Getting your game noticed is a tricky business when you have to punch through the noise of the more than 10,000 new Steam games releasing each year. Young Horses, the developer of Bugsnax and Octodad, have found itself in an even trickier spot: Thanks to Google, people are expecting a Bugsnax sequel that doesn’t exist.
“We are not working on a Bugsnax sequel right now and I need AI bs to stop telling kids we are based on a wiki ideas fanfic,” Young Horses co-founder and president Philip Tibitoski tweeted earlier today. It turns out, through the wonders of algorithmic search result curation, Google’s featured snippets have been informing people that Bugsnax 2 will be releasing in October 2024, despite the fact that neither Young Horses or any other developer are making it.
Yet another “AI bad” post that I can’t replicate. Not that I’m defending Google, they’ve been shit ever since they removed “do no evil” from their strategy, but this is silly. It takes two seconds to verify the top auto generated result when you search something, you literally just have to scroll to the second and third results. If you just take the autogenerated answer (I’m feeling lucky?) without doing any verifying then someone failed you when it comes to doing online research. And for what it’s worth, within hours of this issue being discovered, it was corrected by the same system that made the erroneous claim in the first place.
The problem is that it only gets fixed when people talk about it en masse. Saying it’s fixed when it keeps making the same mistakes is misleading.