Google Cloud’s Chief Global Director, Jack Buser, has claimed during an interview with Mobilegamer.biz that a large number of video game developers utilise AI technology nowadays, but not all of them are comfortable disclosing this yet due to fear of backlash
The executive stated that Gemini and Nano Banana Pro, which are tools provided by Google, are by some developers to remove “the drudgery and repetitive, low value work” during the process of making games, but due to the divisive nature of AI, some companies are opting to keep quiet about its application.
I think what players don’t realise is that their favourite games right now were already built with AI. Those games have shipped. We did a survey around Gamescom last summer with studios all over the world. Roughly nine out of 10 game developers told us ‘yeah, we’re using it’.
Now you’ll see other surveys from other organisations that have that more around like 40-50%. And you might ask yourself, well, that’s still a large number. It’s still almost half of the developers out there. What’s that gap? And that gap is basically the developers’ willingness to tell you whether the fact of the matter is it’s being used.
He went on to state his belief that players may be more accepting of the use of AI in game development if they were aware it was used in some of the titles they have already experienced.
They’ll start to realise this is actually helping me get my favourite games faster. And I’m also getting more innovation in the industry because there’s more room to take risks, and now it’s not seven years waiting for one game, but that studio can make five games, and maybe they understand that only two of those five games will be a hit, but that’s okay because these three other games are really interesting and cool and would have never been made with the old model.
Once that stuff starts happening, and it’s already happening now, you’ll start to see sentiment change.
Buser went on to name Capcom, the studio behind the likes of Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, as one of the developers that utilises AI tools from Google to produce less important assets allowing it to focus its creative efforts the main aspects of a project.
One of the big problems that they have is they’re building these massive worlds and they’ve got to fill it with content. Just coming up with all the ideas for every pebble by the side of the road, every blade of grass, and having all those art reviews, the manual labour just starts piling up in pre production.
What they’re doing is they’re using Nano Banana and Gemini to rapidly generate just countless ideas, and then they’re talking to Gemini to actually go through those ideas and curate them… and of these thousands of things, here are the ones that are probably most interesting to you as the art director.
And then the art director takes that and then gets the art team going on these items, the AI is already pre-filtered and pre-selected the probably really good looking pebbles on the side of the road – and then all of their creative energy gets focused towards the high value creative tasks – the main character, the big enemies, the main scene, objects, that kind of stuff.
The topic of AI in game development has been a controversial and ongoing one, and Take-Two in particular has been quite vocal about its use. Previously, the company’s CEO Strauss Zelnick stated that he doesn’t think a Grand Theft Auto game created by AI would be any good, and revealed that AI has ‘zero part‘ in what Rockstar Games is working on in regards to Grand Theft Auto VI.
Earlier this month, it emerged that the publisher had laid off its AI team, after Luke Dicken, who served as the head of the team revealed that he had lost his job.
[Source – Mobilegamer.giz via VGC]