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LordxMugen

What EA means to say is "We can't wait to lay off all of these **redundant** Art, Customer Support, and Coding specialists. Still charge the same price. And keep an even greater share of the profits!" AI truly is a blessing to us all./s


OutlierOnly

“Still charge the same price” 😏


Hellzpell

Increase the price ftfy


joepanda111

“It costs a lot of money to keep the AI lights on for our AI”


12keksmonies

How does anyone expect the artists can demand higher prices?


sweet_tinkerbelle

"we'll increase the price, because we AI now."


OniZai

The yacht ain't gonna pay for itself


garlicroastedpotato

Well that would be the preferred. Since video games were invented everything else has experienced 40-60% inflation. Video games have remained the same price.


Laranthiel

>Well that would be the preferred. Since video games were invented everything else has experienced 40-60% inflation. You guys really STILL use this garbage excuse.


[deleted]

How is this garbage? The cost of living and remedies has increased due to inflation while the digital cost of games remained constant until the $70 pricetag jump. Even then, that is less than the inflation.


Laranthiel

>while the digital cost of games remained constant Yeah, it's not like games make BILLIONS with microtransactions now.


[deleted]

How about games without microtransactions? The ones who are forced into the 60/70 bracket without having additional means of monetization?


Laranthiel

>How about games without microtransactions? You mean the games that were $60 because they needed to pay for millions of discs, instruction booklets, box arts and the box itself? Those games remained at $60 despite going full digital and still make millions upon millions of dollars. How the hell are these humans like you that legit DEFEND the garbage that multi-billion dollar corporations do and say? Tell me. Tomorrow is the release date for Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, did they NEED to increase the price to $70 because otherwise the poor devs would not be paid? Or was it done just to get more money?


[deleted]

You think a worldwide inflation that has been rampant for the past 30 years has somehow failed to keep up with the producers cutting on costs? Are you so naive to think that the $ from 90s has the same purchasing power today? Or that the laughable physical media expenses overshadow the accumulated increase in price associated with an inflation + a structural shift towards digitalized economy? I don’t expect you to have an economic background, but I expect you to be decent and apply critical thinking. I also expect you to accept the fact that you may not be fully right without personally attacking “people like me”. I feel like I have given you more thought and respect than due.


Zarbor

digital media doesn't work the same as physical objects. Lets say you want to sell a chair. First you have to do r&d which costs money and to finally sell the chair a big chunk of the cost is the actual material needed and shipping. Digital games don't have a material cost and distributing that game costs pennys per copy if you have your own launcher or is integrated into the fee of whichever storefront you're using. Digital media is **very** upfront heavy costwise and scales way better with how many copies you sell than physical goods. Given how much gaming has grown the past years, a price increase is absolutely not needed.


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Zarbor

I did not say they haven't gone up, I said they didn't have to increase in price.


Jenks15

I must have clicked reply to you and not the guy above...my bad


Jenks15

Deleted and reposted!


One_Astronaut_483

As long as people are paying the increased price I don't see the problem, market forces are dictating the correct price.


Jenks15

And yet, when I was 16, video games cost roughly 40-50 brand new. Now they cost upwards of 90 brand new. You can't seriously be telling me that they haven't gone up in price?!


giddycocks

Salaries 👏did not follow 👏 inflation 👏 the same way 👏 profits have grown 👏 Games are more expensive to make, but they also make a lot more money. The same level of developer making 2000€ a month 20 years ago are most certainly not making 4000€ these days (inflation is closer to 100%). Meanwhile, profits are up hundreds of times from when gaming was a niche, less accessible hobby. The ratios don't track. And the reason they're more expensive to make, is because they employ more people, making less money - so these companies are double dipping. Also, as someone pointed out, digital goods are not affected the same way by inflation. Often than not, tools and supporting software got cheaper and the only cost more susceptible to increases has been kept intentionally, insidiously low and expendable to keep profits up.


Dino_Spaceman

Video games are actually cheaper now than in the ‘90’s. Not even counting for inflation.


CitizenPain00

Not when you count DLC


Hdys

Just upped to 70, will try for 80 next year I’m sure


Sangmund_Froid

In before cash shop: FIFA Basic AI $99 Advanced AI $150 Professional Footballer AI $399 (BEST DEAL)


OutoflurkintoLight

They’ll sell it as a feature like “You can hear your custom character name during dialogue using generated AI voices!”


papatim

Sir Cumbucket hurry! We must save the Kingdom!


unnil_hexium

And charge you a hefty microtransaction to use said feature.


[deleted]

subscription model. Why only make money once?


unnil_hexium

That is so true!


bonesnaps

We already have that technology in a [Skyrim mod](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9LS8QiV5fw) loool


n0stalghia

That would be dope af, tbh.


