Latest news with #NickKamen
WIRED
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- WIRED
AI Slop Is Ripping Off One of Summer's Best Games. Copycats Are Proving Hard to Kill
Aug 14, 2025 5:23 PM Peak has sold millions of copies and is Aggro Crab's biggest hit to date. That makes it a prime target for cloning. Still from Peak . Courtesy of Landfall Games Peak is this summer's finest co-op game. Ostensibly a game about climbing a mountain, the slapstick comedy of its bobblehead characters falling down cliffs, easy-to-learn gameplay, and a little bit of cannibalism make it perfect fodder for Twitch streams. The game, created in partnership with developers Aggro Crab and Landfall as part of a game jam, is currently in Steam's top five bestsellers. It sold over a million copies in its first week, and has now surpassed 8 million, according to Aggro Crab cofounder Nick Kamen. Now, as a result of its success, says Kamen, scammers are selling cheap, AI-made versions of it wherever they can. 'We hate to see it,' says Kamen. Clones, games that share deep similarities in visuals or mechanics to popular games after they launch, have been a thorn in the industry's side for decades. Creators of Indie darlings like Super Hexagon , Ridiculous Fishing , Threes , Unpacking , and Wordle , which was eventually acquired by the New York Times, have all faced down copycats; some have used copyright claims to fight fakes. Not even big devs are immune; Sony Interactive Entertainment recently filed a lawsuit against Tencent over what it claims is a clone of developers' Horizon series. Nintendo is suing Palworld creator Pocketpair over its similarities to the Pokémon series. These cheap imitations appear across many different platforms, whether it's on console or PC, regardless of how big the distributor is. In December 2024, Kotaku published a report on clones and AI-generated games clogging up digital storefronts like Nintendo's eShop. Peak is especially vulnerable to copies on consoles because players can't get it anywhere besides PC. The two games recently called out by the company had homes on the PlayStation store and Roblox. On YouTube, CGD Games released a video playing 'Peaked Climbing,' from the PlayStation store. It features cute, big-headed creatures (poorly) climbing a mountain; the game apes Peak 's premise and even the first-person view players have of their climber's disembodied limbs. While it's one thing to handmake a copycat game, Kamen tells WIRED, 'it's another thing to just use AI to get it out as fast as possible and as lazy as possible.' Aggro Crab made the majority of the game with Landfall, who created last year's viral sensation Content Warning , during a game jam—a development sprint where creators spend their waking hours only working on a game. 'We're proud of our game,' he says. 'We don't like seeing it get ripped off this way.' As AI becomes more common in video game creation, however, developers now have another thing to worry about, besides their jobs: AI-made clones, which require no coding experience or coding knowledge to create. Sites like Rosebud AI, Ludo AI, Seele AI, and more spit out quickly made, cheap games players create by feeding it text prompts or photos. YouTubers share tutorial videos on how to create games, or even rip off others. Getting clones taken down can be an exhausting process for developers. Small studios have less time, energy and resources to dedicate to this process, and they're at the whims of the digital distribution platforms these games exist on. Wren Brier, Unpacking 's creative director, says that since the game's release in 2021, developer Witch Beam has reported over 80 clones. 'It feels like whack-a-mole sometimes,' Brier says. These are games that are not just similar in nature, but 'blatant copyright infringements' that lift the game's assets, or even its name. 'The majority have been extremely low-effort scams using Unpacking's name or imagery to trick players into downloading something that isn't even a game, just a series of ads,' she says. When it comes to many AI-made clones, Brier says there's a misconception about what that means. 'They're not AI-made games, they're AI-generated marketing images attached to a completely unrelated hastily-slapped together barebones skeleton of a game,' she says. 'They are literally a scam: They are trying to trick players into buying a crappy product by using misleading imagery, and by pretending to be a real game that the player might have heard of.' Clones don't always threaten a developer's profits—Aggro Crab is confident about its bank account, thanks to Peak 's massive success—but the damage can be widespread in other ways. Brier says that AI-clones hurt developers the same way AI books hurt authors: 'Flooding a storefront with garbage that no one wants to play makes it impossible for players to organically discover indie games.' Game certification, the process of getting onto a platform, used to be stricter. 'It's not a problem just for the games that get cloned, it's a problem for all of us,' Brier says. For developers, there aren't many options to fight clones, regardless of how they're made. Intellectual property attorney Kirk Sigmon says clones are already difficult to tackle legally; copyright protection doesn't extend to a genre, aesthetic, or even gameplay mechanics. '[AI] definitely makes slop generation faster, but the issue has been around for well over two decades,' he says. 'All that's really happened is that the bar has moved ever so slightly lower for new entrants because you can make an AI model pump out stuff for you faster.' The easiest case for copyright infringement typically happens when a cloner lifts work from the game directly—as happened with Unpacking . 