Reflecting on AI in the Games Industry of 2024 | AI and Games Newsletter 11/12/24
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Hello all,
here and welcome back to the newsletter. As the year is coming to a close, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s been sitting in the back of my mind with regards to the state of AI in the games industry, and today I figured let’s get it all out there. So what can you expect in this weeks issue?The Kickstarter campaign for our online course series Goal State ends this week!
A video vlog from the 2024 AI and Games Conference.
Two more entries in my 2024’s Game of the Year list.
Some brief news updates on AI in and around games.
A reflection on the year that has been, and the state of AI in the games industry.
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Announcements
Another week, and lots of things happening in and around all things
.The Final Week of Goal State on Kickstarter
Goal State is now just days away from wrapping up, and we’re keen to snap up as many final stretch goals as possible. The Kickstarter ends this Sunday on December 15th. You can support the campaign from as little as £1, with rewards available to backers at £10 or higher. The more money we raise, and the more backers that support it, means even more content will be created for the project - both for course backers and for free on YouTube. If you have a little bit of cash to spare, I’d appreciate you backing the project.
Find out more at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiandgames/goalstate
The AI and Games Conference 2024 Recap is Now Live
I mean, that largely speaks for itself. The conference wrapped just over a month ago, and while I’m hard at work packaging up all of the talks to share online, this week I also shared some of the joy in putting it all together.
I made the video above both to summarise the experience of putting the event together, but also to give you all some insight into what it was like on the day. As mentioned at the end of the video, we’re already hard at work on putting things together for our 2025 conference, and I’ll have some updates on that in the spring of next year.
AI (for Games) in the News
Well hey, it’s been a bumped week or so since the last newsletter. A whole bunch of stories on how AI is intersecting with the games industry both for good or ill.
PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst says "striking balance" between AI and human-made games will be crucial for industry's future [VGC]
As we’ll discuss shortly, I’ve heard a lot of takes on the ways in which AI will intersect with the games industry this year. PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst delivers a more sensible take than most others - no doubt because PlayStation already does a significant amount of work in and around AI for games.AI People now Running on Local Large Language Models [GoodAI]
Hot off my initial impressions of the ‘Sims-like’ game AI People in a recent edition of the newsletter, the game has received several improvements in the upcoming 0.3.0a update.
By running the LLMs for both the player interactions and speech recognition processes, it removes the dependency on the cloud service and in-turn the use of the online ‘credit’ costs. This is all provided your machine can handle running the game. Running the two LLMs locally requires an extra ~10GB of VRAM on your GPU to run them effectively. This is a modest requirement for many modern GPUs, given the game itself only requires another 2-3GB on top of that (an NVIDIA RTX 4090 has 24GB of VRAM).
The one creative aspect that this enables is that by running models locally, it enables “full control over AI interactions without cloud-based restrictions”. In other words, any censorship applied by GoodAI in ensuring behaviours do not veer into adult content and themes is no longer applied. I mean… okay then?DeepMind’s Genie 2 Model Showcases Controllable 3D Environments [Google]
Arguably the big AI story of the past week, Google DeepMind published some details of their recent work in building AI Foundation Models (i.e. very large generative AI models) that can simulate 3D environments akin to a game. This is a follow-up to their previous work on the original model of Genie published in early 2024 that generated 2D ‘worlds’ to move within.
Building AI models that can simulate an environment, and also be interactable (meaning that a ‘player’ can move objects and characters within it) is a pretty immense task. What we see here is the ability for a text-based prompt to be used for the system to simulate a 3D environment by rendering each frame based both on the information provided by the prompt and world state, combined with a users input. It can only really maintain world consistency at a maximum of a minute, meaning that the longer you ‘play’ within the environment, eventually any consistency as to visuals, behaviour, or otherwise begins to break down. DeepMind themselves admit that many of the examples they showcased can only remain consistent for 10-20 seconds.
I already plan to discuss interactive foundation models for ‘play’ in a newsletter issue in 2025, but the big things to take away from this today are:This is an impressive achievement by DeepMind, and a significant breakthrough in simulating environments through AI models.
