Unpacking the Headlines | AI and Games Newsletter 06/11/24
Netflix fails to read the room, Adobe in EA Sports, and SAG-AFTRA updates.
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Hey all, Tommy Thompson here, and welcome to this slightly-shorter-than-usual issue AI and Games Newsletter. What’s the reasoning for this below-par product? Well, after months of excitement and announcements, the AI and Games Conference is happening this Friday! So right now I’m knee deep in final preparations, and this means that naturally my mind has been a little distracted.
But nonetheless, we’re still going to have an issue highlighting key stories, and other important things happening in and around the space. We’ll then have a post-mortem and follow-up on the conference in the coming weeks.
Before we get into announcements, news and everything else, I wanted to take a moment to give a shout-out to the organisers at Konsoll. I had a fantastic time in Bergen last week, and my talk certainly generated a lot of discussion. Also my apologies to anyone awaiting a response to an email or LinkedIn connection request, things are a little crazy right now!
The talk will go online at a later date after the team edit it up. Once it does I’ll be happy to share it. But in the meantime, consider going to Konsoll, it’s a great event!
Announcements
There’s not much else to add for the AI and Games Conference, other than we’re happy to hear that the train strikes in London that were scheduled for Thursday have now been called off. Phew! That was quite concerning - even if we agree that train drivers deserve better pay and work conditions!
Everything kicks off at 9am on Friday. I was down at the venue on Monday to run some tech checks and go over logistics with Alan Zucconi before the rest of the team descends on London on Wednesday and Thursday.
One small thing to share is the final addition to the schedule. Our panel ‘The Future of AI for Games’ runs on Friday afternoon. I’m pleased to introduce our panellists:
Andrei Muratov / Amazon Web Services
Martina Johannesson / Unity Technologies
Roberto Lopez Mendez / Arm
Yassine Tahi / Kinetix
Unless some logistical headache prevents me from doing so, I will be acting as moderator!
Goal State Launches Next Week!
If you were thinking I’d be taking a well-deserved break after this conference is all wrapped up, think again! My Kickstarter for Goal State launches next Friday on November 15th, and we’ll have some updated information on this next week.
New Case Study: The Restaurant Game
It’s been a few months since we had a nice meaty content drop on the AI and Games YouTube channel. But this week episode #76 of the YouTube series dropped, and its focus is on something a little different. A video game that crowdsourced intelligence by observing human playthroughs. I sit down with Dr Jeff Orkin, who joined me on AI and Games earlier this year for the F.E.A.R. Retrospective, to talk about his experiences in grad school while studying at MIT, and how this led to the founding of not one but two businesses exploring conversational AI, with the latter focussed on game development. Check it out!
New Games
I seriously don’t have time to play games right now. But if I did, here’s the ones that have caught my attention…
Metal Slug Tactics (PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox One X/S) - 5th Nov
I actually received a press key for this courtesy of DotEmu, and I’ve been playing it for the past week or so. I hope to jump on a livestream and discuss some more now that the press embargo has lifted, but in short it’s a tactics roguelike akin to Into the Breach. However it works to embraces movement and coordination as part of attacking enemies each turn. An interesting combo that takes elements from the Metal Slug franchise and transposes it onto a tactics game.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership (Switch) - 7th Nov
It’s been a good year for RPG’s rolling out of Nintendo, and now they’re ending on a high note with the return of the Mario & Luigi series. The first new entry in the series since 2015, and arguably one of the last major 1st party titles to come out on the Nintendo Switch.Metro Awakening VR (PSVR2, Meta Quest, Steam VR) - 7th Nov
I’m hearing a lot of good things about Metro Awakening, and it’s not often the hype builds for a new VR title these days. Consider me intrigued!
AI (for Games) in the News
This week, for somewhat obvious reasons I have refrained from writing a big story. Instead, let’s unpack some of the recent headlines as I get ready to put the finishing touches on our conference running later this week.
Keir Starmer says media firms should have control of output used in AI [The Guardian]
Of course the discourse this week is with regards to the elections happening in the United States, but not too long ago the UK voted in the Labour party for the first time in 14 years. As such, we’re still seeing the principles, policies, and priorities of the UK government take shape.
As part of the Journalism Matters campaign, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer published a piece in The Guardian highlighting the importance of protecting journalism to continue to hold the powerful to account. During which he spoke about the relationship between AI and journalism and how in the common market has a habit of encroaching upon the rights of the other.
Starmer: Both artificial intelligence and the creative industries – which include news media – are central to this government’s driving mission on economic growth. To strike balance in our industrial policy, we are working closely with these sectors. We recognise the basic principle that publishers should have control over and seek payment for their work, including when thinking about the role of AI. Not only is it essential for a vibrant media landscape, in which the sector’s provision of trustworthy information is more vital than ever, it is also relevant to our ongoing work to roll out the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act as swiftly as possible. This landmark legislation will help rebalance the relationship between online platforms and those, such as publishers, who rely on them.
Currently the UK government is showing increasing interest in supporting the UK’s creative industries, notably games, as well as pushing to (re)build the country’s place in the global AI market. This seems to also be more closely aligning with the legislation emerging from the EU AI Act, and the importance of copyright and intellectual property protections in a world where generative AI runs rampant. So no doubt we will have more to say on this in the coming months.
Netflix Bullish on Gen AI for Games After Laying Off Human Game Developers [404Media]
Another week, another company really struggling to read the room. This time around it’s Netflix whose intersection in games is one that continues to leave people’s heads scratching. Netflix has gone all in on providing games in their ecosystem, where a variety of mobile titles are available to play and access from within their mobile app. This has been a long time in coming, given they’ve considered video games as their primary competition for screen time since around 2019. As such, they’ve made numerous adaptations of their own IP, bought up studios such as Spry Fox, brought some games like Into the Breach to mobile, and bought exclusivity rights to certain titles such as the upcoming Monument Valley 3.