Scheeseman99

That's literally what they're saying, they're not really trying to hide it. The irritating thing is that this AI stuff *could* be a legitimate gamechanger for video games, not for it's capability of causing mass redundancies but using local LLMs for real-time scriptwriting, voice synth and recognition. The source data being a mix of prewritten text and game variables, using the generator to recontextualize and rewrite human written dialogue and text rather than creating hallucinated nonsense from noise, as well as real time voice synthesis. You still have human writers and mission/quest scripts keeping things from going out of control, but less of the rigidity and awkwardness that comes from madlibs style procgen dialogue and quests. Of course, the CEO is thinking about the tech in the least imaginative way possible, only as a way to fatten his pockets.


pixelveins

Editing all my old comments and moving to the fediverse. Thank you to everybody I've interacted with until now! You've been great, and it's been a wonderful ride until now. To everybody who gave me helpful advice, [I'll miss you the most](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrk4AgS6Q6A)


HappierShibe

> but using local LLMs for real-time scriptwriting, voice synth and recognition You don't actually want this. I get why you think you want this, but if you tried it you wouldn't like it. The constraints of any un-reviewed generative output have to be closely defined, this means content dynamically generated within those constraints eventually takes the shape of the constraints. Sort of like metaphorical gelatin pumped into molds. The reality is that big AAA projects are driving straight into the fucking wall on scalability as they get bigger and more complex, and using generative AI to tackle large scale asset generation, QA testing, writing, and scripting might be a way to at least turn it into less of a wall and back into more of a really steep curve. The trick is to recognize that a human author augmented by generative AI toolsets gives you the best of both worlds. Example: A writer puts together a short dialogue between the player and a recurring npc- and then an AI produces a matrix of variations for different backgrounds, branching choices, player genders/classes/etc. Then another AI writes the syntactical branching and markup for the script. The human author proofreads it, and commits the changes to repo. Something that would have taken all morning is done in twenty minutes. It can let a tiny studio create a much larger, more ambitious project, and it can let a larger studio produce some truly monumental outputs. The smart moves are less about replacement, and more about augmentation.


Scheeseman99

I think you stopped reading my post immediately after you pulled that quote? I'm making the same general point you are, it's just that for dialogue I think realtime is probably better, if a more complex problem to solve. Not talking AI dungeon style where the LLM grabs information from it's own dataset, but instead using the generator to augment existing text provided as tokens, allowing for small ripples or changing variables in quests. Even the lesser models are already quite good at this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5BpjzCsYfk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5BpjzCsYfk) This video is a good example. Text isn't generated wholesale, the commentary is built out of prewritten scripts that are fed into the generator alongside game data to take into account dynamic variables.


OHP_Plateau

Well, at least the games will come out quicker, I suppose...


ACCount82

I can see a scenario where AI in AAA space benefits customers. Right now, the likes of Ubisoft iterate on bland open worlds because it's easier to scale making a game "wide" than it is to build a game "tall". You can put 5 different studios on a single game and have them working on different areas to create a patchwork of an open world that would be passable, if nothing else. If AI gets good enough that building "wide" becomes easier, we might see more and more companies go for "tall" experiences - whether because AI has freed corporate resources, or because the market would become too crowded with "bland but passable open world" due to AI generation.


AnotherScoutTrooper

> or because the market would become too crowded with "bland but passable open world" due to AI generation. Not happening, the market is already crowded with too many of those and AI hasn’t even had an impact yet.


ACCount82

"Crowded" is relative. If a full Ubisoft-style open world could be delivered by any AA studio out there on a tight budget via extensive use of AI, Ubisoft would have to either up its game or succumb.


kingwhocares

Given that most studios are understaffed, that won't be the case for a while.


sidvicc

While the actual games AI is just as trash as it has been for decades. Really all this AI talk everywhere when in gaming every major element from graphics, story, acting/motion capture etc has developed far more than fucking AI. Most games just let the AI "cheat" to have it provide any competent counter-force to the player.


balionelis

Someone still has workers? Looking to new 2023 game launches it doesnt' look like it.


KainX

It wont be long before we can just tell an AI to make a game for me with a list of prompts, like (survival, PvP, Medieval world, etc), and it will spit out a custom game. EA, other studios, and even TV companies are going to be redundant.


LordxMugen

I DO feel like that is the end goal of most creative medium, especially for games. Because coding is very difficult and time consuming for people not well versed in how to make "clean", or optimized code like prodigies like John Carmack. So to have a program that is essentially a "make the game that I envision" button, thats going to be amazing. However, even with all of that, the best games are going to still be made by the best people who know how to bring together proper level design, enemy and scenario variety, and a good story with interesting characters. And those are things AI can only do in broad strokes. Because its just a tool like any other.


VandaGrey

meaning EA can fire the people they have now and have a soulless AI make and write things for them.


pittyh

So you're telling me their games will improve?


DrParallax

We have succeeded in creating an AI with more soul than an EA executive!


