All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending August 23

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114

Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.

But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Separate comment because separate point:

    I find this mindless anti-AI hate ironic when there’s a big heading in the side panel here listing Approved Bots.

    First off, there’s a significant difference between anti-GenAI and anti-Bot. The term AI has been thoroughly diluted, to the point that we need to infer from context just which kind of AI is the subject. In this case, it’s GenAI, which isn’t the same as deterministic bot logic “AI”. As for the bots in question:

    1. L4s seems to have been used for filling the community with content until some two years ago and has been dormant since.
    2. autotldr used clearly documented algorithms to pick out likely key sentences from news and has also been out of service for two years.
    3. PipedLinkBot apparently doesn’t even exist any more. I vaguely recall it having some high-profile incident, then never saw it again.
    4. wikibot was a utility for quoting Wikipedia sections to save people a click… and also hasn’t posted in over two years.

    So I’m not sure what your point is. None of these are GenAI, and all of them have long stopped operation. Sentiment shifts over time, and I guess it shifted against them at some point. The section is thus clearly a legacy holdover from a time when the topic wasn’t as present in people’s mind.

    If you want to hold the fact that we used to think differently about one thing than we now think about another thing against us, that’s just a non-starter of an argument.

    Forums prior to Reddit didn’t allow bots. For a reason.

    Clutter, spam. If your threads are paginated and linear, bot spam makes it even harder to follow conversations, particularly if it’s spamming ads, which was rather unpopular at the time.

    In a tree-structured format where you can collapse comments and branches you don’t care for, novelty bots are less disruptive.

    Additionally, utility bots have been a thing on some forums too. It was never about “computer bad”. We just didn’t want to deal with bad computers. We also didn’t want bad humans.