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Tim Sweeney says Epic Games Store is open to devs using generative AI
(www.gamedeveloper.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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There was never anything stopping them from doing that without AI. They don't do it because their executives and investors want the large Return on Investment that they can only get with big blockbusters. They don't care to take over the indie scene because it's often focused on titles that are niche and risky.
Even if you are correct about the capabilities of AI, and to be clear I do believe you are mostly correct, it's an overstatement to talk of it as if it will replace all other disciplines. It's almost like saying there is no more purpose for drawing now that we have photography, and nobody can thrive if not for photography. Even if AI is widely adopted there will still be plenty of space for works made without it.
Really, I'm not entirely opposed to AI but the mindset here is definitely one I cannot gel with, one that making more, larger, faster art is more worthwhile than making it yourself. Even if AI could make whole characters and settings in someone's style, the people working on it often want to make it themselves. An AI can't condense all your inspirations and personality and the meaning you would put into a work for you. AI does not even truly understand what it does, it's only providing a statistics-based output. Even the best, most complex, most truly intelligent AI imaginable is not replacement for an artist, because it isn't that artist.
Ultimately AI still seems to serve better to expansive games that need to be filled with a lot of content than small works of passion.
There's a possibility the profit margins could just get that juicy. You could have a skeleton crew work on a game for a shorter amount of time and get it out there making money.
AI can't create anything itself, it's a tool to help artists create explore, expedite, and improve. An AI can't condense all of your inspirations and personality and meaning in the same way a drawing tablet can't. It's all in how you use it. You can infuse it with your learned experiences at training, guidance, inference, and post-processing to make it more closely adhere to your statistics.
We've been talking about indie game devs this whole time, but we haven't even touched on amateur games devs. For small scale, I think this is where we'll see the biggest impact. People with fewer or no skills might get the helping hand they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and get started.
This is pure speculation, and a very iffy one at that. Large game companies keep betting on larger and larger projects, distancing themselves from niche genres. It's a huge leap to go from "maybe they will try to make smaller games with AI", which is already speculation, to "indie devs won't be able to survive if they don't use AI too".
The tablet can be a neutral medium, an AI is trying to condense the outwardly obvious stylistic choices of countless other artists, without an understanding of the underlying ideas that guided them, while you are trying to wrestle something somewhat close to your vision out of it. I suppose that's like being a director, but it inherently means the result less personal. What decided the shapes and colors? What decided the wording and tone? Who can say.
I'd say today there are easy enough tools that getting started is fairly easy, but there's some merit to that. Still... that bumps with the uncomfortable possibility that if AI is widely adopted, there will be less game developer and artist jobs available. Sure, more people could get their start, but could they actually get any further than that?
Square Enix, one of the biggest game publishers in the world, has several divisions that make gacha games for mobile platforms. These games are very profitable, and almost every one of them is developed in house. These games don't compete with or replace their AAA games, and they keep on making them, so it must be good enough. It's almost a requirement for there to be a mobile game of the latest Square-Enix game.
Don't underestimate what you can do with fine-tuning. There's more to guidance than just text prompts.
That I can't say, but I hate that this tool with boundless potential to revolutionize the way we communicate, inspire, create, and connect with each other out of the gate has people attacking it with saws trying to get it to fit into the curtain rod shaped box of capitalism. It's a sorry state. Maybe more people will follow cottage creators with a vision they find appealing, like on OnlyFans and Patreon? We're social creatures, we like having shared experiences in that way. Hell, maybe collaborative projects like SCP in the future.
Did you know that mobile freemium games already surpassed console games in revenue? Sure they may be cheaper to produce, but they are not niche or low in Return of Investment, much the opposite. This does not even vaguely correlate with a total indie market takeover.
However many examples you may pick, it still doesn't make the tech able to make works exactly as the user envisions, and it isn't based on their own internalized inspirations and personality the same way. If anything, using established popular characters and styles as an example indicates that you aren't quite grasping what I'm getting at, about the unique characteristics that each artist puts in their work, sometimes even unwittingly. I don't doubt that AI could perfectly make infinite Mickeys. This isn't about making more Mickeys. So to speak, it's about making less Mickeys and more of something entirely new.
I'm not usually this radical, but putting it bluntly, either AI or Capitalism has to go. If not like this, I wouldn't see any issue with this easier way to get some form of guided aid for artistic expression, leaving aside its limitations and the matter of scraping for a moment. Both of them together, we'll see artists and game developers driven out of their industries, not to mention all the other artistic, customer service and intelectual jobs that will soon be replaced to optimize profits for executives and investors. None of this would be a concern if everyone could just work on their passion projects and have a guaranteed livelihood, but that's not how it works as it is.