This is not in any meaningful way a practical application for game design and development.
As always these are incredibly expensive systems to build and run, and regardless of quality are simply impossible tools to utilise in any meaningful ways based on resource alone. I noted that DeepMind themselves are happy to point out - emphasis mine - “Genie 2 could enable future agents to be trained and evaluated in a limitless curriculum of novel worlds. Our research also paves the way for new, creative workflows for prototyping interactive experiences”. It’s always important to view these things in context, and distinguish that while this stuff is interesting, it doesn’t mean it is practical.Beloved Indie Game Site Itch.io Brought Down by Funko thanks to AI [Itch.io]
Well, that’s certainly a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever write, but here we are. On Monday December 9th, itch.io - the home of hundreds of thousands of games and creative projects - ranging from game jam submissions to fully fledged releases - was brought down thanks to a brand protection software company called ‘Brand Shield’. Somehow Brand Shield’s AI protection tool flagged the indie games site as violating Funko’s IP. Funko of course being the company that utilises other company’s IP in the pursuit of selling as many weirdly shaped plastic figures as possible. This appears to have been resolved now, with the site being down for around six hours on Monday morning.
This is not going to help remedy the ever-increasing negative sentiment among the games community towards AI.
Oh, and speaking of which…Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players accuse Activision of using "AI slop"[Eurogamer]
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 came out the gate to a largely positive response a few weeks back. But the recent event which adds holiday-themed cosmetics has backfired given nobody stopped to question how many fingers a zombie should have.
I was playing the game over the weekend and spotted these items appearing as ‘rewards’ in the current seasonal event, and it’s another example of low-stakes generative AI deployment in a game that is easy to remove if things go south (i.e. the only reason I remember Foam Stars came out this year). It’s not a big enough problem for Activision to care in the grand scheme of things, but it’s proof that even Call of Duty fans want some authenticity in the creative process.
Game of the Year 2024
Time for more of my favourite games of 2024. We have two more today, and then next weeks final issue of the year will round out the top 5.
#07: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Grezzo/Nintendo, 2024
I’m an easy mark for Nintendo. All they have to do is announce a new entry in The Legend of Zelda and I know that at some point I’ll be picking it up. Might not be day one, but certainly I’ll be giving it a shot! While I feel the series still has its ups and downs, I’m always happy to explore each entry, given it’s a franchise that seldom rests on its laurels.
Echoes of Wisdom filled me with a lot of excitement on announcement, given it isn’t just the first ‘main’ entry of the franchise in which the titular Zelda is the protagonist, but Japanese studio Grezzo is building on their previous work in the top-down 3D gameplay of the remake of Link’s Awakening from back in 2019. While beloved, the original version of Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy in 1993 would not appear in my top 10 of best Zelda games. But I found the remake did a good job of shaving off the rough edges of the original (and 1998 DX edition) and making it more palatable to a modern audience. So I was keen to see another Zelda game using that engine that allows for us to continue having ‘classic’ top-down adventures that can sit readily alongside fully 3D entries like Tears of the Kingdom. And it felt obvious to me that this would arise over time, given other Nintendo franchises - such as Super Mario and Metroid - have had similar efforts to offer something unique in both 2D and 3D in recent years.
![The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Famitsu rating: 10/9/8/8 [35/40] : r/NintendoSwitch](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F97c35c8a-f75a-4f42-b43a-0951cc805293_1920x1080.jpeg "The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Famitsu rating: 10/9/8/8 [35/40] : r/NintendoSwitch")
While Echoes of Wisdom uses the same engine as the Link’s Awakening remake, the goal is to deliver an experience that stands out from the rest of the series. While this is obvious in that it has players take command of Princess Zelda, it also extends into the core gameplay mechanics. Combat is but one of the games many forms of puzzle solving, with Zelda’s primary ‘weapon’ being a staff that can conjure up objects she has ‘learned’ from experience over time. You will find a variety of game objects over time - ranging from tables to rocks, monsters, and more - that can be used to try and solve the task presented.
