Over the past year or so, several game developers have started sharing thoughts on the potential benefits and downsides of using AI in game development. As with all things AI, the conversation is quite polarized at the moment: some have already embraced it, while others have sworn not to touch it with a tentpole, mainly for ethical reasons.
Veteran industry executive Jack Buser sits firmly in the first camp. Buser, who worked at Dolby, then at Sony on PlayStation Home and PlayStation NOW, and finally at Google on Stadia first and as Google Cloud's Global Director for Games now, believes AI is the equivalent of an Iron Man suit that developers have to put on to face the issues of an otherwise unsustainable industry, between rising production times and budgets. Here's what he told GamesIndustry.biz:
You can see a massive transformation going on behind the walls of these games companies starting in game development, trying to get that iteration time down. You have to get the time from you having an idea to it being in a production game down. Time in a development pipeline is highly, if not linearly, correlated, with cost. The days of spending five, seven, 10 years to build a video game and spending hundreds of millions of dollars is just not sustainable. Can we return to an industry that's much healthier where we can spend potentially tens of millions on a game and get it out in a few years?
A general trend we're seeing is the very large game companies are thinking about their development pipelines, reducing iteration time. But we're seeing the long tail, as well as the sort of torso of the industry start to realize that with AI, they can punch way above their weight, way above their weight, and they can actually compete with some of these larger budget games by leveraging AI.
The games industry has seen tremendous job loss over the past few years because the business of video games is broken. And there aren't many tools that can help mitigate those threats to our industry and those threats to the games that we love that are as powerful as AI. One of our messages to the industry is to embrace AI like Iron Man's suit. It's right there. It's for you to put on and put it on and see what types of superpowers it's able to grant you.
If anything, AI is going to help us right size these business models. It's going to help us create a healthier industry, not just for the big players, but for small players as well. And I think if we have a more nuanced understanding of how it's actually being used and refine our language a little bit about how we discuss these things, it's easily one of the most important things we can do as an industry right now.
It's definitely a fitting metaphor, especially since the Iron Man suit, as popularized in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, features a built-in AI called JARVIS. However, the jury is still out on Jack Buser's highly positive outlook. Some developers remain outright hostile to AI tools, and yet the industry's long-standing issues cannot be denied. Either the games will have to become much smaller and possibly less polished, or developers will have to embrace external help in the form of AI-powered tools.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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