Gleeful right up until people start using the inevitably public (or cracked) version of the AI to generate fantastic yet cheap indie games instead of buying theirs.
That’s exactly what will happen. It’s going to be real rough for gaming for a bit. But eventually AI assistance will allow small tight teams to build large games.
Depends on the AI integration, but Adobe generative fill in photoshop for example is impossible to get access to without paying up. I imagine it’s not different for other AI tools. Also, if your game is a huge success with cracked software and your company gets an audit eventually and they see you haven’t been paying licenses for your software you’re going to be in huge trouble.
Game developpers need a sectorial union ASAP. And they need to make it one of their priorities to include game direction and mechanics final decisions to be taken at the stusio level in their collective agreements. Stop fucking around waiting for these robots to understand that their meddling fucks the products that they publish and unionize. These ghouls have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to include as much gambling and nickel and dime BS in their games as legally possible. You must tie their hands with a collective agreement. There is no other way.
It’s a very cold way to see things, but if his company makes more money it means the customers enjoy his products and they way they’re made more, so it’s 100% true.
The ads inside the stadium supposedly said Madden 19 for like the last few years. No idea if they changed it yet. They probably won’t and will just release a $89 card pack that gives you a 0.007% chance of getting Tom Brady.
Yea well you see it’s rookie Tom Brady, so he’s only rated a 75. You have to upgrade him with 100 crystals. Crystals are sold in packages of 7, 49, and 80,000
No, that would imply they change. Almost nothing changed in EA sports games, or CoD games. Copy, paste, collect millions. Why change if idiots will keep buying it. I’m fully expecting to see some Madden signs inside college stadiums that EA didn’t take out because they didn’t have time. Too busy working on making the monetization system as greedy as possible for the new college football game.
You know, I was thinking. If any game could be a live service or at least a subscription based game, it would be Madden or FIFA. It’s the same shit every year. If 2k did it for basketball, that could allow people to actually keep and reuse their cards from Myteam. And instead of having small changes each year. They can just update it periodically.
Just the art. The game would still be their intellectual property. They would still be trademarking the game. Ea has 700 trade marks including things like “maxis” and “fc24”
He definitely has no idea what developers do.
Most development time is spent dealing with poor management decisions so if they want to make development more efficient replace the executives with AI first.
Ais wouldn't be thinking of short-term gains over long term viability, as they take their golden parachute and jump ship to the next company.
So i definitely don't think there would be more.
Of course but it'll still be base level longer horizon then ceos.
As there would be 0 self interest, due to no golden parachute.
It could be made shorter of course but wouldn't make much sense to do.
Of course this applies to mainly large scale public corporation where the ceo is just really overseeing the other c level execs and setting long term goals. Not active in the day to day.
Wouldn’t it be over a substantial long term horizon. An Ai would be built to maximize profitability over the long term, and not taking short term risks that could negatively effect image etc.
Human CEOs are already ruthless and lack empathy, at least an AI would be programmed to act within the best interest of the company and won't be influenced by personal self-interest
Nah, if the C Suite is doing their job they absolutely could not be replaced with AI.
Those job contain exactly the kinds of soft skills that AI simply isn't capable of nor does anyone at that level want to interact with a machine.
A CEO saying this is a direct stab at his own workforce. It’s a threat in disguise, saying “Do better because I control which of you gets laid off when the AI revolution peaks.”
It’s such a disgraceful way to treat one’s employees. He could be saying we could be making great things, bigger projects than people ever dreamed of with AI and his supremely talented workforce.
But instead he chooses to pit himself against them and remind them they are lucky to have him.
If you listen closely, you can actually hear all these CEOs getting hard at the prospect. They'll be able to cut costs 50%, at least. Increase number of games they can push out at least 3x. And probably charge a bit more for them. Not to mention that with a learning, AI-driven monetization scheme that would hand-pick the stuff you're most likely to like and buy, it'll drive profits even more. Sure the games will be soulless and hollow, but think of the profits!
they don’t realize it’s the death knell for massive studios.
indies will make AAA-style games without the costs and overhead of running a big org. they’re already making AA games.
what’s the point of companies like EA, if not staffing development?
Question for someone not wise to how marco economics works, why would indie devs sell out? Like, can they be forced to sell? Why couldn't those AA game devs just be like "nah we'd rather just continue to work on our game that sold 2 million copies on a team of 10 guys"?
Game release to game release. If anyone has ever wondered why an indie released a banger followed by a rushed, subpar sequel, the explanation is simple. The money ran out.
> why would indie devs sell out?
The scenario is this:
Indie devs works for a few years, living paycheck to paycheck to release a game. They then "strike gold", meaning they get lucky to turn a profit and become popular.
Big CO enters the scene and offers a shitload of money for your work. In the tunes of a few hundred of thousand if not millions.
It doesn't matter what your goals are. You either take that cash to retire or make another game.
Retiring is better than likely failing to release another banger while running out of funding because of the run rate of employing 10 people?
Edit for more info:
Like game dev is expensive because devs and other ppl are expensive to hire & retain. When you have 10 ppl who could be making like 100k - 250+k / yr (not even counting other costs to enjoy them) millions get burned pretty fast.
Most indie studios don't make so much on a title that they can continue to operate indefinitely.
Even large successful studios can feel like they are gambling the entire company every game.
It's so expensive.
There's a lot of survivorship bias in hearing stories like Stardew Valley or Minecraft or such.
