Attention, gamers: if you thought new titles on top of the endless cavalcade of sequels and remakes were derivative now, wait till you hear about what the game engine maker Unity has got in store.
During a recent earnings call, the company’s CEO Matthew Bromberg teased a new version of its AI tool that he claims, while somehow maintaining a straight face, will eliminate the need for coding in game development. Now, any schmuck can prompt their way to being the next Hideo Kojima or Sam Lake. In theory, anyway.
“At the Game Developer Conference in March, we’ll be unveiling a beta of the new upgraded Unity AI, which will enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform — so it’s simple to move from prototype to finished product,” Bromberg said, as quoted by Game Developer.
“This assistant will be powered by our unique understanding of the project context and our runtime, while leveraging the best frontier models that exist,” he continued. “We believe together this combination will provide more efficient, more effective results to game developers than general-purpose models alone.”
The announcement represents a bold if not questionable double-down by Unity. A survey conducted by Game Developer found that over half of game workers think generative AI is bad for the industry. It’s also a massive reputational risk: pretty much any time a game gets caught using the tech becomes fuel for controversy. Underscoring its contentiousness, the video game storefront Steam requires developers disclose if their titles use any AI-generated content.
There’s also a growing pile of evidence suggesting that AI tools don’t improve productivity — or at least not without sacrificing quality or morale — with many programmers finding that AI coding tools are too error prone to be worth the hassle.
And that’s with people who have the experience to recognize where the tech falls short. Unity is probably aiming at developers who don’t know any better, or the clueless, dollar-sign-for-eyes bosses who will force it on their underlings. (This is a common trait among AI evangelists, newly converted or otherwise: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, for example, fumed that any employee who didn’t use AI to automate every possible task was “insane,” after some of his managers recommended dialing back AI usage. Another CEO bragged that he fired 80 percent of his staff because they weren’t as enthusiastic about AI as he was.)
Unity, however, is pushing AI for a supposedly beneficent purpose: to “democratize” game development.
“Our goal is to remove as much friction from the creative process as possible, becoming the universal bridge between the first spark of creativity and a successful, scalable, and enduring digital experience,” Bromberg said.
We’re not holding our breath for anything good to come of it.
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