It retains some of that free-form puzzle-solving nature that Breath of the Wild explored and Tears of the Kingdom doubled-down on. There are many puzzles you find along the way where you’re given free reign to figure out how to solve them. Plus the map is more or less open to you from the beginning, and you can explore it in any way you see fit. Though admittedly I did try and solve pretty much every puzzle I could just by throwing a bed at it.
My one gripe with this is that the game is still largely combat-based. Zelda herself can't fight, so you spend a lot of time running away from enemies while loading in just the right monster to do the job for you. While you later unlock the ability to wield a sword, it’s considered a special ability that can only be used with a charged meter, and also transforms you into a Link-esque character for a period of time. I feel that if combat was going to be so prevalent, an effort should have been made to allow Zelda to learn her own fighting style that is reflective of her own merits, rather than simply cloning things around her. Considering this is meant to show Zelda in her best light, I found it rather reductive that you can spawn in all sorts of weapons and peripherals but somehow are incapable of wielding a weapon yourself.
While Zelda’s presence as protagonist injects a lot of novelty, the rest of the game is structured to feel very familiar and nostalgic. The main game takes place once again in Hyrule, with the map clearly inspired by 1992’s A Link to the Past on the SNES while incorporating locations and ideas that have became more defined courtesy of recent entries such as Breath of the Wild. Any fan of previous Zelda games will find something familiar and comforting in the open world.
On the whole, after around 20 hours of playtime, Echoes of Wisdom delivers something that is fresh while also very familiar. It’s not an entry of the series I will rush to revisit, given I think the idea largely wears out its welcome by the end - at least in its current form. But it delivered something that was fun and engaging throughout, and was for me a welcome addition to the Zelda franchise.
#06: Shogun Showdown
Roboatino, 2024
In recent years I’ve fell in love with tactics and strategy games again. Though quite often the ‘big’ games are not the ones that capture my imagination. I still to this day struggle to enjoy the modern X-COM games by Firaxis, but then Gears Tactics by Splash Damage and Mario + Rabbids by Ubisoft have been some of my favourite games of their respective years. And then despite my issues with X-COM, Firaxis’ 2022 release Marvel Midnight Suns then appeared in my GOTY 2023 list.
So clearly I like these games, but I have yet to clearly define my personal tastes - to me anyway. And so this led me to discover Shogun Showdown, an indie title developed by a small team that takes the complexities of tile-based tactics games, and reduces it down to a single axis.
Shogun Showdown is a one-dimensional strategy game, players navigate across tiles along the x-axis to eliminate enemies. On each turn, both the player and the NPCs on screen can opt to move, add a tile to your action queue, or execute the action queue. As players progress, you unlock new attack tiles or abilities, while also updating and improving your tiles so that they’re more effective. Meanwhile you can play as different characters who have special abilities ranging from swapping locations with adjacent enemies, to moving along the entire x-axis rather than one tile per turn.
What makes this quite satisfying is that it’s very readable, and so you can not only plan out attacks but equally can foresee how to anticipate and overcome specific enemy movements. While you’re only on the one axis, things can get very complex, very quickly.
I’ve seen some people refer to this as a streamlined Darkest Dungeon, but I prefer the simplicity of Shogun when compared to Red Hook’s own roguelike experience. That isn’t to say this is dumbed down or simplistic, but I find Dungeon has too many systems employed at once, and I find it detracts from the fun of the game. Shogun is very satisfying as you wipe out entire waves of enemies with one attack queue if you line it all up correctly. And it plays very nicely on a Steam Deck, which has been a big reason for it taking up so much of my time in an evening or weekend.
The game continues to evolve as you complete runs with different characters, and on different days, and even after 20 hours of play and several successful runs I’m still unlocking new actions, new characters, and new enemies. So I can see this continuing to be a fun game to explore into 2025.
Reflecting on AI in the Games Industry of 2024
As you can imagine, I spend more time looking at, studying, working within, and discussing the state of AI within the games industry than many others. And the recent trends of generative AI have become rather all-consuming at times, and it’s something that is as interesting as it is often overblown.
2024 is the year that generative AI in and for games became a huge talking point. But it was also a year that despite so much conversation surrounding it, generative AI has little to show for itself. At best I can point to a collection of interesting tech demos, and smaller experiences.