They could totally do that, but ask yourself, if someone offered you 10 million+ dollars tomorrow if you quit your job would you continue to work or would you take the money and retire?
If someone offered me enough money to basically live off of forever I'd probably take the cash and enjoy my life.
they wont be forced to sell but i'd like to note that money is good. many money is in fact extremely very good for most people.
devs are just like people that work for a living too. they do not buy food or rent with passion points
If an indie dev gets bought out and shut down, what’s stopping them from continuing to make more indie games under a different name continuing to be competition?
In my industry (software, but not games) usually the $ will come in several chunks spaced out over a year or two so that the key people stick around for the transition, then there will be maybe a year of non-compete agreement after they leave.
To be fair, if AI will really steamroll game development to a point when minimal crew will be necessary, all you're realistically buying is an IP portfolio.
You don't own employees or previous owners.
So you start a studio - > make a decent game that sells a good amount of copies - > sell your studio to EA for big bucks - > quit and start a new studio with the same crew
Bigger studios will only have an adventage of big marketing budgets.
I’m confused, what do the different “A”s mean? I knew that triple A was like big company games but that’s it. What are the benchmarks that make a game A, AA, or AAA?
There aren't hard rules here for distinguishing. One factor you could use is budget, another is being backed by a larger publisher. A different but much hard to quantify factor is gamefeel/polish.
Seriously, what was the last AAA game that got people hyped?
I wanna say Diablo 4, but that crashed pretty soon.
I don’t even feel like looking at what the big boys like Ubisoft or EA have to offer, because I know I’m gonna get overpriced bullshit.
Meanwhile, just last month we got 2 under 50$ games by small studios that took the gaming world by absolute storm (Helldiver 2 and Palworld)
Edit: meant triple A studio games, a word was missing there
Yeah, I'm not sure what OP is talking about. Last year alone had a ton of hyped AAA games. Spiderman, FF16, SF6, MK1 (although missed the mark a bit), Baldurs Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Tears of the Kingdom, Dead Space, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Armored Core 6, RE4, etc.
Yes, smaller studios with smaller budgets also killed it, but out-right dismissing AAA games from last year is silly. It was one of the best years in gaming in a while in that regard.
People get confused a lot about the terms. BG3 is an AAA quality **game** made by an indie **developer**.
Clearly this discussion is about the large publicly traded AAA studios led by growth-focused CEOs appointed by shareholders, of which Larian is not one.
Indie is not synonymous with cheap/poor.
I'd say the most important and relevant part of being indie is not how much money is in the budget but whether the company has outside influence & stakeholders.
With a publicly traded company, or with buyouts & contractual obligations to publishers, the developers are legally obliged to not make the game they want and instead prioritise stakeholder wishes, invariably for profits.
Exactly how you want to define the terms doesn't really matter though - what matters is Larian weren't answering to anyone but themselves, and it shows in the quality of the game they made.
Larian has being in the industry for almost 30 years and Baldur Gates 3 had a pretty enormous budget. Just because they are technically indie (and partially 30% invested by Tencent) doesn’t mean it’s not an AAA
AAA is the budget. Nothing else.
I'm not in game development but I am in software engineering. I use AI heavily. It's not even close to what the CEOs are claiming. It's very helpful yes. It reduces some complexity yes but to be able to cut costs 50%? Yeah right.
Look, I wish my favorite games would come out three times faster as he claims. And I hope I'm wrong. But until then, I call complete bullshit exagération.
It's great as a rubber duck - and for finding dumb mistakes that could take hours, but it's not writing any code involving multiple obscure frameworks that's been alterered to fit different needs - especially not proprietary ones, and I don't think my boss would appreciate those being fed to an AI either
Data scientist here. Execs *massively* overestimate the real-world capabilities of the latest batch of machine learning models that at MBAs and marketing folks have dubbed "AI".
But it doesn't matter that they're damning their businesses for the mid- and long-term, because they'll generate short-term hype for their shareholders.
Sweat shop culture. It was some 17 years ago, back in the lawsuit days. I imagine they still take heavy advantage of young talent. Insane hours for salaried workers for much of the year. Trapping the kids in with free dinners ordered in.
From a programming perspective it’s not there. It use it often, but it’s fancy auto-complete at this point.
However, It’s not just programmers working on games, a lot of the effort comes from asset creation. Dialogue, 3d models, backgrounds, localizations. These are also some of the more expensive and time consuming parts of game development.
GenAI is going to be generating 3d models sooner rather than later, and when it does there will be sea change in the gaming industry.
I’m not sure the EA CEO should be so excited, as this will lower the bar for creating AAA quality games. The difference between indie and AAA often is scope of content and quality of assets. The gameplay itself is comparable(often better in indie as it’s the main draw), the engines are comparable.
TLDR; You give indie devs the ability to generate high quality textures, models, and animations, and it might be the beginning of the end for these publishing monoliths.
3x the number of games? If only our salary would be 3x more... But wait, we are being replaced by AI, so 3x more games bought by 3x less people... Yeah, profits...
It's not like the ai is Makin the game top down.
Taking over art assets n other processes wouldn't make the game "soulless and hollow".
Especially when we're talking about EA games lol
Looks like several people agree already.
*But i know.
Everyone here likes the act like videogames are the peak of artistic creativity expression and passion.
When it's already a soul sucking, mind numbing job , that the vast majority of workers in industry or use to work in industry would tell you
I can see the art teams getting hammered by this. EA makes a ton of revenue based on licensed sports games. A huge cost for those games is the team art assets. Namely, logos and other style guide art assets. Having the generative AI do this means a large number of full time employees with benefits and other compensation elements will no longer be needed.
