Stellar Blade: Blood Rain labeled as "AI slop" and sales in China at risk - some players noticed traces of AI work

News 5
07 Jun 06:53

Recently, Shift Up studio presented a trailer for the new game Stellar Blade: Blood Rain. Users are studying the trailer, and some have questions.

For example, Chinese people noticed that the "Chinese text" in the trailer was generated by artificial intelligence – "many characters do not exist in the Chinese language."

Gaming consultant Daniel Camilo, residing in China, commented on this finding and explained why this is a very big problem for developers.

Shift Up is a South Korean studio. The two countries have a complex history, but China is a large and very important market. At the same time, the developers of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain made such a gross mistake in their promotion:

Many don't seem to understand what the real problem is here. It's not about the fact of using generative AI itself, but about how exactly it was applied. Firstly, the game's art direction, environment, and setting are largely inspired by Chinese aesthetics. Secondly, China is the largest market in the world for the PC version of Stellar Blade. Thirdly, historically, China and South Korea don't get along very well (you can read about it yourself if you're interested). And yet, knowing all this, Shift Up decided to present the sequel to Stellar Blade with a trailer that uses AI-generated "pseudo-Chinese" text everywhere.

Daniel explained how Chinese gamers might perceive such inscriptions in the trailer:

If you still don't understand what happened, imagine a French studio making a game inspired by Italy, and then filling it with text like "Pasta pasta" everywhere, and even writing it with distorted symbols that aren't even real letters. And even that wouldn't be as careless and bad as what they did in Stellar Blade: Blood Rain! This demonstrates a huge lack of attention, taste, professionalism, control, and sensitivity – both from an artistic and commercial point of view.

Some users hope that these were AI placeholders and such elements will be removed from Stellar Blade: Blood Rain by release.

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