And this is, for me, the big takeaway of AI in the games industry in 2024. A year in which a lot has been said, and little has materialised. But I’d argue it’s more complicated than that. For me looking back on the year, these are the things worth talking about:
AI companies repeatedly fail to read the room.
Yes, AI is being used more than ever - but this is old news reframed to push the narrative.
There is an increasing desire for information and practical guidance that is largely unaddressed.
The ‘new’ wave of Generative AI is emerging at a time when results need to start appearing. AI-native games are still starting to ship in 2025.
There is still a lot of exciting, practical, and relevant innovation in AI for games (most of which isn’t generative). While the big problems in game AI continue to be left ignored.
The mood and sentiment towards AI is increasingly negative across the sector, and I don’t think that’s an easy thing to rectify.
1. Failing to Read the Room
It’s hard not to talk about the state of artificial intelligence in the games industry without taking a moment to deliver a reality check. This industry is hurting right now as it continues to go through a period of tremendous upheaval. It’s a multi-faceted problem that is both an end-result of years of market forces combined with business decisions that are now coming home to roost.
Over 30,000 people have lost their jobs in this sector since the bloodletting began back in 2022. While AI companies in the games industry have seen just over $400 million in the investment past quarter, games studios are being shut down all around the world - with last weeks news of Ubisoft’s XDefiant shutting being just the latest high-profile case where hundreds of developers lost their jobs.
The games industry is in a mess that is equally one of its own making. While there are market forces such as interest rates and inflation affecting the financing of game development, equally business models that relied on either aggressive advertisement in mobile, or big-budget games that are heavily monetised across multiple axis are now failing. Live-service game saturation has led to a point that new free-to-play games die on arrival, while paid products struggle to fight for the time and money of their intended audience.
Games has always been a risky business to operate within, but 2024 has - from all axis imaginable - been one of the worst years for the industry since its inception. Yes there have been some great games, but the health of the industry is rather dire. It’s affecting everything from the largest of AAA to the smallest of indies. While you seldom hear about the plight faced by the smaller corners of the business believe me, it is there, and it’s bad.
And so at a time when generative AI is advocating that it will solve all of gaming’s ills, you really can’t talk about it without addressing the state of the industry. We’re in a situation where games have never been more expensive to make, and more complex to build, but the very experts on whom it relies on are being cut down wholesale. Meanwhile the narrative that is emerging across the boardrooms is that AI will be the saviour for their executives woes. It’s a narrative that is familiar across so many sectors, as C-suite and investors see the ‘potential’ of AI in many applications without any real grasp of reality. All the while the folks building product day-to-day suffer as a result.
It’s a continued failure to read the room as people livelihoods are affected. But equally, it’s a failure to recognise that this technology won’t solve these issues as advertised. Perhaps just as critically, it also highlights a failure to acknowledge the trends that are emerging outside, and that consumers are increasingly disinterested or annoyed at what is being advocated for.
2. Hype Through Obfuscation Doesn’t Work
Earlier this year game engine creator Unity released their 2024 Gaming Report, in which they compile responses from their own internal and externally funded market research surveys to discuss the health of the industry. It’s a pretty bold effort from a company whose behaviour in the last year, and again this year has only added to the situation.
The headline from the report was that 62% of studios surveyed ‘use AI’, and thus helping pointing towards these generative AI trends (after all, Unity has a stake in this space). This was of course used as a mechanism to advocate for generative AI adoption in the industry. But if you really dig into those details and apply any scrutiny to it, it’s really hard to take any of this seriously. Just a quick glance highlights:
The 2023 market research survey used for that headline had 300 responses. My survey which I ran around the same time had just over 250 responses. I can tell you now neither of these surveys has a significant enough sample size to make any meaningful conclusions about applications across the sector.
The graphs shown later in the report (1.4) highlighting use of generative AI for use of art assets is based on a survey of only 120 responses(?!?!).
The ‘main’ use of AI in games according to the chart in 1.5, based on a survey with an actual meaningful sample size (over 7,000 responses) is non-player characters - something that requires zero generative AI to implement and has been the norm for the past… 40 years?