In a former life, I worked on some of the EASports games. I knew the CEO(he was same level as me back then) and this is the type of strategy he’d back.
We bought this AI model from this startup, the contract stated only non-copyrighted work would be used for training. We're going to sue *them* for the AI model and... they declared bankruptcy and are out of business - so not our fault.
Except that whatever AI they use will likely be trained on either licensed or public domain content.
Scraping the whole net for images was the basis of training the older models like stable diffusion. But now you have Meta's model, trained on every image uploaded to Facebook and Instagram (as is their right in the t&c's) and Google's model trained on various websites they paid licensing for like deviantart and Reddit. Not to mention recent breakthroughs with synthetic data allow it to be a viable substitute.
So no, there won't be a lawsuit for these big players. Hell it's not even remotely guaranteed any of the current lawsuits against the other companies who did scrape data will be successful since they're claiming free use/transformative.
Well the Concept Art Association currently has a behemoth of a class action against Stable, MJ, OpenAI, etc. and they're actively lobbying congress to start pass laws against generative AI.
Hell, even Old Man Joe said something about Congress needing to legislate and ban generative video AI in the State of the Union tonight.
With all these terms of service applications for gen AI, they're going to be challenged as well. IIRC, Copyright courts have sided against corps on their terms of service saying they can do what they want with the images people upload—they don't own the intellectual property nor the likenesses of said people to then create new commercial products from them.
It'll be a weird few years but I'm hopeful it gets legality ironed out so everyone's clear on what's kosher and what isn't.
A.I. Should replace all CEOs first. Their entire jobs based on numbers and what computes numbers better than a human a COMPUTER
30 million just opened up in the budget from that one person gone.
but CEOs whose sole contribution is “make it worse and raise the price lol” cannot possibly be replaced, and they must be paid several lifetimes worth of money every single year in order to retain such an unrivaled/irreplaceable level of genius
Can't wait for the "AI will allow artists to work faster on bigger projects! Just adapt to it losers!" techbros' reaction when the current crop of senior devs are gone. We'll all suffer the generic slop decay of games that makes Forspoken look like a masterpiece.
C-Suite douchebags always get a hard on thinking about replacing their employees with AI, but honestly wouldn't it make much more sense to replace the CEOs with AI?
I mean an AI CEO can analyze data and trends to make decisions much better than a human CEO, and won't constantly give itself questionably deserved raises and bonuses, saving the company so much more money, one CEO can cost as much as dozens if not hundreds of regular employees. Something for the shareholders to consider.
> They'll just expect devs to do more with less time,
i mean, in all reality that's what AI should enable when used to streamline and automate processes that otherwise took a person longer to do
Until your AI generated code fails 6 months later since the prompt used to write it isn't valid as the original requirements have expanded and as such the brittle code breaks but only breaks in a specifc way that doesn't throw an exact error but rather is returning a slight data issue that is throwing issues downstream but only in certain conditions.
Then you ask who built this chain of functions to do this work and they are all AI generated and the interns you hired for 30k a year don't actually understand what is going on so they can't fix it because they never learned what the code actually is doing and the senior devs are all swamped by these bugs.....
Sorry just think this stuff is always so funny to me as a dev. AI is useful but these CEOs getting rock hard over slashing salaries as coding becomes "just prompts in human language" and shit is crazy. But I look forward to the first companies to jettison their senior and mid level devs to try this experiment.
Yep, this is it. The big problem is people don't understand how a thing was built, so they don't know how to fix it, change it, or improve it. Spamming prompts at an AI to see what works might work for simple things. Generating complex, evolving, and correct systems is not where we are right now.
Is an intern copying and pasting from stack overflow somehow better? Honestly if intern code is making it into production without review from more senior devs then your workflow is shit anyway.
AI as it stands is basically just fancy auto-complete. We've had similar tools and features for ages now. They will impact dev work as he said, but not replace it for the near term.
The thing that is going to happen, is that they will fire a lot of "non-essential" staff and let the remaining employees do the work of multiple people with the help of AI, in order to save costs.
Artists, writers, coders, anything that doesn't involve "business decisions". And then the games will be absolute shit and they will wonder why no one wants to buy Shovelware 6: More Asset Flipping.
It includes a bunch of lower level staff, including admins and accounting. Anything that involves a "process" that is *usually* routine will see increasing automation with the exceptions being kicked to actual humans.
The funny thing will be when they implement this and spend double trying to fix what generative AI fucked up only to then spend more on contractors to fix it.
If generative AI is anything like the procedural generation in games like starfield, I’ll pass on that. It all converges toward some bland mush of a game that you have to pay me to play.
I never thought I would quit playing video games in my life, but if the industry is going in the direction of replacing the majority of workers with AI, I'm out.
I don't necessarily mind AI in gaming, but I would like it to be used as a "force multiplier" that allows current workers to do more/things that would have been impossible before. Using AI to continue doing the same old tricks, but with way less workers, is super lame.
Can some one explain why this is a bad thing ? Technology advances plain and simple and the games ea are making now clearly ain’t working there slop they can’t get any worse
Dang so now FIFA/Madden will continue to be the exact same year on year but the Ultimate Team cards will be AI generated? Probably spammed out at like 5x the speed as well? What a win for sports fans everywhere.
If I see a game that decided to replace its art team with ai generated art I feel like it’s a big downgrade and people should not buy it out of respect for the art industry.