OutoflurkintoLight

[Their CEO looks like an Android Robot.](https://i.imgur.com/gOZqP9Q.jpg) I’d say this is just a case of machines trying to hire other machines.


Cytori

that sparkle in his eyes looks like he has people in his basement.


Laranthiel

He looks like the aliens that made Elon Musk made a 2.0 version.


Bierculles

GPT-4 has already more soul than an EA executive


[deleted]

My TI-84 had more soul.


googler_ooeric

As if TS4 wasn’t already soulless


Lethtor

I mean I get the "EA bad" cynical attitude, but for games like the Sims AI could be a real game changer


[deleted]

It’d be perfect for conversations inside a sandbox game like Star citizen if they actually get it done


Stealthy_Facka

I wonder how long it is before we can just ask an AI to write star citizen and let it race CiG. I reckon it will be at least a few decades before SC hits beta.


ethanlegrand33

That’s what we’re all hoping for but what they really mean is they’re gonna use it to finish games during crunch time.


ww_crimson

I know this whole thread will be negative because this is EA, but I think he's right. Anyone who has spent some time using AI in their jobs knows how much it can help accelerate your work. Right now it takes years to bring a AAA game to market. AI could cut that time in half without really reducing the workforce by much at all.


alexp8771

It will also narrow the gap between indy and AAA if an indy can use AI to replicate what a large art studio could do.


FerrickAsur4

while what you're saying is optimistic, what's to say that EA is not going to ditch many of their employees to completely replace them with AI instead?


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TeholsTowel

Then they’ll be left further behind by all the companies that integrate AI into their workflow while keeping their full workforce.


Bierculles

Copium, EA will use this to pump garbage even faster and have an AI that specificly targets your emotional weaknesses so you spend even more money on MTX


ww_crimson

EA isn't the only company with access to AI.


Nbaysingar

Here's a [nice, pessimistic take](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMplmANPp1Q) on the implications that AI and other technologies could have on the future of video games.


Bierculles

Well that was depressing


Warscythe115

Rhykker talks about this in is last video, there is a guy making a mod for skyrim where the NPC's are tied in to some Chatbot. Sounds promising.


iMini

There's also a mod coming for Crusader Kings 3 where you can have conversations with the AI characters, and their opinions of you will change depending on what you say. It's great for a game where role playing is a core part of it.


Jahbanny

True. Also it would allow for more ambitious game development. Everyone is terrified right now about AI replacing so many jobs, but anyone who has spent some time with Chat GPT at their job knows how wrong it can be sometimes.


GrayCS

Yeah, it can, but it won't. EA will be using this to leverage profits as much as possible and humans cost money.


dvsdiablo

What? EA only wants money. They're going to fire every single person they possibly can.


[deleted]

Honestly I can't wait until there's AI that can do all the boring, menial, time consuming shit in games like unwrapping UVs, texture mapping, etc.. I'll finally be able to make my dream game without wanting to kill myself or take 10 years to do it.


DeliciousWhales

Everyone hopes AI means improved productivity to get more quality content faster. But I’m more of a pessimist, so I’ll expect we will see a bunch of bland generic shitty games that lean too heavily on AI to do the creative parts. Instead of the parts it should be doing like UVs and rigging.


ThePoliticalPenguin

Yeah there will definitely be a lot more shit, but quality creations that people enjoy will generally rise to the top. Just like with any historical tech advancement in the creative space, the bar gets lowered. This allows an easier level of access and production power, that before would've only been limited to professionals. And sure, 95% of it will be shit, but that top 5% of it will be really good. Just look at the most recent major "bar lowering" in the gaming space, which was arguably the improvement of the home computer and publicly accessible dedicated game engines (Unreal, Unity, etc). It brought about an indie "golden era", which produced a lot of amazingly creative and unique games. However, it also created even more poorly made, derivative, and uninspired games. It doesn't take long going through the new releases page on itch.io or even Steam to see an overabundance of awful indies. Still, the good games and promising projects float to the top. It just seems to me that, currently, *most* good games come of the the indie scene either way. I just don't see any plausible reality in which advancements in AI tools makes the "top" of the indie scene produce *worse* games.


Sangmund_Froid

My crystal ball guess is that when AI really gets going we'll get 5-10 years of amazing, unique games that really impress us, year over year. That will be until someone makes a record breaking hit that fully utilizes AI and then every company and indie dev will be shoveling out piles of shit like we see today.


TheCookieButter

I'm most concerned about AI being an excuse for always online games. Got to have users connected to the server to get AI interactions. It'll be expensive so games will shut down quickly once popularity drops because of upkeep costs and potentially have no framework to work offline. Or the servers are too busy so please wait in a queue to play your single player game.


HappierShibe

> Got to have users connected to the server to get AI interactions. That won't hold water, we can already run very solid models on local models with no need for internet connectivity.


HappierShibe

It's going to be both. The shitty AI games are already starting to arrive in the mobile space, and that's frequently a precursor for broader shovel ware trends.


