AI-First Games

Thread/ we're entering a new era in AI-first game creation ☀️

up to now AAA games like Red Dead Redemption 2 cost $500M and took over 3,000 people 8 years to make. with generative AI, small teams can ship at near AAA quality but at a fraction of the cost & time

a few thoughts 👇

1/ as a fusion of art & technology, games are infamously complex & costly to build

@CyberpunkGame took a crack team of 500 developers over 9 years and ~$175M to ship, and was still widely panned at launch for being incomplete

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/style/cyberpunk-2077-video-game-disaster.html

2/ up to now, most game development has followed the triangle theory where a team can only "pick 2" from:

- scope

- cost

- time

building a big, immersive MMO with a small team? expect it to take 10 years

or speed it up by hiring more but it'll cost $$$

3/ genAI promises to break this triangle: enabling good + fast + affordable

imagine Cyberpunk where much of the world was generated, enabling devs to shift from asset production to higher-order tasks like story-telling & innovation

all while shipping in 3 years vs 9

4/ text / dialogue generation is already here

i love this example of how @ammaar used ChatGPT to write a children's storybook with illustrations from @midjourney_ai

https://twitter.com/ammaar/status/1601284293363261441?s=20&t=b7JGateJSu5qlOLU4_XvjQ

5/ all those NPCs in a game? we'll be able to generate those too

millions have already used AI photo app Lensa to create stylized art of themselves

and with @inworld_ai @readyplayerme we can build interactive NPCs using concept art

https://twitter.com/inworld_ai/status/1598346250298032130?s=61&t=oXsq5JVp9F0VjI-TxwkdwQ

6/ for 3D assets, genAI could be the next level of procedural generation which is already used in many games

if you played @Diablo @EldenRing, you spent hours in worlds created with algorithms. 80% of the @EldenRing greenery was procedurally generated

https://www.pcgamer.com/elden-rings-open-world-took-a-lot-more-effort-than-previous-souls-games/

7/ what's exciting is that we're very much still in the early innings. as foundational models improve, we'll see better tooling which flows into better end-user products

the rate of AI research progress has been exponential - just look at this chart

https://twitter.com/JackSoslow/status/1600552300392480768?s=20&t=AFjjrCZKqnKmPgcy89JxKQ

8/ long-term, tools that make it easier for folks to build games will open up the market to new creators, and with them new ideas & gameplay types

a parallel: @TikTok_us enabled unique new forms of video - where else can we find sea shanties like this?

https://twitter.com/recitrachel/status/1349417682341396481?s=20&t=K-OjqXpkiztw7tkPFIo1EA

wrap/ AI-first games are poised to kick off a new cycle of industry disruption on the same level as mobile and cloud

for more on the genAI revolution, see this great blog from my partners @JackSoslow @Gwertz

https://a16z.com/2022/11/17/the-generative-ai-revolution-in-games/

[original tweetstorm link]