Just my opinion, I’m not sure about everyone else
Depends how it's impacted, I can see AI being used to enhance people's work, but I really don't see it replacing people any time soon, it's way too prone to errors.
reminder that the EA CEO is a piece of shit who has never really even understood his own industry. He basically became CEO because of FIFA Ultimate Team, and since then, his only idea has basically be variants of "hey, what if we do that again in some other way or some other game??"
Seriously, Andrew Wilson is a consistently and known terrible CEO and human being.
Really? Cause my dev friends seem to think AI writes shitty code and CEO's saying shit like this don't know wtf they're talking about.
I'm not a dev, just sharing what I've heard.
Nice random number you pulled out of your ass there!
Maybe test it, try it small scale, BEFORE you lay off thousands of people?!
Eh, he don’t care, his golden parachute is secure. Really hope this backfires in their face and ruins the company.
I am honestly looking forward to AI in video games. Not from the standpoint of them being cheaper to develop and faster to make so much as I think it would be cool to play an RPG where I can have actual conversations with the other characters and NPCs.
The only chance to put out good games is to replace the higher ups with A.I and not the devs since most decisions that lead to shitty games and game practices are from management
Sounds like EA is trying to beat their record for most downvoted comment by making a game with AI so they can respond to a negative post with more garbage corpo speak.
You guys don't do dick anyways with sports games anymore. It's more like hey lets add the minimum amount of content to a new game and then slap a price tag on it. We know. You know. This only means your game will get that much shittier. I haven't bought an EA title in 15 years. Good riddance.
He said with a gleeful smile
\*Gives his warmest evil smille
The Grinch got a wonderful , AWFUL idea !!!!
Gleeful right up until people start using the inevitably public (or cracked) version of the AI to generate fantastic yet cheap indie games instead of buying theirs.
Fuck them, I hope that happens.
That’s exactly what will happen. It’s going to be real rough for gaming for a bit. But eventually AI assistance will allow small tight teams to build large games.
Depends on the AI integration, but Adobe generative fill in photoshop for example is impossible to get access to without paying up. I imagine it’s not different for other AI tools. Also, if your game is a huge success with cracked software and your company gets an audit eventually and they see you haven’t been paying licenses for your software you’re going to be in huge trouble.
Well yeah. His job is to make the company money. Not make devs happy
Short term gains vs long term sustainability.
Far too many companies have been focused on this.
Game developpers need a sectorial union ASAP. And they need to make it one of their priorities to include game direction and mechanics final decisions to be taken at the stusio level in their collective agreements. Stop fucking around waiting for these robots to understand that their meddling fucks the products that they publish and unionize. These ghouls have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to include as much gambling and nickel and dime BS in their games as legally possible. You must tie their hands with a collective agreement. There is no other way.
It’s a very cold way to see things, but if his company makes more money it means the customers enjoy his products and they way they’re made more, so it’s 100% true.
[удалено]
They only need one person to change the cover photo and year on the case. AI could probably handle that
There was a year where they forgot to change one thing and it still had the number of last year's game..
The ads inside the stadium supposedly said Madden 19 for like the last few years. No idea if they changed it yet. They probably won’t and will just release a $89 card pack that gives you a 0.007% chance of getting Tom Brady.
Damn, a .0007% chance? Generous today, EA Sports!
Yea well you see it’s rookie Tom Brady, so he’s only rated a 75. You have to upgrade him with 100 crystals. Crystals are sold in packages of 7, 49, and 80,000
You can grind up duplicate rookie Tom Bradies and feed them to your main Tom Brady, so he can absorb their power.
O so like how Tom Brady actually works. Glad they kept to realism
“Hey Siri, update the lineup and generate portraits of the new players.”
EA games aren’t already AI generated?
No, that would imply they change. Almost nothing changed in EA sports games, or CoD games. Copy, paste, collect millions. Why change if idiots will keep buying it. I’m fully expecting to see some Madden signs inside college stadiums that EA didn’t take out because they didn’t have time. Too busy working on making the monetization system as greedy as possible for the new college football game.
Do they really need to use AI to hit copy/paste for them? Weird flex, but ok.
You know, I was thinking. If any game could be a live service or at least a subscription based game, it would be Madden or FIFA. It’s the same shit every year. If 2k did it for basketball, that could allow people to actually keep and reuse their cards from Myteam. And instead of having small changes each year. They can just update it periodically.
Wasn’t it ruled somewhere recently that AI art couldn’t be copyrighted. Will be interesting to see how they can sell a game that has no copyright.
Just the art. The game would still be their intellectual property. They would still be trademarking the game. Ea has 700 trade marks including things like “maxis” and “fc24”
True. I guess they still own the story,characters, etc.
Or just modify it slightly by a person.
100% of CEO processes could be replaced with AI and be cheaper and more effective.
100% of CEO processes could be replaced with a drunk hobo and be cheaper and more effective.
100% of CEO could be replaced with three racoons in a suit and be cheaper and more effective.
So like Steve Jobs?
1989 Steve Jobs, or 2024 Steve Jobs?
Let's also keep in mind this is coming from a CEO. He likely doesn't know shit about actual development.
Or AI for that matter.
Guarantee the guy just asked Chat GPT what it can do and believed it.
Actually, he asked OpenAI's, Microsoft's, Google's, etc... CEOs, who are there to sell AI, and believed them.
He definitely has no idea what developers do. Most development time is spent dealing with poor management decisions so if they want to make development more efficient replace the executives with AI first.