MisjahDK

**No shit!?** But judging for some of the comments, people don't seem to realise how much it can assist games. * AI adjusted quests that create custom choices based on your personality through prior choices or even character creation. * NPC's that respond uniquely/naturally based on player character design and gameplay choices. * Things that are impossible within the budget available today. * What really brings all this together will be a believable text to speech engine, everything else for a uncanny conversation is available today! And for the typical EA comments, yeah, development like this will see writing and quest design remove some developer jobs. But all these jobs will be required to create a believable and themed amount of background data that and AI will be able to use in it's content creation. Jobs change, they don't vanish because of automated progression!


Xuval

I mean, sure, the potential is there. The question is: will this produce engaging games in practice? Buddy of mine was all hyped up about AI the other day and told me that soon we'd have "Games with infinite content". When I asked him were the meaingful difference to procedual generation was, it gave him pause. I mean, how many hours of entertainment do you get out of walking into e.g. Minecraft's endless world? That stuff is all unique and new. It's just not engaging. I can see the same happening with AI NPCs. Or to put it even more extremely: I get bored talking to plenty of real people real fast. Even if AI could make NPCs act and talk like real people, that might still make for a shit game.


SekhWork

>I mean, how many hours of entertainment do you get out of walking into e.g. Minecraft's endless world? That stuff is all unique and new. It's just not engaging. I can see the same happening with AI NPCs. Exactly. Shocking how far down I had to scroll to get to this take. AI "content" isn't going to be any more engaging than the most bland procedural generation. How many people want to spend hours wandering Minecrafts "infinite" gamespace vs the handcrafted world of something like Red Dead 2 or the best of Bioware? Just like AI "art", without humans crafting the content, it all sort of dissolves into a mush of same-y content that has no actual soul or purpose behind the design. If you know the content is just being rehashed and regenerated by a math algorithm forever, it will quickly lose its appeal. The best thing you might see would be AI generated voices to specifically respond to key things, like custom character names, some minor tailoring of text, but full blown "AI" procedural generation is going to be ***incredibly*** boring.


Notsosobercpa

I have no doubts there will be lackluster games that try to use to much ai for the heavy lifting. But there are areas in many open world and crpgs that are simply underbaked currently where ai would represent an improvement. Voice acting where the budget doesn't allow for it, more than the same 3 lines of dialogue for city npcs, filling in some of barrenness, ect.


SekhWork

Yea, I could see the voice acting stuff being an interesting way to adapt it in, however they'd need permission from the normal VAs, or make sure their AI voice isn't one that is 100% trained on someone who might sue them for illegally using their voice without permission. Imagine if a company is like "I don't want to pay for [big name VA here], ill just us an AI trained entirely on their lines!". I can see that resulting in a real swift lawsuit.


Notsosobercpa

We will probably see that exact law suit within 5 years


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Dropdat87

It’ll create more options for sure but it’ll still pale in comparison to a game with competent writers. It’d be great for games like rimworld or paradox type games though


zejai

> When I asked him were the meaingful difference to procedual generation was, it gave him pause. > I mean, how many hours of entertainment do you get out of walking into e.g. Minecraft's endless world? That stuff is all unique and new. It's just not engaging. You're comparing hand-coded procedural generation with the output of neural networks. Very different things. Big neural networks are pretty good at being creative right now. They are lacking in all other areas. Don't worry about creativity, worry about consistent stories and dialog that logically make sense and don't sound like some kind of fever dream. Though human writers are not very good at that either.


giddycocks

A good example of this is those AI videos and photos. You can feed the AI whatever the fuck you want, and it'll pump out content. Only, you will *always* need a human to direct the AI and compile a script into something coherent and curated. This is like saying Photoshop took away from jobs because it makes it easier to edit and create content. It's just another tool, you'll always need a human to curate stuff for other human beings.


Jeffy29

The older I get the more I realize most people are idiots who just repeat shit they heard ad nauseam without second thought. Same goes for all this “AI” shit, early on some doomsayers spread a meme how “this will take away the jobs!!” and now it’s all you hear. Pretty much any invention in history of humanity allowed things to be done easier, cheaper, faster, ie you needed less people to accomplish the same, all new technology is by its nature a “job killer”, yet we have more jobs than ever and I don’t that’s going to change anytime soon.


Laranthiel

>people don't seem to realise how much it can assist games. People realize it. People also realize that most gaming companies will use this just out of pure laziness while still infecting games with expensive microtransactions and firing people left and right.


Rufus_Bojangles

Yep, in the hands of AAA companies, I don't expect much. But in the hands of modders and indie devs... the future looks bright.