The survey is phrased to advocate that generative AI is a useful part of ideation and prototyping - which is something I know studios are exploring in various capacities - but the whole thing is written in such a way as to try and normalise the practice that is frankly disingenuous. It is but one of many examples I’ve seen this year where the hype surrounding AI is used to obfuscate the reality of its adoption and applications, which I think personally only reinforces the negative sentiments people have towards it when they drag these reports into the cold harsh light of day.
Even just this week, the news story mentioned earlier in this issue about Google DeepMind’s new ‘interactive’ foundation model Genie 2 has been classic example of this phenomena. Genie 2 is capable of simulating an environment and rendering through use of a large scale generative model (i.e. a foundation model). Building a model that is capable of simulating a 3D environment of even basic complexity and maintaining model consistency for even a few seconds is a really impressive achievement. Wearing my AI researcher hat, this is really impressive work. But wearing my game developer hat, it’s a weird expensive toy that has no meaningful applications.
I won’t denounce Google for building a weird research toy that is impractical for the real world, because that is what a lot of research is. It’s about exploring ideas and then sometimes finding ways in which it could prove useful in specific use cases - be it in leisure, business, healthcare, whatever. So many useful, practical, and relevant applications of technology - be it AI or any other discipline - emerge from researchers exploring weird and wonderful ideas. And in fact a lot of ideas are eventually discarded: because at the end of the day it’s an interesting concept that just doesn’t ‘work’ when you place it within the trappings of real world scenarios.
But I will denounce Google for the manner in which it presents its work, and the company’s messaging of how their work could impact broader business and society. If Genie 2 was a piece of research published 20 years ago, it would have been an exciting update that you really would only hear about within academic spaces. That they had built something that many a researcher would be inspired by and explore in their own work. But in 2024 we operate in a very different climate. Now something like Genie 2 or Sima gets a PR push because it influences stock price, and the broader perception of Google’s impact in a rapidly developing field. Without any meaningful consideration of whether the messaging behind the PR is going to negatively affect existing industries and processes. Because the goal is to get people talking about it, regardless of how useful it is in any real world situation.
If you’ve seen me give a talk at an event of the past year, you may have heard me talk about DeepMind’s StarCraft II bot ‘AlphaStar’. Critically the point I often make is that while it was a huge achievement and an interesting development in its own right, it was in no way reflective of how deep learning can be applied in video games. The entire ecosystem AlphaStar existed within was completely impractical for any game studio to replicate. 5 years have passed since DeepMind published this work and still, to this day, I have to explain to technologists, investors, journalists, and business leaders why that project cannot be applied in game development pipelines. Because the work is published without addressing these realities.
And so in 2024 this practice has become normalised. If you’ve been reading this newsletter throughout the year, you’ll have heard me talk about many a company delivering obscure updates on upcoming AI developments in such a way that it can encourage discussion that lacks any nuance - and I try my best to give that pinch of reality salt. Google set the template that everyone else now follows, and the internet will react as expected.
Hype through obfuscation is the norm for AI in creative industries, and the sad truth is they think it’s working. When you meausure the ‘impact’ solely by website clicks, and social media discourse, they see this as positive. All the while investors observe what impact it has on the stock price. But in truth it ultimately has the opposite effect. In that most of the discourse within the games industry about all of these stories is highly negative. Just take a look at this sample of posts from game developers about the Genie 2 announcement over on BlueSky. This PR push isn’t convincing the experts in the field.
My one takeaway from this for you, the reader, is that it’s always important to analyse and assess these works within a vacuum. So many tech demoes and press releases are deliberately constructed to maximise interest while obscuring the limitations, issues, and the validity of the technology as a viable solution to an existing problem. We must also be critical of what is presented rather than accept it at face value. Too often companies post updates for the sake of being seen, but without saying anything of substance. I mean full credit to Ubisoft for being one of the only companies this year who showcased an AI project - the Project NEO NPCs - and in the same press release said it was nowhere near ready for any video game production.