'It's not uncommon for knockoff games to accidentally (or intentionally) copy assets from the game they are knocking off,' he says. In fact, Sigmon says, AI-generated games might actually be better protected from copyright infringement lawsuits. 'After all, if knockoff developers are savvy, they'll use AI models to develop unique assets/code, rather than steal it from another game or just download it from some random Internet source,' he says. 'That'll make it much harder to go after them in court, for better or worse.' Platforms ultimately hold the power when it comes to ridding a storefront of clones, though smaller developers bear the brunt of the work in filing a report and sorting out who to talk to. Sometimes that process is quick and wraps in a few days; sometimes it can take weeks. Social pressure may be the best defense a developer has. Sigmon says that complaining to storefronts or enlisting fans are workable solutions. 'I don't know many gamers who are a fan of half-hearted slop games,' he says. Aggro Crab and Landfall are taking this route. 'We're not really the type to be litigious,' Kamen says. Instead, they're being outspoken in their distaste. In early August, the company posted on X that it would rather users 'pirate our game than play this microtransaction-riddled [Roblox] slop ripoff,' in reference to one copycat. Landfall tweeted that the company has 'been reporting a bunch of these AI slop things' in response to a screenshot of another game called 'Peaked Climbing.' It was available on the PlayStation Store before being removed; Peak has only released on PC. WIRED has reached out to PlayStation, Roblox, and Steam and will update accordingly. 'I consume media because it's made by humans,' Kamen says. 'I want to experience a piece of art, whatever it may be, another human has made and get their perspective and their outlook on the world. If AI is used to make the game, then you're removing that from the equation. There's no value in it.'
Spectator
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Sydney Sweeney has saved advertising
I'm only surprised it's taken so long. And that anyone could possibly be surprised by it. 'Beautiful girl appears in ad campaign for fashion brand' is hardly a revolutionary concept and yet, since Sydney Sweeney appeared in a new campaign for American Eagle and lit up the internet, there's been quite a lot of confected surprise, shock and outrage. How could a brand use a beautiful woman to sell jeans in 2025? The question they should be asking is how could this not happen? The reason the American Eagle ad is unusual is that in recent years the advertising industry, once famed for its glamour and beauty, has been colonised by pompous, po-faced pearl-clutchers. Now a new generation of advertisers is finally rebelling against the stifling sanctimony of their elders. They've grown tired of brands pretending to be holier than thou, more socially aware than thou in their disingenuous attempts to be more profitable than thou. Let's face it, customers were never looking for the Co-op to solve climate change or for Maltesers to tackle the issue of post-natal depression. A return to common sense and clarity of purpose was long overdue. So Sydney Sweeney selling jeans in such a simple, clear and stylish way may well appal the pompous, joyless old guard of advertising but it's cheered and delighted the rest of us. This is how advertising always used to work: it used truth, beauty, humour and intelligence to sell things. The Levi's ads of the 1980s were a perfect example. This forgotten and deeply unfashionable brand were practically dead and buried until BBH enlisted Nick Kamen and the then-unknown Brad Pitt to put them on (and take them off) during the ad breaks. Ditto Diet Coke. It was seen as weak and unappealing before a hench looking hunk removed his shirt to enjoy a can, ogled by a gaggle of office workers. And yet for years, we've been told that people would rather see themselves reflected on screen, no matter how out of shape and let's just say, 'plain' they are. This is not true and never has been. I can think of few things worse than seeing someone who looks like me on screen because – especially when I was younger – it would have denied me that feeling of aspiration so vital to the success of a fashion brand. I was never mistaken in the street for Nick Kamen or Brad Pitt and yet I remember that great feeling of glamour-by-proxy that came with my first pair of 501s. This is how advertising works. And for American Eagle, it's working brilliantly. Sydney Sweeney is selling so much denim that their share price has leapt 15 per cent, adding around $400 million to the value of the company. Making her the face and body of the brand was a stroke of genius. American Eagle's most ferocious critics know this and it's driven them to derangement. Because the endline of the ad simply says 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans' and 'jeans' is a pun on 'genes', there are mad people online making quite disgraceful comments. Sidney Sweeney is white, they claim, so this is a campaign, not for jeans, but for white supremacy. These claims are so vile, they're almost laughable but they typify a miserable movement in its death throes. If Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle herald advertising's return to wit, beauty and actually selling things, everyone reading this should say 'Hip Hip Hooray!' The industry will once again attract smart, funny and creative people who'll restore its social significance and cultural clout. But don't think for a moment that I adore these ads because I think Sydney Sweeney is sexy. Please – she's the same age as my daughter. Nope, for me, far the sexiest thing in this whole campaign is the 1966 Ford Mustang GT350 she drives away in.