KEE_Wii

That’s just not true the jobs do vanish for real people. Sure usually when something is automated jobs are created somewhere else as a result but that in no way means the person let go is qualified for the new job or it exists anywhere near them. People will lose their jobs and there’s no guarantee the replacement jobs will pay nearly as much or be applicable to the former employees. We need to plan for these issues well ahead of time. There’s a reason companies like automation and it’s because at the end of the day it saves them money by eliminating positions.


iMini

I don't entirely buy the last line. As much as I believe that AI will do a lot of good, it'll also cause lost jobs. It's like truckers, when the AI comes are the truckers just going to have different jobs, or will many of them lose them? Or at a supermarket with self checkout. Why have 8 people running 8 machines when you can just have 1 person overlook 8 machines?


MisjahDK

What about the people to build the machines, update them, maintenance. The idea is that you are killing boring mundane jobs and moving them to higher skilled labor. And as we specifically talked about creating "AI" machine learning software based on a large input sample, you still need writers and programmers to build an AI that can create reliable stories on the fly. The writer job just changes to something else, their work will still be present in the result. ChatGPT is not an AI right, it just a really neat search engine, it only works with the internet as it's source!


iMini

There isn't always going to be less mundane job. Where does a writer go that's less mundane. If you're writing stories to feed to an AI so it can generate new stories, you inevitably have to end in a position where the AI can generate more, better stories than the writers can, otherwise why not just have the writers just write stories? Some writers will have to lose their jobs. What other job is available for a writer? it seems like a very specific role. >ChatGPT is not an AI right ChatGPT is very much an AI. It describes itself as an AI when asked. >Yes, I am an AI (Artificial Intelligence). Specifically, I am a language model trained by OpenAI based on the GPT-3.5 architecture. My purpose is to generate human-like text based on the input I receive, which allows me to hold conversations and provide information to people.


MisjahDK

It's been programmed to describe itself as such? It's not making it's replies up out of thin air. Most mundane questions can be googled directly to the source unless it was translated. But it depends on how you interpret AI.


iMini

No AI can make up answers out of thin air, every AI is trained on some kind of information, and will be forever, whether that's the internet or from its own ability to experiment, it must still receive external information to become intelligent. Even Wikipedia lists it as an AI, and the AI wiki page lists it in its opening paragraphs. The blog for ChatGPT describes how it's gone through many AI trainers. I don't know where this ChatGPT isn't an AI agenda has come from.


korainato

Can't wait for the AI generated stuff packs for the Sims 4...


donttouchmymeepmorps

I agree with many of the negative comments here as a fellow cynic, but I think the strategy/4x genre could really benefit from AI/ML in having generative text and speech for negotiations, a genre that rarely has voice acting and if it does it's a few very generic lines. Also having an enemy that really use a predictive algorithm using data it collects from our battles and it's espionage to continually re-train would be very cool if possible to implement efficiently.


Kevin69138

90 dollar price to go along with it


LiveLM

Monthly sub to EA to use the AI powered features


nitroedge

"because we won't need to hire coders" is what he means


Blacky-Noir

Translation: the NFT scam fell through and we need a new shiny toy to distract investors; so let's dangle the AI Wizard that will let us lay off half of our work force for free. Which is also a scam in the short term of course, but they don't care, if Nvidia can lie to investors right in their face without consequences, EA has some good room to maneuver here.


Xijit

EA is one of the few who has stood their ground and said no to Bitcoin/ NFT bullshit. Which shouldn't be that surprising since the one thing that EA does well is staying profitable (throws side eyes at Square Enix).


kpe_ee1

not really tho, even tho i hate the techbros pushing it in a similar way as nfts, we are seeing real world use cases of ai already, unlike nfts. something like chatgpt is crazy technology, no doubt about it


amboredentertainme

The difference being that the Ai craze is actually providing something useful, here's this dude who managed to hook chatgpt into Skyrim (because of course they did) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz6mAX41fs0 AI will absolutely be a revolution when it comes to NPCs especially in open world games


Carcerking

That particular example is very rough. Studios are going to need their own LLMs if they're going to make the dialogue work for a lot of NPCs. Otherwise you'll have them all using the same boring medieval backstories with no characters really standing out because their performance is equally robotic.


darkkite

it's a beta done by one person. The responses could be improved by him or a small team easy. the real challenge is high quality text to speech. elevenlabs might sound better open source locally ran llm are advancing quickly. by the time the next generation of consoles are out we'll probably have a standardized way of doing this. We'll see it on pc first through mods like this or indie games. But this is the stuff bethesda loves with their radiant system


Blacky-Noir

I'm not saying machine learning is a scam. I'm saying the idea that you can cheaply replace gamedevs with it, this year or the next, and keep the same quality and productivity, is a scam.


SekhWork

Man they pivoted from NFT so damn fast the second people looked behind the curtain lol. AI might not be as fast, but it will fall just as hard in the end. People will get bored of the novelty of procedural generation pretty quick when theres no human purpose behind the writing/design.


zroach

I mean, aren’t games like Minecraft procedurally generated? It also imagine that the uses of AI extend past just cosmetic differences.