This practice has only got significantly worse in the past 12 months, and I genuinely struggle not to roll my eyes at many a press release that spend a lot of words in order to say very little. It only continues to poison the well when it comes to future customers of these technologies (a point I return to shortly).
3. There is a Desire to Learn
If there’s one big takeaway for me based on the work I’m doing in and around the industry, it’s that there is undoubtedly a large desire to learn more about the space of AI for game development. This is, in part, due to the aforementioned obfuscation and marketing that pushes the AI narrative with little substance. But also because people are keen to make their own judgements and risk assessments of the validity of AI systems and tools for their respective workflows.
This year I’ve had at least one major speaking engagement a month, in which I present to the games industry and give an accessible and practical overview of the state of AI. I’m fortunate and grateful to be invited - be it virtually or physically - to events around the world to help give some insight into the world of AI for game development. One of the big reasons I get asked to speak in so many places is that my talks are hype-free, and focussed on the issues, they’re informative yet accessible. My goal in every talk that I give is to ensure that my audience walks away learning more about the state of AI and how it intersects with creative industries. Even if that means giving audience members more reason to dislike current generative AI trends. I would much rather people’s perspectives on AI in the games industry, be they positive or negative, come from an informed position.
Equally, I have hosted more professional training classes this year as well covering everything from classic game AI techniques, to current trends in large language models and their use cases. I’ve presented to games programmers, business managers, human resources teams, and other personnel across the sector. There is as much a desire to learn as there is a need to have a grasp of this such that businesses make smart decisions on whether to adopt AI or not, as well as being aware of obligations that will arise from AI legislation.
Plus of course I can’t talk about a desire to learn without mentioning the AI and Games Conference we ran last month. The desire isn’t just for people who have little to no experience of AI, it also comes from those who already work in these spaces. We prescribed the same philosophy I have in my presentations on generative AI to those we accepted at our event. We sought out companies that we knew were doing good work in this space, and we could trust to deliver hype-free, realistic takes on what this technology can and cannot do in games at this time. And this brings us to the next talking point…
4. Real Generative AI Applications, and Games, are Emerging
As much as I recognise and appreciate the sentiment you read online, generative AI does have practical use cases. Sadly the most obvious use case is stealing the work of creatives in pursuit of creating generative outputs, be it text, images, videos etc. It’s what has set the tone in the conversation surrounding generative AI as a whole, in that companies ranging from OpenAI to Google or Microsoft have shown a disregard for the ownership of artistic assets such that they can maximise profit, and showcase that they are the leaders in all things AI.
I get it, and I won’t defend them. But to dismiss the technology wholesale is rather naïve. If you consider what generative AI actually is - complex models for generating statistically likely outcomes - then you can see a variety of possible applications that do not need to steal the livelihoods of others.
We have seen a variety of interesting applications crop up across the past year. Some of which like Ubisoft’s NEO or even just recently GoodAI’s AI People showcase the capacity to build something new using these technologies. In either case neither of these are complete games, but they are indicative of playable experiences that could become more commonplace in years to come should business models and technologies reach a point of maturity.
That said, the first real ‘AI-Native’ games that are commercially released via conventional means are coming from indie spaces. Retail Mage: a game where you help customers buy what they want before the store closes, launched on Steam last month. Where generative AI is used to create story options on the fly. Meanwhile two other AI-native games, 1001 Nights and Dead Meat, are on track to release in 2025. These teams have built games powered by generative models to craft an experience that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. As you can see on the 1001 Nights Steam page, they’re being built whilst aware of the ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI technologies, but are not exploiting the more damaging potential that it has. Rather, they utilise what generative models are good at: statistically likely outcomes based on the data presented to them. Each game has then utilised that process for their own creative goals: their own core conceit leans on generative AI as a mechanism to craft a gameplay experience around it, rather than use the technology to replace developers doing something in a more ‘traditional’ pipeline.
Irrespective of the actual quality of these games, these three are (through not fault of their own) examples of the true litmus test generative AI faces in games both as a creative tool, but also in how it can exist within the established publishing, marketing, and monetisation standards of the industry. We’re still at a point where the real challenges of using generative technologies as part of a game are not being explored sufficiently, because the vast majority of companies that are making the most noise about it immediately head for the morally and ethically questionable application areas. We need games to be built using generative AI to learn whether or not it yields anything positive. I mean Web3 managed to ship a bunch of games to help reinforce it wasn’t something most people wanted. Generative AI needs to do the same thing.