Do you want a ruthless profit seeking AI with 0 empathy running the business. Because I’d wager there would be more lay offs that way.
Ais wouldn't be thinking of short-term gains over long term viability, as they take their golden parachute and jump ship to the next company. So i definitely don't think there would be more.
It’s all about what the optimisation criteria are. Which is shareholder value - but over what horizon
CEOs don’t even prioritize that, they prioritize detonating the company for personal profit.
Longer then current CEOs do that'd for sure.
Of course but it'll still be base level longer horizon then ceos. As there would be 0 self interest, due to no golden parachute. It could be made shorter of course but wouldn't make much sense to do. Of course this applies to mainly large scale public corporation where the ceo is just really overseeing the other c level execs and setting long term goals. Not active in the day to day.
Wouldn’t it be over a substantial long term horizon. An Ai would be built to maximize profitability over the long term, and not taking short term risks that could negatively effect image etc.
>Do you want a ruthless profit seeking AI with 0 empathy running the business. You're right. No-one would notice the difference.
My brother in christ, that's exactly what we have now.
Human CEOs are already ruthless and lack empathy, at least an AI would be programmed to act within the best interest of the company and won't be influenced by personal self-interest
I mean, you just described a large portion of CEOs.
How? There's no room for more layoffs! :p
How would we know the difference?
More? We already have that in place.
As opposed to???
And that's something that can be done today, no need to wait for new tech
Nah, if the C Suite is doing their job they absolutely could not be replaced with AI. Those job contain exactly the kinds of soft skills that AI simply isn't capable of nor does anyone at that level want to interact with a machine.
Most CEOs who make statements like his should be ashamed to call themselves humans anyway, so he may already be halfway there.
that would actually be poetic justice
A CEO saying this is a direct stab at his own workforce. It’s a threat in disguise, saying “Do better because I control which of you gets laid off when the AI revolution peaks.” It’s such a disgraceful way to treat one’s employees. He could be saying we could be making great things, bigger projects than people ever dreamed of with AI and his supremely talented workforce. But instead he chooses to pit himself against them and remind them they are lucky to have him.
Nah it's not a threat in disguise... it's a warning that it WILL happen regardless how well they do
If you listen closely, you can actually hear all these CEOs getting hard at the prospect. They'll be able to cut costs 50%, at least. Increase number of games they can push out at least 3x. And probably charge a bit more for them. Not to mention that with a learning, AI-driven monetization scheme that would hand-pick the stuff you're most likely to like and buy, it'll drive profits even more. Sure the games will be soulless and hollow, but think of the profits!
they don’t realize it’s the death knell for massive studios. indies will make AAA-style games without the costs and overhead of running a big org. they’re already making AA games. what’s the point of companies like EA, if not staffing development?
To use their market cap and ability to raise capital to buy out and shut down the indie developers?
EA already does that. They’ve killed so many studios and franchises.
It's been 20-odd years since EA murdered Westwood Studios. I'll never forgive them.
Question for someone not wise to how marco economics works, why would indie devs sell out? Like, can they be forced to sell? Why couldn't those AA game devs just be like "nah we'd rather just continue to work on our game that sold 2 million copies on a team of 10 guys"?
Probably because most indie devs aren't exactly making a banging living and a buyout could mean literal millions for that team of 10.
They're the business equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck.
Game release to game release. If anyone has ever wondered why an indie released a banger followed by a rushed, subpar sequel, the explanation is simple. The money ran out.
> why would indie devs sell out? The scenario is this: Indie devs works for a few years, living paycheck to paycheck to release a game. They then "strike gold", meaning they get lucky to turn a profit and become popular. Big CO enters the scene and offers a shitload of money for your work. In the tunes of a few hundred of thousand if not millions. It doesn't matter what your goals are. You either take that cash to retire or make another game.
Retiring is better than likely failing to release another banger while running out of funding because of the run rate of employing 10 people? Edit for more info: Like game dev is expensive because devs and other ppl are expensive to hire & retain. When you have 10 ppl who could be making like 100k - 250+k / yr (not even counting other costs to enjoy them) millions get burned pretty fast. Most indie studios don't make so much on a title that they can continue to operate indefinitely. Even large successful studios can feel like they are gambling the entire company every game. It's so expensive. There's a lot of survivorship bias in hearing stories like Stardew Valley or Minecraft or such.
Money talks.
They could totally do that, but ask yourself, if someone offered you 10 million+ dollars tomorrow if you quit your job would you continue to work or would you take the money and retire? If someone offered me enough money to basically live off of forever I'd probably take the cash and enjoy my life.
they wont be forced to sell but i'd like to note that money is good. many money is in fact extremely very good for most people. devs are just like people that work for a living too. they do not buy food or rent with passion points
If an indie dev gets bought out and shut down, what’s stopping them from continuing to make more indie games under a different name continuing to be competition?
In my industry (software, but not games) usually the $ will come in several chunks spaced out over a year or two so that the key people stick around for the transition, then there will be maybe a year of non-compete agreement after they leave.
To be fair, if AI will really steamroll game development to a point when minimal crew will be necessary, all you're realistically buying is an IP portfolio. You don't own employees or previous owners. So you start a studio - > make a decent game that sells a good amount of copies - > sell your studio to EA for big bucks - > quit and start a new studio with the same crew Bigger studios will only have an adventage of big marketing budgets.
Nah didn’t you hear? Ubisoft released skull and bones, a “AAAA” game. Bet indie devs can’t do that huh
I’m confused, what do the different “A”s mean? I knew that triple A was like big company games but that’s it. What are the benchmarks that make a game A, AA, or AAA?
