It's entitled and it's like it's stupid.

[00:06:12]field is that when a controversy hits, the creator class and the player class don't necessarily move together. And that gap is bigger than most people realize because the assumption in gaming discourse is usually that if the creators are upset, the players will follow. And that's how it's supposed to work and it actually worked that way.

[00:06:33]The community has >> So, I've always told people this. I've always told people that creators do not shift opinions. creators channel opinions. So, for example, if a game is getting a lot of positive feedback, a creator can make the game get more positive feedback. If a game's getting a lot of negative feedback, a creator can make the game get more negative feedback, but a creator can't make a bad game good or a good game bad. Reaction, it creates pressure. The developer responds or the game suffers. But the majority of players weren't really upset. Actually, I'm curious where you stand on here. Drop a comment and tell me honestly, did the AR drama change how you feel about NTE? Did you quit? Did you stay? Or did you even know about it until right now? I genuinely want to know because I think the answer is more split than people are admitting.

[00:07:23]>> Uh-huh.

[00:07:24]>> And here's why I think this matters beyond just NTE specifically. We are living through a moment in gaming where AI is everywhere and nobody has figured out the rules yet. Every game studio is using it.

[00:07:35]>> I think they've figured out the rules. I think people don't want to acknowledge the rules.

[00:07:40]>> Somewhere some are being upfront about it. A lot are not. And I'm telling you, most of them are using AI. And the NT situation is probably not the last time this happens. It's not even close to the last time. Turns and desert went through almost the exact same thing. Arc Raiders got called out for AI voices. This is the new normal. And what the player >> They're all doing it. They're all doing it. And I hope that in 2 or 3 years, like every single one of these like virtue signals from now on, people need to go through every single game that they ever take a sponsorship for. And if they are being hypocritical, oh my god, I can't guarantee anybody else, but I can guarantee I'll probably make a video about it. I'mma farm the [ __ ] out of that. I hate it.

[00:08:31]tells us is that the audience's tolerance for this is higher than the creator community's tolerance. Not because players don't care about artists. I think most of them do, but because for a player, the game has to cross >> just cuz the artists don't care about the players. Like it it's it has to be a two-way street.

[00:08:48]>> Different threshold before they walk away. It has to affect what they actually experience, the story, the characters, the gameplay, the things they actually touch. background billboard textures. Come on, for most players, that's not it. But there is the question that keeps me up at night thinking about this. If players tolerance is this high, what stops studios from pushing further? If the community doesn't walk when it's background, will they walk when it's cutscenes? Will they walk?

[00:09:17]>> They will walk when it's bad.

[00:09:19]I don't understand why this is hard to for people to understand.

[00:09:24]The end goal of the product is to fulfill a need. If the product fulfills that need, then the product succeeded.

[00:09:31]If it didn't, then it failed. It's actually that simple.

[00:09:36]>> That's what I think.

[00:09:36]>> When it's character art, where is the actual line? Because if there is no line, then the creator community screaming into the void is the only thing creating any pressure at all. And the >> I mean, think about how many video games are not AI made, but nobody bought them.

[00:09:53]Nobody played them. Like I mean look at Concord. They didn't make Concord with AI. It was just garbage. I wish they did. It would have been better, right? I mean like you've got plenty of things like that. Like AI or not AI is not a marker of quality. Fundamentally quality exists outside of a spectrum of how it's made.

[00:10:10]>> Showed that even that pressure has limits.

[00:10:14]>> Okay, here's where I actually land on this. I made a video about NTE. I told the comeback story. Hot studio lost everything with tower fantasy. I came back better >> deserve because it sucked dick. It sucked big dicks.

[00:10:29]>> I believe that story and I still believe it. But I think hot made a mistake that goes beyond the AI itself. They got caught in a lie. Okay, assuming that this is real, that they told Iron Mouse that there was no AI. That's not a gray area. Okay, that's not we used it for atmosphere.

[00:10:49]That's a direct lie to security just like a cloud power of fantasy had no substance problem that doesn't go away just because the players kept playing.

[00:10:57]At the same time, I think some of the discourse around this went way too far.

[00:11:02]The game wasn't made with a chat JPT prompt. Hundreds of artists worked on it for years. The city of Heather, the characters, the story, it's real human work. Throwing all of that out because of background textures and side quests feels like it misses something important. The truth is somewhere in the middle and nobody wants to be in the middle right now because the middle isn't very loud. Hot Studio should have been honest from the start. Full stop.

