Peter Molyneux, a veteran game developer responsible for games such as Fable, Dungeon Keeper, and Theme Park, spoke out about what he thinks people can expect from the games industry over the next few years and what developments will be made to keep it alive. The main answer was AI. When asked by Eurogamer where he thinks the world of video games will be in two years time, he mentioned that AI will most likely be heavily used at this point.
“AI is going to be a real game changer. There will come a time where AI will be used to create huge parts of a game – AI-generated characters, animations, dialogue, VO, there is so much that AI will be able to tackle.” While this is a genuine possibility, it spells danger for those who are in the games industry at present, as it would leave their jobs dangling in the balance. What will happen to those responsible for animating characters when AI takes over? His statement continues with, “You will be able to, for example, create a game from one single prompt such as ‘make a battle royale set on a pirate ship,’ and your AI will go and do that for you.”
With how controversial Peter Molyneux has been in the past, these responses don’t surprise many people. In addition to adding AI into the game industry mix, he also went on to explain his thoughts on how Hollywood will perceive video games and says that Hollywood is “going to continue to be fascinated with games and keep on coming for more game stories and narrative.” We’ve seen the Fallout TV show, The Last of US TV show, the Super Mario Movie, and recently announced the Minecraft movie.
While Peter Molyneux commented on AI during this interview with Eurogamer, he wasn’t the only veteran games developer to comment, as Shinji Mikami, founder of Tango Gameworks, also explained how AI will make a difference in the game industry. Looking into the far future, Mikami mentioned “there’s not a whole lot that can be changed as far as backgrounds, but animations and stuff like that could all be, in 25 years, completely AI-generated. And so the importance of the creation of backgrounds and actual animations, I feel that there’s going to be a much bigger gap than there is now. That’s one of the things that is a bit daunting.”
AI has accelerated from janky-looking art prompts on Dall-E to fully-fledged videos and imagery that borders reality. For the most part, it is still easy to clock out what is AI and what isn’t, but who knows how fast AI will continue to evolve?