Meanwhile interesting ideas of how to use these tools at a production level are still being thought through and explored. I briefly mentioned the work happening at the likes of BitPart.ai in my Restaurant Game case study. Meanwhile at the AI and Games Conference last month, we had the likes of EA’s AgentMerge project, with Alessandro Sestini and Luca Ballore highlighting efforts to use LLMs as a means to collate and manage issue tracking in the Battlefield franchise. This is an interesting application area to solve a common production problem - of maintaining accurate issue tracking in task management. Of course we also had on LLMs being used for story and content generation, Rachel Dong from Riot Games discussing challenges in using the models to create murder mystery games, and Chris Wallace from Hidden Door discussing both the benefits and limitations of these technologies when operating within established IPs.
This shows that generative models, like any AI innovation, take time to become useful in games. We’re quick to forget that the machine learning revolution of the past 10-12 years didn’t rapidly materialise in game productions. It took years of experimentation before it made sense to roll it out in specific aspects of production - if at all. Generative AI will prove to be the same. This is the real truth of where we are as a field with this technology, but sadly the conversation is being dominated by the larger existential issues of generative AI being used to downsize the industry because of the actions and words of the biggest players in the space.
And if you think that is exhausting…
5. Game AI Has Problems That Are Being Ignored
This one is short and simple: in the closing slides of my talk delivered at the AI and Games Summer School this summer, I made a point of how the big issues that surround AI for game development - the stuff that we know is a problem - are not being addressed.
At this year’s AI Summit at GDC, one regular talking point was issues with navigation in games. The challenge of building comprehensive and practical tools for characters navigating in video games is an ongoing one, and outside of games studios investing in their own solutions, and a handful of external providers such as Mercuna, Havok and Kythera, this isn’t really considered an issue in the eyes of broader AI developments.
It speaks to a fundamental problem with the conversation surrounding AI for games, in that the challenges being faced by ‘game AI’ developers (i.e. creators of non-player characters and things like opponents and experience managers) are seldom being explored by all the new players entering the space. Much of the generative AI hype has focussed on solutions in other areas of production, or creating solutions to previously unattainable game designs. Meanwhile the challenges AI programmers face in games, ranging from navigating complex environments to handling behaviour in richer and larger open worlds, are only getting more demanding as games continue to become more expansive and ambitious.
It is perhaps not surprising that so many game AI programmers I speak to treat a lot of generative AI with disinterest (or disdain) given so little of what’s been presented seems to be of any relevance to the issues they’re working on.
And that speaks ultimately, to the image problem of AI in the games industry and how it’s only getting worse.
6.The Damage Is Done
I’d argue 2024 has been a year of unearned confidence for AI, as companies doll out their perspectives on generative AI in a variety of sectors often to middling results. This is in part because the technology is still new, and while we’re seeing positive results emerge in some corners, the opportunities and limitations are still being worked out. This is of course why it’s taking so long to manifest in games, because it’s a risk-adverse business sector, that also takes years to ship product. But the way in which it is often presented in games is incredibly frustrating.
It’s something I have actively worked on with companies in their business interactions and press releases (*ahem*, call me). There are too many people, both from inside the games industry and out, that think that waving the AI flag is going to be embraced so enthusiastically - both by developers and consumers. It’s an issue I can speak to first hand both on the advisory board for the AI Summit at GDC, as well as being the lead organiser of the AI and Games Conference. So many pitches that amount to a senior member of a start-up (be it the CTO, the CPO, the CEO, heck even the CFO) wanting to share their ‘vision’ of how the games industry will evolve thanks to AI. These pitches are often very quickly undermined when they present a vision that shows very little understanding of how games are built, or is so naïve you wonder how they got all that start-up funding in the first place.