More crowdfunding as a solution? On whose wages? Making it that way is already a rare luck, before any larger issues. But what if everyone used AI? Well, that wouldn't really make the potential customers any more numerous. It would, however, make the number of artists and developers needed less numerous. So, how do they make a living then? What good is it if an artist has to take some sweatshop job to survive because AI is now making works in their style for free?
But I admit that the AI genie probably can't be put back in the bottle, now that it's already so widespread with no legal repercussion. But it's a battle that will get much uglier, and resentment is the least that we will have to worry about. No wonder, because it's going to suck for a lot of people.
You're moving the goalposts here, your original comment asserted that large companies only bet on larger and larger games, and when you have this many mobile games out at once, a lot of them are going to be pretty niche. Currently, gacha is the go-to for small development for large companies, it's not out of the realm of possibility for lower costs to lead to more traditional games to me.
I'm not sure what you believe generative tools are supposed to do. This is just one tool in a chest of many, it isn't going to pop out fully finished work. You need to work with what you make. It also isn't a requirement to use established characters, I picked things with distinctive characteristics, the characters are just a touchstone for people to evaluate how well those characteristics are transferred. This can work just as well for anyone, I've seen people fine tune with just nine images.
Preach, I nominate we get of capitalism.
Would be nice if there was any headway in that sense but it seems we just get more and more reasons why society can't keep going like this, but it keeps going like this.
I did not move goalposts one inch. You are thinking of mobile games as "small games" when in fact they are more profitable than console games. I specifically contrasted "niche" to "blockbuster". Candy Crush may be simple but it's one of the the most profitable game of all time, it is not niche. Even something like Final Fantasy Dissidia Opera Omnia surpassed 100 million dollars in revenue, which would be a huge fortune for the average, mildly sustainable indie. If you look at them solely in terms of how costly they are to develop you are missing the point.
They are not going to be making, say, psychological surreal point-and-click adventure games because it's not so easy to shove microtransactions out the wazoo and get hundred million dollars from them. You see them making a lot of live services with endless progression, multiplayer and arcade-style games where it's easy to monetize.
I never meant small in terms of profits, I only ever meant in terms of development resources, that's what generative AI will impact. The most humble games can become huge hits, see: Stardew Valley. With a better cost proposition, we might just see those psychological surreal point-and-click adventure games.
Also do mind that Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition isn't a gacha, it's a scaled down port of the game of the same name that's divided into ten chapters; the first one's free, but the other nine will cost you. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis, a free-to-play port of Final Fantasy VII too will be episodic, but it will have a gacha for weapons and costumes.
Well I did mean small in terms of profits, because that's what directs the investment of big companies. So, yeah, I don't think so. Farming Sims weren't even seen as a money maker until Stardew Valley became a hit. Sure they can chase trends, but even if it was cheaper it's pretty unlikely that they'd bother investing in genres they can't see big returns in. Even with AI, it's not like they can put "psychological surreal point-and-click adventure game" on a prompt and get a finished product that easy, they will still need to invest in developers for it, nevermind all the marketing that big companies do for their releases. It's more likely they'd release yet another gacha.
Even your examples of it being done different are still the highest profile releases from that company, not some quirky novel idea. They were betting big on FFXV when they released that, and they are doing this for FFVII these times.
The AAA companies are too risk-averse to take out the indie scene, they would rather insist on trends until they stagnate.
I was never arguing that it would be effortless, but easier. I also feel like the marketing budgets are kind of beside the point here of development costs, but hey, generative AI might help with that too.
I don't know, they also released Diofield Chronicle, Triangle Tactics, and Octopath Traveler were smaller budget games with no pre-existing IP that were also pretty experimental. What they make may not be your "psychological surreal point-and-click adventure game", but it might be something just as adventurous.
Eh, a couple new RPG IPs from a company known for making RPGs is hardly such daring venture. If anything, they used to make more of those around the PS1 era. AI may make game development easier, but it won't make such a drastic branching out likely.
Some people consider releasing new RPG IPs pitching your money right in the trash. That's pretty adventurous to me. Even if it doesn't cause a drastic branching out, more companies dipping their toes might make quite the ripple.
Can you imagine if SquareEnix of all things couldn't pitch a single brand new RPG IP? If this is what counts as adventurous, I'm not worried for indie studios at all.
It's wild, but these days this is adventurous, even for Sqaure-Enix. The trend with their AAA games has been not turn based RPG for more than a decade. More big companies might decide to release more modest size games that play to their heritage and strengths.