I don't know if it is the game industry, or just the media focus, but the amount of what seems like poor development management decisions in the gaming industry seems incredibly high based on the volume of news.
PaulHoule · 14h ago
I get the impression it has gotten worse post-pandemic (after the time period discussed in the article) because:
(1) There was a gaming boom during the pandemic that the industry planned games and hired up to service that went bust afterwards
(2) The zone has been flooded with bad ideas like NFTs and now AI
On top of that, it is a glamour profession that a lot of people get into because they love games thus they tolerate bad working conditions.
I think generative AI could be a boon to games in numerous respects [1], but the immediate threat is that management will believe they can lay off a large fraction of the developers and still keep delivering quality games on schedule.
[1] The biggest problem with "interactive fiction" is limited dialogs with characters. A game like Persona 5 Royal reflects the state of the art, which is that you can choose one of three options of things to say and the NPC can react accordingly. It would be amazing to see games where you could have open-ended conversations with NPCs and generative AI makes it seem possible instead of science fiction.
For VR "nonfiction games" I think generative AI is even more essential. The NPC problem is even more urgent. With Horizon Worlds, for instance, I could make a world for my business but if I want people to be able to get service I have to staff the world with a real person which is a non-starter for small businesses (restaurants) who already invest heavily in social-media marketing. Also something has to be done about the high cost of authoring -- I think I could sell a $20,000 project to an SMB, but not more than that, and generative AI looks like a boon for that.
(1) There was a gaming boom during the pandemic that the industry planned games and hired up to service that went bust afterwards
(2) The zone has been flooded with bad ideas like NFTs and now AI
On top of that, it is a glamour profession that a lot of people get into because they love games thus they tolerate bad working conditions.
I think generative AI could be a boon to games in numerous respects [1], but the immediate threat is that management will believe they can lay off a large fraction of the developers and still keep delivering quality games on schedule.
[1] The biggest problem with "interactive fiction" is limited dialogs with characters. A game like Persona 5 Royal reflects the state of the art, which is that you can choose one of three options of things to say and the NPC can react accordingly. It would be amazing to see games where you could have open-ended conversations with NPCs and generative AI makes it seem possible instead of science fiction.
For VR "nonfiction games" I think generative AI is even more essential. The NPC problem is even more urgent. With Horizon Worlds, for instance, I could make a world for my business but if I want people to be able to get service I have to staff the world with a real person which is a non-starter for small businesses (restaurants) who already invest heavily in social-media marketing. Also something has to be done about the high cost of authoring -- I think I could sell a $20,000 project to an SMB, but not more than that, and generative AI looks like a boon for that.