If someone has the vision and taste to create the next x, they likely have the appreciation of what decent music sounds like and the work that goes into that.
> The use-case, I think, is more along the lines of generating adequate background music for a my-first-self-published-videogame project with next to zero effort
n+1. #indiedev is full of extremely passionate people who want it exactly their way down to the pixel and every note of music. To write off the entire non-AAA space as only wanting to write shovelware even as a first game is laughable.
Having worked on a few games doing music, the devs were super passionate about a quality product, frequently over-engineering, and when then-available bog-standard audio middleware didn't do the procedural mixing we wanted, wrote a custom system just to get it spot-on.
I also know a few major AAA legends who went indie who won't publish shite.
Equally, if the original commenter is happy with x being good enough then that's valid. Maybe the game isn't for you?
Keep in mind my initial reply was directly replying to the "What happens if you've built the next hollow knight" in your post. The implication of my first reply is if you're at such a level you can do that, you very likely aren't going to settle for your music letting you down, which is arguably the other 50% of what a modern game is against the visuals. You're focusing on the commenter being satisfied by AI music. If the game is that good, you'll get a budget to have the music not suck, whether that's via XGP paying to finish the development, a revshare with a composer, a grant, or even a publisher.
The tl;dr is if buddy thinks his game is anything more than a learning exercise or something he simply enjoyed making and has potential to actually be a great piece of art or a decently selling product, he absolutely does not have to settle for mediocrity even without a budget.
>To write off the entire non-AAA space as only wanting to write shovelware even as a first game is laughable.
Clearly I'm not - as I mention hollow knight.
>Equally, if the original commenter is happy with x being good enough then that's valid. Maybe the game isn't for you?
Clearly it isn't for me, as I'd have to listen to the above sort of garbage music and would hate the time spent, regardless of the game itself.
> The implication of my first reply is if you're at such a level you can do that
There are lots of people who have great ideas and even iterations on a game that isn't there yet, but who fail in graphics, audio, and overall design because they underestimate how important those are to user experience.
I would never say "I'm so glad I have access to copilot, now I can make a game with next to zero effort" but the guy I replied to thinks he can get a score worthy of being in a game from a machine learning model.
The easy part overrides everything and we get (or are going to get) huge collections of shovelware from people who see how easy it is to produce.