[00:11:28]And the player community is allowed to decide the game is still worth their time or not. Also, full stop. Both these things are true. But I really think that the assets that already existent in the game that they already removed now weren't that much of a problem. It wasn't a big deal. It didn't really define the game. And I don't think you have been playing the game because of that or you have quit the game or didn't like the game because of that.

[00:11:53]>> People always try to come up with superficial reasons for why people should or shouldn't play a video game because those superficial reasons either agree or disagree with their worldview.

[00:12:05]But fundamentally, gamers will make a decision on whether a game is fun to play based off of its quality. It doesn't matter whether, for example, Anita Sarkeesian worked on Slave Aspire 2. If the game plays well, you're going to have a lot of people that will buy it. It doesn't matter if you know, like, let's say everybody in the world says that Blackm Wukong developer studio is sexist, people are going to buy the game because it plays well. It doesn't matter whether Ghost of Yoai was like a female protagonist and like the voice actress was a a [ __ ] People are still going to buy the game if it plays well. And then conversely, it doesn't matter how much negative criticism and sentiment you can put towards a game like Stellar Blade.

[00:12:45]fundamentally people are still going to buy it because it plays well. And so what you have is there is a total group of people that are trying to co-opt video games as a mode of pushing an ideology. Fundamentally the game has to be good or bad and that is what will determine its success. Everything else after that is noise. Now does that noise matter? It does matter and also sometimes those cultural influences do impact the game in negative ways like for example Dragon Age the Veil Guard.

[00:13:17]But fundamentally a good game will always succeed. That's what matters.

[00:13:23]>> When I say the players won, I mean they won this round. The game is still alive.

[00:13:27]The player count didn't collapse and is going to keep going or even get better.

[00:13:31]But I'm not sure that's a comfortable win because if the lesson studios take from this is we can use AI get caught issue a mild statement and survive then what actually changed. That's the question I keep coming back to. Not whether NTE is good, not whether Iron was right, not whether the players are naive like every single video we're seeing now, but what does this studio have to do before the player community actually walks away? Because I genuinely >> make a bad game. Simple. It's actually like this isn't like an amorphous like, "Oh, I wonder what's going to happen."

[00:14:04]If the game's bad, people are going to quit playing it. It's that simple. Duh.

[00:14:08]Of course, >> don't know the answer. And I think that answer matters a lot for where this whole industry goes next. AI is a big thing now. Tell me what you think in the comments. And if you stayed with N or quit, I really want to know why because this conversation is far from over. And for me, I'm sticking with NT. And I think AI is going to be used even more and is going to be more tolerated in the future. For some reason, I feel like this is going to be inevitable. Shout out to my supporters. If you want to be one of those people, you can become a channel. Clicking join under the video.

[00:14:39]Thank you so much, guys. See you next one. Bye-bye.

[00:14:41]>> The game isn't on Steam. No, it's not on Steam. So, they can farm out as many [ __ ] uh weebs pulling for the characters as they possibly can. Got a chainsaw man enjoyer, obviously. And uh we got a free tin pole. I I don't know.

[00:14:56]Like I I I could log in and show you guys the uh the how far I've gotten in the game. I I played it a lot, right?

[00:15:02]What happened to infield? I didn't think infield was that great. Uh that that was really about it. Like uh it's that simple. And uh yeah, where are you at? I I don't know. I could show you. What about the sponsor game you played a while ago? The prison one. That's the same game. It is. It's actually a video game now. Infield was boring. Not going to lie. It was like I beat the game. I just kind of was was bored, right? I just got bored of it. That was about it.

[00:15:28]So, uh yeah, Ent Combat's garbage. I think the combat's pretty good. I do.

[00:15:33]But either way, yeah. I mean, a like content creators thinking that they have the power to hurt a video game like this is crazy. Especially when and here's the issue is that Twitter is like one of the worst modes of figuring out like what player sentiment is. And the reason why is because you have a ton of people out there. Like it's full of a bunch of people that aren't even gamers. They don't even play video games. It's like the the 1348 game of like all these [ __ ] like Twitter retards talking about how they wishlisted it and then nobody bought or played the game. So the big issue I think what happens is that people get high off of the idea that oh well everybody's going to like this because you know they're getting positive like social media sentiment but Twitter is like the worst place to judge sentiment. If you really want to see what players think about something look on YouTube. Look on YouTube. Look at Steam reviews. Look at stuff like that.

[00:16:36]That's going to give you a real idea of what to expect. Because everything else besides that is [ __ ]