Times
06-05-2025
- Automotive
- Times
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to build brands
'If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen', 'Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach' and 'Just Do It'. All big ideas that drew me to the advertising industry when I started in 1989. Ideas that leapt out and snagged in the memory. Ideas that inspired consistently powerful advertising campaigns and built lasting brands. They captured what those brands stood for (reliability, refreshment, action), creating distinctiveness, attracting customers and justifying price premiums. Take Levi's. Launching its 501 jeans in the UK, there was little to choose between them and rivals such as Lee and Wrangler, but when, to the strains of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Nick Kamen unbuttoned his 501s in that famous launderette commercial, sales shot up
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Black models, foreign films, queer culture – how The Face shaped me as a young man
I still remember the first copy of the Face magazine I bought at age 14. It was the January 1984 issue, with model and pop-rock singer Nick Kamen on the cover, in a ski cap. As a young kid, I bought magazines weekly, starting with Look-in, a preteen music and television magazine, followed by the brightly coloured teen bible Smash Hits and then the Face, the last two founded by Nick Logan. The Face was like a cool, older teenager who invited you into a sexy new world where fashion, music and design fused to create a revolutionary culture. As a young Black gay man, that invitation meant everything. This truly was the heyday of magazines, as I was reminded when visiting The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery last week. I was moved to see all of the magazine covers and spreads that I had collected and hung up on the walls in my youth. There was a particular image of the Kiss FM crew in their studio with Norman Jay, Gordon Mac and Paul 'Trouble' Anderson, DJs whom I had loved and followed. When I was 16 and had left school, the Face opened a window into London's arts, music, clubbing, queer and fashion scene, which took me out of my small world in south London and allowed me to aspire to something different. Beyond the capital's walls, the magazine introduced me to the emerging house music scene in Chicago and New York, and foreign-language films. The 1980s and 90s are often described as something of a 'monoculture', a period in which there was a shared participation in cultural phenomena – people watching the same shows and consuming the same music. But the decades saw an explosion of youth subcultures, and the Face revealed and brought together different tribes that were previously siloed off – rockabillies, rude boys, skinheads, soul heads, goths. What was important to me as a young person was that the Face told you that you didn't have to belong to one tribe; it could be cool for you to enjoy pop music and a bit of ska and a bit of soul. The Face also did not simply report on culture, it shaped it, and it helped me build a sense of style and identity. Images created by the Buffalo movement, a fashion collective headed up by the stylist Ray Petri and the photographer Jamie Morgan, often filled the pages and the cover. Buffalo had drawn on Jamaican culture, dancehall music and hip-hop, and embraced sports labels such as Lacoste, Fila and Sergio Tacchini. It also pioneered playing around with gender representation – putting men into leather skirts with combat boots; choosing steely, masculine depictions of women over glitter and elegance. The Face also used a diverse range of models, and had Black men as cover stars at a time when you would not see them in fashion stories or magazines anywhere else. It featured young Black male models now lost to history such as Tony Felix, Simon de Montfort and Wade Tolero. In June 1985, a month before I came out as gay to my family, the boxer Clinton McKenzie was on the cover of the Face in a beret with his muscles bursting out of his shorts and tank top. It's an image I still love now. That truly subversive, culture-defining era of magazines feels like a bygone era now. Perhaps I cannot claim, at age 55, to be completely tapped into the youth market, but the landscape of culture and the means of its dissemination are so much broader now. The decline of print magazines in the 2000s and 2010s was a consequence of the rise of the internet and social media, which spawned millions of cultural influencers and micro-trends. While magazines such as the Face weren't gatekeepers of culture, they were published by a select few people who set the narrative. Trends now feel much less substantial and much less consequential for popular culture. I remember being heartbroken when the Face closed down in 2004. While I had stopped collecting the magazine in the mid-90s, moving on to the more sophisticated GQ and Vanity Fair, it felt like one sign that we were entering a new era. The Face was founded at the beginning of the Thatcher era, and carried on through to New Labour and the explosion of Britpop. By the time it closed, the optimism of New Labour was crumbling, the advent of technology was not bringing the innovation and productivity gains for which we had hoped, and soon enough a financial crisis would appear on the horizon. The death of this truly British youth style bible – a symbol of growth, cultural revolution and promise – was the canary in the coalmine. I have followed the Face from a distance since its relaunch in 2019 and am pleased to see it back. Perhaps magazines cannot shape culture in the same way as they did in my youth. The pursuit of clicks means magazines, with their additional digital presence, are now doomed to follow trends rather than set them. However, the preservation of definitive print products feels vital when our culture is dominated by an online world in which our attention is infinitely split and an identity is hard to establish. Perhaps I'll go out and buy a copy again, even if I won't have the foggiest what anything in there means any more. Marc Thompson is a queer archivist and the lead commissioner of the London HIV Prevention Programme As told to Jason Okundaye