Speaking anecdotally, I have observed how this has bled into the industry itself. While I mentioned there is a desire to learn more about this space, people are wary and sceptical of who turns up to offer any such guidance. At every event I attend, I have to go out of my way to clarify my background and experience in this sector because otherwise it’s assumed I’m a product salesman or hype merchant. It was easier at an event like NEXUS, where I was the 2nd speaker of the vent, but at Konsoll I didn’t speak until the afternoon of the closing day. Meaning every time I had a conversation with someone new, I had to clarify my stance and expertise. Some people were quite civil about it, others you could see a hint of hostility until it became obvious that I knew what I was talking about - and that I also agreed with the bigger issues surrounding generative AI. That’s fine, I get it.
But on the consumer side, I fear this is really starting to wear thin. Now it’s well established that the average player knows very little about how games are made, but it’s striking to me when I read reactions to news stories, or engage with people that lack any real knowledge of game development, that several elements keep reoccurring. And all of it effectively summarises the points I have made throughout this issue:
Consumers are seeing unimpressive applications of AI in other business sectors, and worry how this will affect their hobby.
What is often presented as ‘new frontiers’ of AI for games is not warmly received, particularly as the conversation around studios downsizing is in the air.
Many of these aforementioned new frontiers are demonstrated using fairly poor quality demonstrations that don’t match the quality expected of video game releases in 2024.
Given few (if any) applications of generative AI have made it into games that show substance or merit, it has only reinforced the negative image consumers observe in point #1.
Combine this with how little people know about how artificial intelligence is used in games, any mention of ‘AI’ it is being considered a net-negative, much akin to Web3 and NFTs.
The equivalence of AI to NFTs in the eyes of gamers is increasingly apparent everywhere I go. Whether I am chatting with people at events or speaking engagements, to simply reading any comments section on a news website or social media platform. It’s a technology that C-Suite and investors won’t shut up about, and yet it has brought nothing of merit to the end customer. Tis happened with Web3, and so as it’s easy to draw the conclusion that it’s the same thing all over again.
I mean if you pop back up to the news section of this newsletter, almost every one of those headlines is not a positive one. When AI is doing everything from shutting down a popular indie game website to delivering subpar cosmetics in one of the biggest live-service shooters in the business, all the while R&D breakthroughs showcase ‘games’ that simply look abysmal to an end-user, I can see quite easily how anyone outside of this space can reach an extremely negative conclusion.
Earlier this year, right after my interview appeared on Eurogamer, I commented on how the future ‘AI winter’ would not be from a lack of corporate/government investment, but from public sentiment being so strongly against AI that it will have an impact on how games adopt it. I don’t see this changing in the immediate future.
Looking to the Future
While I continue to be optimistic about a field I genuinely love to be a part of, I am also concerned with how it continues to intersect with this industry. To simply assume that things will get better is rather naïve, but if anything it only reinforces that what I do around here is necessary.
This year I’ve been grateful for the positive response I’ve had to many of the endeavours I’m participated in this year, ranging from my work on YouTube, to this newsletter, the talks I’ve given at events, the Goal State Kickstarter, and of course our very own event in London. Providing a space for people to hear a grounded and realistic perspective on this field is what
has been all about since the first YouTube video in 2014, and I’m grateful that my peers and my audience have not only stuck by me, but also helped support so many of these projects.
The AI and Games YouTube channel celebrated its 10 year anniversary in March, and it’s been a heck of a year to mark such a huge milestone. If anything, it has only reinforced to me that I hope to continue doing this for another 10 years. If the way things are going is anything to go by, I’ll certainly have plenty to talk about!
Thanks for reading all the way to the end, and for supporting AI and Games!
Wrapping Up
I have most certainly written enough for what is our penultimate issue of the year. It’s been a long one - possibly the longest this year - and I hope you’ve found it interesting! We’ll wrap things up next week with my top 5 in my Game of the Year list, as well as discuss games that I’m looking forward to next year - including those sitting in my backlog that I have yet to try out!
In the meantime, a shameless final call to check out the Goal State Kickstarter as we wrap up this week. The crowdfunding campaign will end just as I get ready to return from my trip to GDS in Prague. A pretty fantastic end to the working year I think!