There are more people making video games than ever before, but most games are still designed by professional teams. Technical skill barriers prevent ordinary people from making their own games, but by 2024, that will change. Artificial intelligence will make game development so easy that you can make a game in half an hour and then spend the rest of the afternoon playing it with your friends. The flood is coming, and in the next 12 months, the renaissance of indie games driven by artificial intelligence will completely disrupt the entire industry. It will fill the market in unprecedented numbers, eliminate thousands of jobs, create countless others, and forever change our relationship with video games.
If you have ever used an AI image generator, you will have seen a preview of the coming wave. You don’t need to know how to draw to create visual art, and soon you won’t need to know coding to make full-blown video games. Generative AI applications like ChatGPT help computers turn simple human language into usable content, and it can also create video games. All you need are artificial intelligence tools built for this purpose. You may not realize they’re already here.
“Large-scale language models and templates will make building many different types of games a simple process,” said co-founder and CEO Aleksander Caban. authority, a platform that allows developers to create impressive 3D backgrounds and objects through written prompts and other simple tools. “Let’s say you want to make a sci-fi first-person shooter. It’s as simple as typing ‘make me a first-person shooter,’ telling the AI to set the scene to a space station, and then instructing it to lower gravity.”
Video games are about to have their SoundCloud moment. Just as cheap audio editing software paved the way for independent musicians, artificial intelligence will open doors for people who never had the chance to make games. It will usher in a new era of creativity—and an unprecedented amount of absolute crap—and raise all kinds of troubling questions about power, economics, and art in the process.
A child can do it easily
There are already dozens of AI development platforms, and even more are on the way, but no company has done more to bring game design to the masses than Roblox. It is a game creation platform for a child army of players and creators. According to reports, more than half of American children under the age of 16 were users of the platform at the beginning of the epidemic. Roblox already makes it easy to create simple games in minutes using a drag-and-drop interface, and simplifies more complex game development with a variety of easy-to-access tools. Building Roblox games is already simple enough that kids can do it, but with artificial intelligence, the process will soon become almost effortless.
“We believe generative AI has the power to revolutionize game creation,” said Stef Corazza, head of Roblox Studio and head of generative AI for the platform. “This is a world where your success as a creator depends on the success of your ideas, not the ceiling of your technical skills.”
In 2023, the company launched a beta version of Roblox Assistant, a new tool that allows users to leverage generative AI for nearly any game development task. When Roblox rolls out the full functionality of the tool over the next few months, you’ll be able to provide Assistant with simple commands to build 3D worlds and scenes, make objects interactive, script conversations, and get interpretations of existing code , generate code from scratch, etc. Assistant is even available in multiple languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish.
“It’s an end-to-end solution for building an entire game through a chat interface,” Corazza said.
Of course, there are bound to be some bumps along the way. This technology is not magic; Anyone who has tried to use ChatGPT for more complex or specific tasks knows that there are severe limits to what artificial intelligence can do.you won’t be able to draw the next one Salda With a few lines of instructions or something like that. Just because you can speak English doesn’t mean you can write a good book. But while creating basic games will be easy, Roblox is opening the door to more advanced ideas by making Assistant a learning tool and all-in-one game factory. If Google Assistant can’t complete a task for you, it can point you to resources to help you complete the task yourself.
When tools like Roblox Assistant come to fruition, it’s hard to underestimate the change they can spark. Corazza said Roblox has seen a shift in the demographics of its creators thanks to artificial intelligence. While game development has traditionally been a boys’ club, Corraza said there has been a disproportionate increase in the number of women and girls making games on the platform.
When it comes to the public’s overall relationship with video games, an even bigger shift may be in store. If your 70-year-old grandma could make a game, it would change our understanding of who video games are for. Currently, gamers are primarily consumers of content created by others. In the near future, however, making your own games may be part of the fun. Playing games with friends after get off work can start by making a game from scratch.
More AI, more questions
It’s not all plain sailing. Generative AI works by taking large amounts of existing material and using statistical models to produce content that looks like something the AI has seen before. This means that AI art is inherently derivative, at least to some extent.Gamers in China have begun to push back against companies that use artificial intelligence to build gaming properties Fans said it felt cheap and soulless, missing limbs and other strange artificial intelligence hallucinations. This problem will become more severe as the ecosystem faces an impending glut of inefficient games.
There are also serious concerns about where the content used to build artificial intelligence comes from, and whether its artists and creators are properly compensated. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI, accusing the makers of ChatGPT of stealing copywriting materials from the newspaper. For example, Roblox says its algorithm is built on users’ proprietary data, but the company has been criticized for: Turning children’s game creators into underpaid labor.
Artificial intelligence also raises concerns about job losses. In May 2023, Nvidia launched the new “Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine” (ACE), which can Create real-time interactive artificial intelligence game characters, complete with improvised voice dialogue and facial animations. Such tools would eliminate the need for thousands of high-paying game development jobs. This process is already underway.In China, simplified tools and government regulation reportedly combine Cut illustration work by 70% Last year in the gaming business.
Yory Wurmser, artificial intelligence business analyst at market research Insider Intelligence, said: “AI tools will lower the barrier to innovation and make it cheaper for smaller game companies, but for traditional platforms and developers, this will be a huge problem. opportunity.” the company, told Gizmodo. “That could be great from a consumer perspective because you’d have more different visions as far as games go, but it could also solidify a lot of control in the industry.”
Part of the reason is that large companies will build many of the most powerful and useful AI tools. There are many small companies and startups producing AI game development software, but the tech giants are in a better position because they have deep pockets for technology development and have large amounts of proprietary data that can be used to train new algorithms.
But the biggest factor in the gaming industry is distribution. Even in a world where anyone can make a game, developers still have to work hard to get those games into people’s hands. Artificial intelligence may shift power toward the companies that make platforms and devices that already have millions of users. Roblox isn’t the only major gaming company jumping on the artificial intelligence bandwagon. Xbox and game console Both companies have major artificial intelligence initiatives launched in 2023. Square Enix’s CEO recently said his studio would “Provocation”, pushing to integrate artificial intelligence into their workflows. Morgan Stanley recently predicted that the biggest winners in the artificial intelligence game will be large companies, because artificial intelligence can Reduce AAA game production costs by up to 15%.
Still, some in the AI game development startup community, such as Auctoria’s Aleksander Caban, say they’re not worried. “Yes, big companies have the money to work faster and sometimes better, but many of the big discoveries and improvements in artificial intelligence are made by smaller companies because they have to be more resourceful,” he said. Caban believes there’s a lot of room in the industry, especially since smaller businesses are often driven by passion rather than balance sheets, which can often lead to more creative work.
Social media over the past decade has become a model for the future development of the video game industry. The content creation and distribution tools launched by platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have dealt a serious blow to the traditional gatekeepers of the entertainment industry. More and more of our leisure time is spent watching films made by amateurs rather than studios controlling television shows. As a result, we are seeing dramatic changes in human creativity. It was a revolution, but from one perspective, the only thing that really changed was who was doing the labor: independent workers rather than employees. Giant corporations still control the spigots, it’s just that more and more are headquartered in Silicon Valley rather than Hollywood.
The same thing will happen to video games. As more and more people become artists, we will see a new and exciting world for people who play games, but ultimately, the real winners will be the big tech companies.