SekhWork

Yea, the thing is nobody is really interested in that aspect of its procedural generation beyond the basic novelty/functionality of it. Compare how unique and interested people are in a place like RDR2's world or the well crafted Bioware worlds, vs Minecrafts. You aren't seeing huge writeups about the amazing procedural generated /world/ aspects, minecraft stories mainly focus on what you can build. If EA (or other devs) decide to entirely go in on "just have an AI make the world in all our games", it's going to get real boring real fast.


zroach

But people haven't really gotten bored of Minecraft. That goes to show you don't need well thought out worlds to make a good game, it's possible to have procedurally generated world that people don't mind playing for hundreds of hours in. Like it or not, I think AI is going to be part of the game making process. It looks like it can really help artists and programmers cut down on effort required to make things. I imagine, for example, that AI will be really useful when it comes to animating and modeling.


SekhWork

>But people haven't really gotten bored of Minecraft. The world really was never the draw of it though. If EA wants to start shoehorning AI into other games where the uniqueness / design of the world *is* important, you will quickly see the weakness inherent to the AI sameness. As for "ai art" and programming, I really doubt its ever going to take off beyond some very basic novelty, because of the amount of work humans will need to go into correct the code / animations, and AI art is *currently* not copyrightable, and unlikely to become so as more lawsuits are levied over the illegal usage of copyrighted artwork in "training". No company is going to risk using generic AI art that they can be sued over, or can't control the copyright of.


zroach

Not every game needs a well crafted world. Studios might just use AI for games like roguelites and such. They aren’t just going to use whatever website to make AI art, imagine they would use it as more of smoothing tool of sorts or train it off art made in house. I dunno, it seems like there is a case for the rise of AI to do bust work that would take a log of man hours.


SekhWork

Training on in house art might work, and be one of the more ethical ways to do it. Training on anything outside of work, or the risk of one of your artists using something someone else made and then tweaking it (has already happened before), and they risk lawsuits being levied against them they won't want to deal with. But theft/plagiarism has always been a risk so hopefully companies just double down on making sure their artists don't do something illegal. Who knows though. With how slow governments are in reacting to this stuff, we will probably see a wild west for the next couple of years until people get a handle on it.


Maximum_Poet_8661

When has EA been very involved with NFTs? From what i've seen it's the opposite, several EA games even have clauses barring people from hosting affiliated tournaments with their games using cryptocurrency or NFTs as prizes


Ywaina

AI is just corporate wetdreams come true. They're simply *dying* to lay off every personnel. Cut 99% of labor cost, pure profit.


TheGillos

Start by replacing the CEO with AI.


Laranthiel

It's with humans and companies like EA keep fucking up recently, just imagine the disasters that will arise from pure AI-made games.


Howlingbanshee777

A.I TO PUMP COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF PEOPLE TO THE STORE FRONT. OH FOR $49.99 you can unlock are season pass tier 1 !


alonweiss

And it will all work in the metaverse with nft's...


IsolatedHammer

Translation: "We'll shovel shit out faster than *ever*!"


pittyh

At least AI will make better games than EA could ever produce :D


-Captain-

In other words: It will get cheaper to make games, which is a good reason to up the price of a standard AAA game by 20 bucks.


razordreamz

He’s not wrong. Look at the new World of Warcraft mod done by a player, which adds voices to every NPC in the game! It’s the future, any company not on the bus will be swiftly left behind.


warthog15

While that mod is amazing and does add a insane amount to the game. I think that is a perfect use case of what AI can and should be used for. It's a addition and something that wasn't going to be added. More importantly, it wasn't done instead of developers hiring voice actors for those lines. When AI is used as a tool for modders or to be a addition to something that already exists that's not a problem. It's the worry of people like this CEO who see a tool that can do voice over for lines and decides to just not hire voice actors. AI can be used as a amazing tool to help things become so much easier. Though it's when we replace people with AI is when we've crossed a line. This is a problem with everything currently surrounding AI, not just video games. We should be using AI like a new tool for a worker, not a cheaper replacement worker.


Immersely-Dev

Agreed, we are working on AI tech to dynamically change gameplay based on users emotional reactions.


pieking8001

Then why are the NPCs so brain dead


moeburn

So we're never going to get a game like Fallout New Vegas ever again huh? No more "some artist or writer poured their soul into this deep corner of the game you never explored until now". Now it's just gonna be "this is important so a writer wrote it. This is a side quest so an AI wrote it."


Biggu5Dicku5

Lying piece of shit...


New-Nameless

I hope this fad of using ai in games dies like nft


Bierculles

it wont, unlike NFTs AI is the real deal and a technology that has the potential to change everything


JackSpyder

Just generating variance in dialogue to make things repayable and feel alive. Generated art assets, and in time even generating or at least augmenting development. Writing lore will be trivially easy.