So like the rest of Netflix’s ecosystem, they need to create more content, and churn it out at scale. You can see where this is going right?
Mike Verdu at the company has recently transitioned from the VP of Games - a role he has held since 2021 - to becoming VP of Gen AI for Games. And in his recent post on LinkedIn wherein he announced this new position, he sought to highlight his perspectives on use of generative AI for game development.
Verdu: I am focused on a creator-first vision for AI, one that puts creative talent at the center, with AI being a catalyst and an accelerant. AI will enable big game teams to move much faster, and will also put an almost unimaginable collection of new capabilities in the hands of developers in smaller game teams.
Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down well. LinkedIn doesn’t have a ‘dislike’ button, but I’d be curious how this post would have gone down if they had one. Naturally, this is LinkedIn, and you can’t really take what people say seriously on the platform - speaking as someone who also posts a lot on LinkedIn. But while the AI generated graphic only reinforced peoples distaste, it was all a bit naff when you consider Verdu and his team shut down an entire games studio just 2 weeks ago before they even released a single game.
2024's Top Selling Game Adds A Generative AI Tool In Its Latest Big Update [Kotaku]
A few weeks back in this here newsletter, I unpacked Electronic Art’s recent investor day presentations, and the over-emphasis on an as yet undefined generative AI future for the company. My big issue with this pitch, was how flimsy it was, and how little it showed of things that were actually going to manifest in their games.
And so now, just weeks since that investor day, EA Sports College Football 25 - which is currently the best-selling game in the US of 2024 - has added a new generative AI feature. As mentioned in the recent patch notes, you can now create logos in the Team Builder portion of the game, but… using an external tool?
TEAM BUILDER
Introducing Adobe Express Integration for Team Builder.
DEV NOTE: Team Builder is getting an upgrade! We’re excited to announce a new partnership with our friends from Adobe. Adobe Express, a content and design generation tool, is now integrated as an optional feature into Team Builder, allowing you to express your creativity and customize your experience in more ways than ever. To utilize the tool, head to your logos page and click “Create with Adobe Express.” Simply create an Adobe account or login with an existing one to instantly access up to 25 credits to use towards logo generation OR design from scratch with the powerful design elements built into Express. Design away and then click “Save” in the Adobe Express tool to get back to Team Builder, importing your new custom image into your Logos page. From there, you can apply your custom layers to your stadium, uniforms, and more.
Internet connection, Adobe account & EA account required. Applicable platform account may be required. Age restrictions may apply.
To learn more about the integration and how Adobe Express can empower your creative expression, check out the Adobe Help Article!
For those not familiar, Adobe Express is a cloud-based design platform. Furthermore the Team Builder isn’t in the game itself, it’s outside of it, and you build and design everything on a web page and then save it for it to appear in the game. So you can design your team logos and the like now using Adobe’s generative tools.
I do think this is a pretty neat idea. But I’m waiting to see what issues this might flare up in content moderation - which if they do make both EA and Adobe look bad. Meanwhile, I’m struggling to get over the fact that after making such a big stink about how EA is all in on generative AI and will lead this new game development future, their first big foray into the space is simply tying their game to an external tool.
“Few to no citations of the 25+ year old field. A very worrying trend.” [BlueSky]
Not a story per-se but something that I mentioned just recently in my talk at Konsoll, is that we’re seeing an increasing number of academic publications by corporations - notably the likes of Google and Nvidia - that try to reset the history of AI research. This was obvious when you see things like of AlphaStar - Google DeepMind’s StarCraft bot - where the published paper conveniently ignored the decade of existing research in building AI that plays the game.
And so as Google announce ‘Unbounded’, another project on automated game design, AI researcher (and all-round good egg) Dr Matthew Guzdial called them out on it.
You’d think of all people, they would know how to use Google Scholar…
Actors' union SAG-AFTRA's agreement with AI service aims to safeguard performers [Eurogamer]
Back in September we talked about how AI is the root cause of the current SAG-AFTRA strike in the games industry. Since then there has been some movement, with both sides returning to the table. But no resolution to the core issues as yet.
In this piece over on EuroGamer, Ed Nightingale highlights that SAG-AFTRA has signed an agreement with Ethovox, an AI company that provides synthetic voices, to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to protect actors livelihoods and the use of their likeness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ethovox is a voice AI company that is also owned by voice actors. It once again speaks to this second wave of generative AI for tech that is moving more closely to how it should be deployed. Quite often the secret is that these new businesses have to be built by people with knowledge of the existing paradigms.
Xbox is rolling out its new AI support chatbot to testers [VGC]
Last but not least, we have a story popping up over on Video Games Chronicle about a new AI-powered chatbot that is available to Xbox insiders to help them with use of their Xbox. Essentially removing the need for you to scour through the support pages to figure out how to change your chat settings so you don’t hear 12 year olds speak ill of your parents during a round of Call of Duty.
This is a really good example of how modern AI can be deployed: it’s summarising the help pages, and can make that easier for people of various technical skill to find the answers they need. Now if only we could get something like this for PlayStation, as I sometimes find tweaking the settings on my PS5 incredibly frustrating…
OK, I Gotta Go Pack!
My trip to deepest darkest south London awaits. I’m going to be on-site for conference preparations all day tomorrow and then Friday is ‘The Big Day’. So yeah, wish us luck folks! We’ll report back next week!