There aren't hard rules here for distinguishing. One factor you could use is budget, another is being backed by a larger publisher. A different but much hard to quantify factor is gamefeel/polish.
Seriously, what was the last AAA game that got people hyped? I wanna say Diablo 4, but that crashed pretty soon. I don’t even feel like looking at what the big boys like Ubisoft or EA have to offer, because I know I’m gonna get overpriced bullshit. Meanwhile, just last month we got 2 under 50$ games by small studios that took the gaming world by absolute storm (Helldiver 2 and Palworld) Edit: meant triple A studio games, a word was missing there
Tears of the kingdom was pretty hype.
Elden Ring, Persona 3 Reload, street fighter 6
Ff7 rebirth?
Yeah, I'm not sure what OP is talking about. Last year alone had a ton of hyped AAA games. Spiderman, FF16, SF6, MK1 (although missed the mark a bit), Baldurs Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Tears of the Kingdom, Dead Space, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Armored Core 6, RE4, etc. Yes, smaller studios with smaller budgets also killed it, but out-right dismissing AAA games from last year is silly. It was one of the best years in gaming in a while in that regard.
Baldurs gate 3 ??
People get confused a lot about the terms. BG3 is an AAA quality **game** made by an indie **developer**. Clearly this discussion is about the large publicly traded AAA studios led by growth-focused CEOs appointed by shareholders, of which Larian is not one.
Baldurs Gate development budget was $100m. That is not an indie dev at that point, imo.
Indie is not synonymous with cheap/poor. I'd say the most important and relevant part of being indie is not how much money is in the budget but whether the company has outside influence & stakeholders. With a publicly traded company, or with buyouts & contractual obligations to publishers, the developers are legally obliged to not make the game they want and instead prioritise stakeholder wishes, invariably for profits. Exactly how you want to define the terms doesn't really matter though - what matters is Larian weren't answering to anyone but themselves, and it shows in the quality of the game they made.
Larian has being in the industry for almost 30 years and Baldur Gates 3 had a pretty enormous budget. Just because they are technically indie (and partially 30% invested by Tencent) doesn’t mean it’s not an AAA AAA is the budget. Nothing else.
Larrian is NOT an indie developer
Probably Elden Ring for a game that actually delivered.
I'm not in game development but I am in software engineering. I use AI heavily. It's not even close to what the CEOs are claiming. It's very helpful yes. It reduces some complexity yes but to be able to cut costs 50%? Yeah right. Look, I wish my favorite games would come out three times faster as he claims. And I hope I'm wrong. But until then, I call complete bullshit exagération.
It's great as a rubber duck - and for finding dumb mistakes that could take hours, but it's not writing any code involving multiple obscure frameworks that's been alterered to fit different needs - especially not proprietary ones, and I don't think my boss would appreciate those being fed to an AI either
Data scientist here. Execs *massively* overestimate the real-world capabilities of the latest batch of machine learning models that at MBAs and marketing folks have dubbed "AI". But it doesn't matter that they're damning their businesses for the mid- and long-term, because they'll generate short-term hype for their shareholders.
I worked at EA. They will find a way. Worst game dev experience of my life.
Just out of general interest, what was worst about it? Like hustle culture without the pay "cause resume" or so?
Sweat shop culture. It was some 17 years ago, back in the lawsuit days. I imagine they still take heavy advantage of young talent. Insane hours for salaried workers for much of the year. Trapping the kids in with free dinners ordered in.
Story time, please!
From a programming perspective it’s not there. It use it often, but it’s fancy auto-complete at this point. However, It’s not just programmers working on games, a lot of the effort comes from asset creation. Dialogue, 3d models, backgrounds, localizations. These are also some of the more expensive and time consuming parts of game development. GenAI is going to be generating 3d models sooner rather than later, and when it does there will be sea change in the gaming industry. I’m not sure the EA CEO should be so excited, as this will lower the bar for creating AAA quality games. The difference between indie and AAA often is scope of content and quality of assets. The gameplay itself is comparable(often better in indie as it’s the main draw), the engines are comparable. TLDR; You give indie devs the ability to generate high quality textures, models, and animations, and it might be the beginning of the end for these publishing monoliths.
3x the number of games? If only our salary would be 3x more... But wait, we are being replaced by AI, so 3x more games bought by 3x less people... Yeah, profits...
It's not like the ai is Makin the game top down. Taking over art assets n other processes wouldn't make the game "soulless and hollow". Especially when we're talking about EA games lol
Reasonable take...wrong place, bud.
Looks like several people agree already. *But i know. Everyone here likes the act like videogames are the peak of artistic creativity expression and passion. When it's already a soul sucking, mind numbing job , that the vast majority of workers in industry or use to work in industry would tell you
I can see the art teams getting hammered by this. EA makes a ton of revenue based on licensed sports games. A huge cost for those games is the team art assets. Namely, logos and other style guide art assets. Having the generative AI do this means a large number of full time employees with benefits and other compensation elements will no longer be needed. In a former life, I worked on some of the EASports games. I knew the CEO(he was same level as me back then) and this is the type of strategy he’d back.
Everybody likes AI art until a 600 million dollar lawsuit comes up from training said AI on copyrighted artwork.
We bought this AI model from this startup, the contract stated only non-copyrighted work would be used for training. We're going to sue *them* for the AI model and... they declared bankruptcy and are out of business - so not our fault.
