Generative artificial intelligence will profoundly change the way video games are created and played, but its capital costs pose a major obstacle, the CEO of French gaming giant Ubisoft told AFP on Monday.
Speaking at an event in Los Angeles showcasing upcoming releases, Yves Guillemot said that generative artificial intelligence, or generational artificial intelligence, could make open-world games like Ubisoft’s hit series “Assassin’s Creed” even more “alive”.
The games presented during the event included the hotly anticipated “Star Wars Outlaws”, based on the universe of the cult film series, and “Assassin’s Creed Shadows”, which takes the historical fiction series to feudal Japan.
“What we see with Gen AI is the possibility that these worlds – the open worlds of action-adventure games – will be much more interactive and alive,” he said.
continued below
“When I say alive… if you meet a character that’s not acting, you can talk to them and develop a relationship with them.”
He described generative artificial intelligence, in which trained computer programs create everything from text to videos in seconds with plain commands, as “something that will be a game changer.”
But because of the high demand for computer processing and resources needed to train models, “the only problem is how much it will cost,” Guillemot said.
Since the generative craze broke out with the release of ChatGPT in overdue 2022, everyone has been focused on how the technology could change the video game industry.
After a huge boom during the coronavirus pandemic, the video game industry has found itself on the defensive with a wave of layoffs and cost cuts at major companies.
The industry is also struggling with the dominance of franchise titles such as “Call of Duty” and “Fortnite”, which hinders the emergence of recent titles.
“Star Wars Outlaws” will debut on August 30, and “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” will debut on November 12.
– Go to cloud –
“At the moment, we lack gigantic innovations in the industry. We need genAI, we need the cloud to lend a hand us deliver truly recent experiences,” Guillemot said.
Cloud gaming, which has quickly gained popularity in the industry, allows users to stream and play high-quality games without the need for high-priced hardware or dedicated gaming consoles.
Cloud gaming advocates say such a change could create a more vigorous and connected gaming community by moving users away from relying on a single console ecosystem like Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation.
Guillemot welcomed moves by Apple and other device makers to upgrade their hardware with more powerful chips that could shift the growing computing needs of gaming from the cloud to the device itself.
Adding AI chips to hardware like iPhones and laptops “will mean more intelligence in our games” and could also reduce the needs and costs of cloud computing.
“Artificial intelligence is coming,” Guillemot said. “We know it can be mass market. The problem is that adoption takes time, and we still have the issue of cost.”
Most read in Artificial Intelligence
