cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6960437
The Postal series is essentially the videogame equivalent of Uwe Boll’s filmography*. They’re notoriously awful—the last one we reviewed was Postal 3 in 2012, which earned a dismal 21%—and they keep happening for some reason. A new addition to the lineup was announced on December 3, in fact, called Postal: Bullet Heaven. And then approximately 24 hours later, everything went very sideways.
“After revealing Postal: Bullet Paradise, a title Running With Scissors was planning on publishing but not developing, we’ve been overwhelmed with negative responses from our concerned Postal community,” RWS wrote on X, the day after Bullet Paradise was revealed. "The strong feedback from them is that elements of the game are very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.
“We’ve always been, and will always be, transparent with our community. Our trust in the development team is broken, therefore we’ve killed the project. We have a lot of good things coming (some you know and some you don’t).”
It’s very funny to think about a videogame that’s so odiously bad it doesn’t even meet the standards of the guys responsible for Postal, but this is where we find ourselves. “The concerned Postal community” also comes off as a knee-slapper, although that may be unfair: Postal 4: No Regerts, released in 2022, has more than 10,000 user reviews on Steam, and a Kickstarter for Postal 2 Redux more than doubled its $250,000 goal earlier this year.
Can I explain it? Absolutely not. But there is clearly a community of some sort here, they like what they like, and they do not like generative AI: Complaints about it are plentiful on the Postal subreddit and Steam.
The issue is moreso that it’s “he said, she said” bullshit currently.
The devs said they didn’t use AI for anything. RWS has supplied no proof that the devs were. They just cut ties as soon as the backlash reached them, and the studio pretty immediately closed their doors.
There’s a lot of speculation currently, but no outright proof. Hell, as far as I’ve seen, RWS haven’t responded to anyone asking for more information on this.
It’s coming off like a snap decision based on community reaction instead of taking any steps to verify, and the lack of direct response isn’t helping.
I’m far from pro-AI, but this is not a good look for RWS as a publisher. This should be taken into account by any other company looking to work under them, just in case, because right now it looks more like “Well, they said, so we did, and you could be next if they say again”.
The studio themselves admitted to it about a day ago.
I’m not disagreeing with you, the publisher didn’t have this info yet when they made their decision after all. I just wanted to note they definitely did use AI. And looking at their other games, the usage of AI is very obvious. Which makes me wonder if the publisher is just being insincere about actually caring about AI being used.
I mean, look at this shit… https://store.steampowered.com/app/3642560/SCP_Control_Error/
Huh, well then. Wish this had been in the articles I had seen! Thanks for the confirmation! I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt since AI is such an extreme topic to try to discuss at this point with people jumping to “everything is AI” rather quickly.