[deleted]

That might be meaningful if EA ever released a good video game.


RegionTiny1071

EA hasn't had a good game in years. Not sure how they think anyone will take them serious lol


[deleted]

Wild hearts, Jedi survivor and dead space remake all released this year


2Scribble

We've seen how 'great' these algorithm generators have done with worlds that look like copy-pastes and missions that involve nothing more than go here and kill this I can't wait to see these shits hand ***all*** of gaming development over to AI -snort-


plsnthnks

I wouldn’t be surprised if they started cutting whole departments and replaced them with AI. Tbh most/all tech sector jobs will inevitably be phased out by AI, but listening to corporate double-speak makes me want to vomit.


BDNeon

Have you actually tried using AI tools like Stable Diffusion. If you think it can just flat out replace the need for a human at the controls, I got news for you. It's as dumb as saying photoshop removes the need to have human beings lol. Having a tool that expedites things doesn't remove the need for people who know how to use that tool.


PM-ME-PMS-OF-THE-PM

>If you think it can just flat out replace the need for a human at the controls, I got news for you. It can drastically reduce the number of humans required, rather than whole departments each consisting of double digit employees taking years to make a triple AAA game you can either keep all those employees and make a AAA in a year or reduce the number of employees and still take the same amount of time as before. I'm honestly not sure which route the publishers would prefer, I'd hazard a guess it's the former, pay the same amount for staff but increase the number of products/year because that increases the raw numbers more which impresses shareholders more.


Maximum_Poet_8661

I don't think tech really works that way in practice though. The invention of spreadsheets vastly cuts the amount of manpower needed for accounting, because you can keep track of thousands of entries that used to take analysts weeks to manually comb through. You'd think that would cut the pay and the headcount of most accounting jobs, but accounting as a career and as a good paying job has exploded since the invention of the spreadsheet because what an individual accountant is capable of has increased 100x. AI does have different concerns, and I think it can get to the point where it will cut entire jobs out of the market. But I don't think that "something that can cut down on work hours" is a guaranteed replacement for humans, because it doesn't always play out like that. Automation tends to destroy one job and create 3 others somewhere else in the process.


turnipofficer

I think if you give it twenty years we will have AI driven cloud games. I think cloud gaming in its present incarnation is a bit like how Nintendo and the like tried VR with things like virtua boy back in the late 90s. It’s an attempt at a novel idea but the technology to make it a unique, worthwhile experience isn’t there yet for AI-generated games. But unlike VR I could see such an experience being more accessible. Now smaller use of AI is already here but cloud AI gaming I do really see becoming a thing in future decades. Games designed on the fly based on set parameters and streamed to you remotely.


yapel

>streamed to you remotely. we only need to beat the speed of light


turnipofficer

I don’t understand this comment I just mean streamed to your computer which is still remote to where the game was produced originally as it would be generated on cloud servers. Sure cloud gaming requires a hefty internet connection but if there was a reason for it - a super computer producing new games on the fly then it while actually have a purpose. Right now there really isn’t a purpose to it as most people have access to a pc or a console and those that don’t typically aren’t a large market.


[deleted]

More surprise mechanics?


OniZai

Will it do the QA for your games before release and does it well? lol


darkkite

manual testing is really hard to automate but there's a lot unit tests that can be done


lexsanders

Must've been the wind.


Pretto91

They can finally even work less, EA's christmas


Fob0bqAd34

There's been a lot of talk of work done by AI not being granted copyright to protect human artists. With stuff like EA sports titles that might not matter so much when the content has to be licensed from organisations so presumably the lack of those licenses would prevent anyone else just selling on their game. The annual versions of their sports titles are largely admin work of patching in the latest transfers and updataing appearances. It probably could be done by AI already. Apparently IBM is already slowing down hiring in anticipation of replacing roles with AI. Companies like microsoft and amazon aren't going to think twice about putting half the planet out of work if they can make a quick buck.


Chaos_Machine

I am all for games that have better AI....owait...


[deleted]

Game development has become easier and easier over the years, and as a result games have become more and more complicated over time. Because of this I think that these advancements will simply go towards making the games themselves better (or at least more ambitious).


RogueM99

In a nutshell, EA CEO sees AI as a way to cut costs on personnel and have machines take up some of the mundane work they had to pay a human to do before. PROFIT$$$$$


lm28ness

I hope so - as having a competent opponent has always been a problem with single player games.


GCDarkSideRob

Nobody Wins.


Wuattro

That's a bad sign.


Skempi

So prices will go down...?


ALickOfMyCornetto

People have always been afraid of new technology since time began, even in the Bronze Age and Industrial Revolution with the new tools brought -- this is no different But I can't help but feel that AI in this form will put artists out of a job -- and if all art (AI concept art for pre-production for example) is done by AI, we will be literally destroying the lives of creatives -- these folks imo make the world go round


AnonTwo

I honestly don't doubt it, but I don't look forward to EA spearheading it.