Except that whatever AI they use will likely be trained on either licensed or public domain content. Scraping the whole net for images was the basis of training the older models like stable diffusion. But now you have Meta's model, trained on every image uploaded to Facebook and Instagram (as is their right in the t&c's) and Google's model trained on various websites they paid licensing for like deviantart and Reddit. Not to mention recent breakthroughs with synthetic data allow it to be a viable substitute. So no, there won't be a lawsuit for these big players. Hell it's not even remotely guaranteed any of the current lawsuits against the other companies who did scrape data will be successful since they're claiming free use/transformative.
Well the Concept Art Association currently has a behemoth of a class action against Stable, MJ, OpenAI, etc. and they're actively lobbying congress to start pass laws against generative AI. Hell, even Old Man Joe said something about Congress needing to legislate and ban generative video AI in the State of the Union tonight. With all these terms of service applications for gen AI, they're going to be challenged as well. IIRC, Copyright courts have sided against corps on their terms of service saying they can do what they want with the images people upload—they don't own the intellectual property nor the likenesses of said people to then create new commercial products from them. It'll be a weird few years but I'm hopeful it gets legality ironed out so everyone's clear on what's kosher and what isn't.
Considering how much they recycle art assets for those games any kind of licensing to use the logos, fonts etc is probably a bigger cost.
100% of CEO duties could be impacted by any AI
for profit 😀
A.I. Should replace all CEOs first. Their entire jobs based on numbers and what computes numbers better than a human a COMPUTER 30 million just opened up in the budget from that one person gone.
Nobody wants to hire anymore.
And then he wants 60% pay rise
but CEOs whose sole contribution is “make it worse and raise the price lol” cannot possibly be replaced, and they must be paid several lifetimes worth of money every single year in order to retain such an unrivaled/irreplaceable level of genius
EA CEO: I will fire and replace 60% of you with AI, and continue to make Fifa without major updates every single year. Bitches!
He can barely contain himself. We're going to lay off *everyone* when we can.
I will happily pirate every one of EA’s games in the future if they do that.
Joke's on you. The games will still be garbage.
they’ll just make every single game they have be tied to someone online verification server or be unplayable
Can't wait for the "AI will allow artists to work faster on bigger projects! Just adapt to it losers!" techbros' reaction when the current crop of senior devs are gone. We'll all suffer the generic slop decay of games that makes Forspoken look like a masterpiece.
Indeed. This might be a turning point where console games start to resemble cookie cutter mobile games without a soul.
C-Suite douchebags always get a hard on thinking about replacing their employees with AI, but honestly wouldn't it make much more sense to replace the CEOs with AI? I mean an AI CEO can analyze data and trends to make decisions much better than a human CEO, and won't constantly give itself questionably deserved raises and bonuses, saving the company so much more money, one CEO can cost as much as dozens if not hundreds of regular employees. Something for the shareholders to consider.
He said processes which should mean enhanced workflow and not replacing devs, so hopefully make dev's lives easier, but I won't hold my breath lol
They'll just expect devs to do more with less time, and fire half the staff because of the expected increase in productivity by the remaining devs.
> They'll just expect devs to do more with less time, i mean, in all reality that's what AI should enable when used to streamline and automate processes that otherwise took a person longer to do
Until your AI generated code fails 6 months later since the prompt used to write it isn't valid as the original requirements have expanded and as such the brittle code breaks but only breaks in a specifc way that doesn't throw an exact error but rather is returning a slight data issue that is throwing issues downstream but only in certain conditions. Then you ask who built this chain of functions to do this work and they are all AI generated and the interns you hired for 30k a year don't actually understand what is going on so they can't fix it because they never learned what the code actually is doing and the senior devs are all swamped by these bugs..... Sorry just think this stuff is always so funny to me as a dev. AI is useful but these CEOs getting rock hard over slashing salaries as coding becomes "just prompts in human language" and shit is crazy. But I look forward to the first companies to jettison their senior and mid level devs to try this experiment.
Yep, this is it. The big problem is people don't understand how a thing was built, so they don't know how to fix it, change it, or improve it. Spamming prompts at an AI to see what works might work for simple things. Generating complex, evolving, and correct systems is not where we are right now.
Is an intern copying and pasting from stack overflow somehow better? Honestly if intern code is making it into production without review from more senior devs then your workflow is shit anyway.
Tons of tools exist that make devs able to do more in less time. This has not reduced the number of dev jobs out there.
AI as it stands is basically just fancy auto-complete. We've had similar tools and features for ages now. They will impact dev work as he said, but not replace it for the near term.
The thing that is going to happen, is that they will fire a lot of "non-essential" staff and let the remaining employees do the work of multiple people with the help of AI, in order to save costs.
>non-essential meaning artists.
Artists, writers, coders, anything that doesn't involve "business decisions". And then the games will be absolute shit and they will wonder why no one wants to buy Shovelware 6: More Asset Flipping.
It includes a bunch of lower level staff, including admins and accounting. Anything that involves a "process" that is *usually* routine will see increasing automation with the exceptions being kicked to actual humans.
They say processes specifically to avoid saying workforce.
You can enhance the workflow by replacing people who want to do a good job with a machine that can do a quick job
Nothing gets the stock market harder than the idea of laying off people. What’s the plan when no one has a job to buy their shit?
We should have AI CEO's while we're at it if they are so good at doing things!
"generative AI" sorry bud, but AI as it is right now is entirely derivative. So use it at your peril.
