Exactly how helpful can AI be to games development? A Reader's Feature offers a very optimistic view of how generative AI might be used in video game development in the future. There are many out there who are terrified about the possibility that AI will take over a large segment of the workforce, but I argue that the gaming industry (as well as many others) is struggling with the cost of making games; we've seen many studios having to lay off staff and 'restructure' to cut costs. And the biggest cost by far is just creating the world! With growing hardware power, it has become more and more difficult to create a graphically beautiful world and characters.
Hundreds of development hours are spent creating a simple landscape, realistic physics, and trying to make sure there are no glitches, like holes in the universe players can fall into. More and more often we've seen AAA games come out that are so glitchy they may as well be beta releases. This has led many studios to start releasing games still in development as early access versions, allowing players to hunt out the glitches without backlash from the community.
Some even turn to releasing retro style games which are incredibly low resolution and low power so the devs can spend more time just creating a good story, side quest lists, and multiple endings based on player choices (in some...
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