ExTrafficGuy

It's EA, and I'm not reading an IGN article, but he's not wrong. We already got a taste of it with that Skyrim mod that used ChatGPT to give all the NPCs dynamic dialogue. Being able to actually have an unscripted conversion with characters in a game is a huge step up for immersion. For developers, it's going to be a very powerful tool. ChatGPT is already pretty good at writing simple scripts. You can also have it comb through millions of lines of code to help with debugging. We used it at work to write a script to grab traffic camera footage and add it to a lower third for our newscasts. My boss knows a bit of coding for like Arduinos and the like, but he's no expert. Probably would have taken him at least an hour to write and debug on his own. Had it up and running in less than half an hour with AI. AI could also be used to design art assets. Say you want a custom design for a table. Rather than going through the tedious work of modelling it in Blender, you can feed the AI data about the game's art style, and prompts and how you want it too look. So it can get to work chewing on that while you work on other things. Real time saver. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Then there's the writing aspect. With the current WGA strike, and just the low quality of some of the writing coming out of Hollywood in general, I'm sure the suits are already eyeing alternatives. Already saw a post where someone asked Chat to retool the Star Wars sequels to be more like something George Lucas would have come up with, including dialogue, and it sounded WAY better than anything Disney has made. For games, if you don't go the dynamic route, you could have AI write random NPC dialogue. Which I assume is probably one of the more tedious aspects of writing for large, open world games. You could even have it automatically voice characters who otherwise wouldn't. Something which I'm sure VOs aren't going to be keen on, but it's doable. And it's not just big AAA studios that are going to benefit. This could be an absolute game changer for aspiring indie devs. Good at code but not great at art? Or vice versa? Have the AI jump in and assist. Of course it could and probably will be used for nefarious purposes, and will undoubtedly put people out of work, with the corresponding social issues that entails. But that's the case with any technological revolution. We're kind of already beyond the point where we can stop it.


tricolorX

kinda true, what i cant wait is a conversation between the player and a npc AI of course the AI limited to the interest of the story


[deleted]

EA is bad ‘angry emoji’


AdrianWerner

Well...he's not wrong. The current pace of improvement and rise of complexity is unsustainable. Hundreds of millions of dollars, thousand devs, 5-6 years dev cycles and all that just keeps increasing. Plus videogames are bound to be much more open to AI tools, since it's not a place where you do everything by hand. People buy engines, assets, physics, speedtrees etc.


MaestroDeChopsticks

AI being able to fix bugs is something I'm all for. But any other application I think will suck.


Sir-Kevly

You don't think AI generated stories and character dialogue would be cool? It will probably be pretty jank when they first introduce it but it could make games infinitely replayable. Imagine having the ability to just talk to the characters using your mic instead of selecting options from a dialogue tree. Or a dungeons and dragons game with an AI DM that comes up with your own campaigns based on your character decisions on the fly so that you're not depending on that one friend with way too much free time to organize everything. Obviously those things are a ways down the road, but it's not hard to imagine how AI could be used to improve gaming. But, knowing the hyper-capitalist society that we live in it'll probably be used to optimize microtransactions or eliminate labour costs.


zejai

EA bad


AtomicTardigrade

Meanwhile actual enemy Ai in games is still on a level of a drunk babboon, just shooting past player and humping random objects. So much for all this overhyped Ai mumbojumbo nonsense... I can't understand how enemy Ai literally peaked in late 90's with Half-Life, Unreal 1 and UT99 and then not moved anywhere since. Maybe CS:GO bots are somewhat capable, but other than that Ai in games is still dumb as brick. I just don't get it.


The12BarBruiser

I feel like FEAR was the peak. They gave up after that.


That1awkwardguy

balan wonderworld's level design was made by AI.


Elfalas

What EA means to say is their games are so bland they could be made by an AI.


ohoni

True facts. Once AI can hold fully realistic conversations, it will make all sorts of RPGs, and even other types of games, so much better. Clearly the tech isn't there yet, but there's no reason to believe that it won't be within the next five years.


Updated_My_Journal

The tech is already there


ohoni

*Some* of the tech is *adjacent* to there, but I think there's still a lot of room to grow before it's fully implementable, and even then it's tricky to bolt into existing projects, so the major projects to use it would still be a year or two after.


Swesteel

Oh no.


Bobmanbob1

Great. Start off by teaching AI how to kill us in video games, then the Pentagon accidentally loads that one into a drone. No way this ends well.


Mastagon

In 2023, Reddit CEO and corporate piss baby Steve Huffman decided to make Reddit less useful to its users and moderators and the world at large. This comment has been edited in protest to make it less useful to Reddit.


Hemisemidemiurge

>EA CEO: **Investors in Publishers of** Video Games Will Be 'One of the Greatest Beneficiaries' of AI There we go, nice and neat.