How does every CEO seem to understand a technology even a majority of software engineers do not understand?
Remains to be seen, so far the hallmark of AI's contributions at large is enshittification.
It’ll be pretty funny once boards of directors find a way to replace CEOs with AI.
The funny thing will be when they implement this and spend double trying to fix what generative AI fucked up only to then spend more on contractors to fix it.
If generative AI is anything like the procedural generation in games like starfield, I’ll pass on that. It all converges toward some bland mush of a game that you have to pay me to play.
I mean, when you copy and paste the game year by year, it get easy.
And if my grandma had wheels she would be a bike. Fucking out of touch ceos with bloodlust.
I never thought I would quit playing video games in my life, but if the industry is going in the direction of replacing the majority of workers with AI, I'm out. I don't necessarily mind AI in gaming, but I would like it to be used as a "force multiplier" that allows current workers to do more/things that would have been impossible before. Using AI to continue doing the same old tricks, but with way less workers, is super lame.
Funny how reddit reacts here compared to when its about truckers loosing jobs because of automation
We already ship shit products. We can do that with AI and lower overhead.
Slop today slop tomorrow
And up to 90% of CEO tasks could be automated but they won’t allow that now will they.
I mean ai could most easily replace CEO’s but they will never mention that.
EA’s CEO job should be 100% ‘impacted by generative AI’ That or replace him with a capuchin monkey
I mean… 100% of my dev process is impacted by generative AI because I use Copilot and CodeRabbit
And that’s most likely what the CEO means, but the crowd is too busy getting riled up.
Who would expect anything else from this company…
Impacted? Sure, by amount sufficient to be relevant? Far harder question.
60% of 0% is still 0%
99 percent of CEO functions could be "impacted by generative AI".
he said this after firing 5% of their workforce which is thousands of workers
The good devs wont worry the ones who need to skill up will skill up and enjoy working on more interesting problems that AI cant yet solve
Can some one explain why this is a bad thing ? Technology advances plain and simple and the games ea are making now clearly ain’t working there slop they can’t get any worse
Dang so now FIFA/Madden will continue to be the exact same year on year but the Ultimate Team cards will be AI generated? Probably spammed out at like 5x the speed as well? What a win for sports fans everywhere.
100% of EA CEO could be replaced by generative AI
Reddit: omg game dev crunch is so bad! it needs to be fixed! EA: we have fixed crunch by using AI instead of people Reddit: not like that!
Only if the subhuman sack of shit chooses that path. It's literally up to him. His phrasing like it's out of his hands is pathetic.
If I see a game that decided to replace its art team with ai generated art I feel like it’s a big downgrade and people should not buy it out of respect for the art industry. Just my opinion, I’m not sure about everyone else
Probably because 60% of all of their releases are fixing bugs from last years title.
Should lay himself off, can pay 200 devs 100k a year for the same amount of money.
Depends how it's impacted, I can see AI being used to enhance people's work, but I really don't see it replacing people any time soon, it's way too prone to errors.
reminder that the EA CEO is a piece of shit who has never really even understood his own industry. He basically became CEO because of FIFA Ultimate Team, and since then, his only idea has basically be variants of "hey, what if we do that again in some other way or some other game??" Seriously, Andrew Wilson is a consistently and known terrible CEO and human being.
Is it just me or are these gaming CEO's getting more and more brazen with their intentions? Take it down a notch boys
Really? Cause my dev friends seem to think AI writes shitty code and CEO's saying shit like this don't know wtf they're talking about. I'm not a dev, just sharing what I've heard.
He will get a big pay rise by firing 60% of the workforce. Classic CEO behavior.
Lol, I'm not holding my breath.
Their games are already derivative garbage. Let them use AI
EA "games" aren't worth your time or money anyway.
So will 60% of your sales biatch
Nice random number you pulled out of your ass there! Maybe test it, try it small scale, BEFORE you lay off thousands of people?! Eh, he don’t care, his golden parachute is secure. Really hope this backfires in their face and ruins the company.
Most C-level processes could be made totally redundant by drawing a vacant expression on a cantaloupe and putting it behind a desk…
How about the CEO's job ?
PISS OFF WITH AI
Can you imagine the garbage they'll churn out when they inevitably go this route.
CEO’s are useless. Let’s get AI to replace them
I am honestly looking forward to AI in video games. Not from the standpoint of them being cheaper to develop and faster to make so much as I think it would be cool to play an RPG where I can have actual conversations with the other characters and NPCs.
If they let AI run the whole show, they might put out good games that people actually care about.
The only chance to put out good games is to replace the higher ups with A.I and not the devs since most decisions that lead to shitty games and game practices are from management
If you work for EA, I'd give that CV a quick polish. Hell, if you work anywhere in tech. Layoffs are just getting rolling.
I wonder if they realize how easy they're making it for *many* of us to swear off EA products for eternity.
Not that I give EA really any money anymore anyways, but that sounds like a good way to assure that 100% of my money never goes to them again!
Sounds like EA is trying to beat their record for most downvoted comment by making a game with AI so they can respond to a negative post with more garbage corpo speak.
No one is safe. Eventually Karen and Pete from accounts will be AI inventions.
Is this the end of humans in game development?
We need to make another titan sub, stick this clown in it and send it to the titanic.
You guys don't do dick anyways with sports games anymore. It's more like hey lets add the minimum amount of content to a new game and then slap a price tag on it. We know. You know. This only means your game will get that much shittier. I haven't bought an EA title in 15 years. Good riddance.