Vincent Accovino
Appearances
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The video game industry at a crossroads
You're basically beating up enemies in a dystopian version of New York City. And there's all this kind of like ooze spilling out onto the street.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
So I find the creator of this game and his story, his name is Sean Alexander Allen, absolutely fascinating. Years ago, he worked for a major video game company. So he was on the other side of the industry, big budget games. Now he's making his own games. And he sees the industry right now at a crossroads. He looks around and says, why are we seeing so much volatility in this industry?
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Why are we seeing the mass layoffs that we're seeing? Right now, it takes an incredibly long time for big budget games to be released. Games people are waiting for a long time for. He worked for Rockstar 13 years ago. Rockstar Games is the creator of Grand Theft Auto. It's been that same amount of time since a Grand Theft Auto game came out.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Well, that is kind of the question. If you ask someone like him, he says it's a combination of these ballooning budgets and also bad management strategies and everyone just wanting it to be, needing it to be
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The video game industry at a crossroads
So it's like a really old school looking game. It's all like pixel art that's reminiscent of retro kind of video games and arcade games.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Yeah, so video game budgets are kind of like this closely guarded secret, but we know that, for example, The Last of Us Part II, The Last of Us has been adapted to like an HBO series, so a lot of people are now familiar with that game. The second game in the series cost...
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The video game industry at a crossroads
around 200 million dollars to make and that's fine like movie level budget oh beyond yeah beyond because these people have often literally thousands of people who work on them that's fine if your game makes 500 million dollars in return but it doesn't always do that and that's where the problems start like for example last year there was a game that came out called concord and
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The video game industry at a crossroads
And that game had a big budget, a lot of expectation, and it absolutely flopped. And in one month, they shut that game down. A multi-hundred million dollar project, most likely.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Exactly. And I think also because these games require constant development, if the projects shrink in size or if they're not successful, then they have to let people go.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
So I talked to a lot of developers at the conference as well who have very different opinions about AI. One demo I saw showed off a Call of Duty kind of game. And this was a demo that was given to me by Elvis Liu at Tencent, which is the biggest video game company in the world. They're a Chinese company.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
and basically the demo shows you interacting with your squad mates, so you speak to your squad mates, and they will listen to you and interact with the environment in very specific ways. So if you say, like, go behind the red car or the rust-colored car, they'll know exactly what you're talking about, and they'll do it.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
This is interesting for the player, but Elvis Liu at Tencent says it's also helpful for the development of these video games.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
So that's one example of a thing that kind of made sense to me. Then you see you hear from independent developers and they are largely not excited about this. Many of them are kind of skeptical of what it means for their own creativity in this industry. And so like when I speak to like people in narrative or art departments, they're like, well, this is a part of the job that I like to do.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Like, I don't want to automate the part of my job. They're like, maybe if like it sent emails for me, but not like if it writes my stories. One person I talked to was Keita Takahashi. He developed a game that people of my age love very much called Katamari Damacy. And it's like this absolutely ridiculous game. It has a great sense of humor.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
It's basically you're rolling up a bunch of small objects on the world into a giant ball and then they become planets in the sky.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Yeah, it's absurd, but on purpose, and it has a great sense of humor. But Takahashi was very blunt about the AI thing, and actually he brought this up unprompted in a different interview I was doing, and here's what he said.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
I mean, AI is just the business stuff, because they just want to make more money. So that's an example of someone who is just very purely an artist who is completely not interested in generative AI stuff.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Yeah. I mean, the conference really hit this home for me. The industry right now is just filled with so many video games that are great, especially because we've had this explosion of smaller teams making games. There are just too many video games to play that are great. So that's a great problem to have for the industry and for someone like me who loves playing games.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
So I would say just the sheer number of great games. It's never been better. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you need broad enthusiasm from both video game players and the industry for something like that to really happen. And that's, I don't know yet what's going to happen because it feels like the big tech companies like NVIDIA and stuff are pushing it hard and want AI to be the future of games.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
But I haven't seen the same sort of excitement on the other end.
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The video game industry at a crossroads
Some of the biggest hits in the industry are coming from developers that are, you know, a team of one person. It kind of goes to show the power dynamics right now in the industry where small independent developers do have the power and potential to make big video games without the risk that comes with making a giant multi-million dollar project as a big studio.