The use of AI is one of the most controversial subjects in the gaming industry. On the one hand, developers are increasingly turning to the new technology to help them generate content: One in three developers are starting to use generative AI, according to a survey earlier this year from the Game Developers Conference.
Yet the subject of AI draws a fierce social media backlash, as both gamers and some developers decry the use of such tools as inauthentic and anti-consumer. The GDC’s survey finds that 30% of developers think that generative AI is bad for the industry.
Game developers who have embraced the use of AI in their work think there’s a way to manage the social media backlash: Namely, by being upfront and honest about whether they use it.
“You just have to be direct about it”, Simon Davis, founder of GOAT Gaming, said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference on Tuesday. He explained that GOAT Gaming writes articles on their use of AI to help prevent accusations of “art theft” and maintain their customers’ trust. As a result, he says backlash has been minimal.
Trung Nguyen, founder of Vietnamese game developer Sky Mavis, admitted that he “used to be very skeptical about AI content generation.” But the high-quality content that AI can now deliver to players changed his mind.
Davis said that AI will soon become an established part of the gaming landscape, and that previous transformations, like the rise of paid extra content for games, drew their own internet outrage.
And he made a bold prediction: That in a matter of years, the industry will have its first billion-dollar company built by just one person.
Cutting costs
What used to take a “team of 15 and maybe nine months” can now be done by non-technical “vibe creators” in just six weeks, Phylicia Koh, general partner at Play Ventures, said.
That could be welcome news for the gaming industry, already struggling with ballooning development costs. AI could now help gaming studios lose the overhead costs of more-than-100 person teams keeping games up to date. But the new technology can also create content on a scale that’s impossible for humans to match.
Davis said his team could make 25 million characters for his platform using AI. Done without AI, such a task would have needed the work of “armies of people for decades,” he said.
Still, AI’s effect on staffing could unnerve a developer population that’s already worried about layoffs. GDC’s survey also noted that one in ten developers have reported being the subject of job cuts over the past year.
The best thing game developers in large companies can do right now is “building AI projects in every spare hour [they] have,” Davis said.
“It is going to be painful, and some jobs will be lost,” Koh admitted. But AI may end up being a way to speed up the industry timeline and get costs back to a more manageable level.