Grand Theft Auto 6 and the future of AI
In case you missed it a few weeks ago, here’s the game trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6. This is worth a look and is great on many levels. But GTA 6 may be the pinnacle of the open-world category, untouched by the next wave of technology, especially generative AI.
Let’s start with some facts: First, the GTA’s budget is reported to be between $1-2 billion. most expensive game ever
Not only is this the most expensive game of all time, but compare it to a movie. The most expensive movies, the latest in the Star Wars, Avengers, and Pirates series, cost just $300 million to $450 million. So this is almost 5x.
I think this also shows that games are taking pole position in culture.
The recent trailer was the most-watched non-music video on YouTube in the first 24 hours after its release, surpassing movie trailers and TV show premieres, and even surpassing MrBeast.In his first 10 hours he reached 70 million views and a few weeks later at the time of this writing he has over 140 million views
It’s also interesting to compare this to building products in the technology field. In this game, instead of “move fast and break things” it’s more like:
- As mentioned earlier, it cost $1-2 billion to build
- We started development in 2014, so it has been 11 years from development to release.
- Thousands of developers, designers and others are working hard to finish it.
But as most of us in the tech industry have observed, tools and approaches to gaming are rapidly changing.
How generative AI will change the gaming industry
We’re seeing generative AI impacting many parts of game development. It’s still early days, but there are quite a few places where this is impacting. This includes everything from concept art to in-game assets and interactions with NPCs.
- Create endless types of concept art
- Design/Create 3D assets
- NPC using LLM
- Generate environments and worlds
- Synthetic voice of in-game characters
- Competing bots, bots participating in PvP competitive games
- Endless quests, stories and more
- etc
But it is only a “weak form” of innovation that is easy to imagine today. The “weak form” that my colleague Chris Dixon talks about often appears paired with a strong form version. Weaker forms are easier for the market to understand, but it is often the stronger forms that end up having more impact.
“Stronger Forms” of AI innovation will impact GTA in newer forms. Figuratively speaking, it’s great to see the emerging GTA RP (role-playing) community emerge through mods, allowing new gameplay for people to play as cops, gang leaders, and more. That’s it. Millions of people tried this format of his GTA, and millions more watched it. This is a new and original form of play that has never existed before.
I think the same thing will happen in future editions of the open world genre. Yes, generative AI is used to make games like GTA cheaper ($1-2 billion is a lot!) and to get more content for the same dollar. But AI will unlock new forms of gameplay as well.
For example, I’m really excited about what’s going to happen in the GTA version of AI Town. There he NPCs have their own inner voices, motivations, and needs. You can also imagine that this underlying platform could power the next generation of social, dating, and more. You can think of open world games like GTA as more of a physics engine with layers of modding and AI built in. And on some level, it’s a large enough playground that many other game genres can be built within it. (Like Roblox does).
Genetic AI isn’t just going to make production cheaper; it’s equally likely to reinvent genres.
Consider what happened in the last content revolution, where user-generated platforms like YouTube and TikTok allowed video creators to significantly reduce the cost of their content. Creators weren’t using this technology to compete with Hollywood. People don’t interrupt a two-hour movie or his 10-episode TV season with a short video. Instead, there will be entirely new video formats specific to the medium, including his personality-driven vlogs, video game streaming, and long-form podcasts. These don’t compete with Hollywood. Taking a completely different approach to entertainment, he stitches together hours of entertainment six seconds at a time.
So far we’ve been talking about big open-world games, but I actually think the best new experiences won’t look anything like Grand Theft Auto. Instead, new game genres will be released rapidly that compete in different ways.
- you’ll probably understand Games as a new meme form. If an entertaining presidential debate happens between two candidates, we’ll probably see a full-fledged fighting game (built in a no-code, AI-enabled environment) become a huge hit later that night .
- perhaps Games will become hyper-personalizedAnd people will create huge, immersive, deep games for their 50-person college clubs.
- perhaps Games will be sold alongside commerce and other experiences. Today, you might build a huge gaming experience around Harry Potter, but the economics don’t work well for promoting a small Shopify store. I might do that if the cost of creating content gets close enough to zero.
In any case, it’s very hard to imagine a big budget game like GTA happening the way it is now. Instead, content is generated by AI along with quests and even genres. And perhaps it will be something different than what we think of as a game today.
The past year has been an exploratory time for the gaming industry, but it’s still in its early stages. Everyone is experimenting and it’s a good start. Additionally, tools for creating concepts such as Midjourney are here to stay. However, very few are actually produced. A big change is coming, and it will be as big a wave as anything this industry has ever seen.
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