“And at least part of that plan involves AI”, reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment.
…having spent the past four days dashing between appointments with CEOs and developers, there is one sentiment that has remained consistent among almost everyone I spoke to. We need to make games quicker.
Amen. Twenty years ago, 3 years was a long dev cycle, and most games were churned out in 12-18 months. It also relied heavily on crunch, but maybe we could get back to 3 year dev cycles that don’t, and that can be considered somewhat “normal”.
Of course, it’s one thing to say you want to make games more quickly, and quite another to actually do it. More to the point, how do you do it?
Well, I, for one, would start with the bloat that made its way into mainstay series. The icon barf of Assassin’s Creed. Turning series open world that have no business doing so. Making a huge game as the first outing in a series instead of seeing if there’s even an appetite for the premise in the first place.
One option is to make games that look worse. Given how super-detailed graphics seem to be far less important to a younger generation raised on Roblox and Minecraft, this would seem like a fair enough strategy. … Yet there seemed to be little appetite for this strategy among the people I spoke to at Gamescom. Perhaps it’s an unwillingness to fly in the face of conventional wisdom in an industry where frame rates are often fetishised. Perhaps it’s more about simple pride in the craft.
So are we refusing to do what’s actually necessary to keep people’s jobs sustainable, or…?
So what’s the alternative? One option is to use AI to speed up the development process. And it’s an option that more and more studios are taking up. … AI is the games industry’s dirty little open secret – the majority of people I spoke to said they were using AI in some form or another.
And this is where I know a lot of people would like to stop reading, but I’d encourage you to continue anyway.
Utilising AI to generate snippets of code was a popular choice.
To date, this is the only use I’ve ever heard, as a programmer, as something that might be useful for my job. Not that I’ve done it. I can still come up with snippets quickly enough just from old fashioned documentation most of the time. But sometimes it’s written so generic that it takes hours of your day or more to actually learn it. And that’s not the most common thing in the world that I run into that.
I do wish the author broke down how much, and which pieces, of this came from developers compared to executives/managers/owners. I’m glad to hear that everyone agrees that shorter dev cycles are a goal worth pursuing. I’m not convinced AI gets us there, and I wonder how many programmers really feel it’s speeding them along in their day-to-day such that it can reduce a development schedule by literal years.
There are exactly two major developers that get an eye raise from me these days. Nintendo and From Software. And even From Software I’m cool on right now because I’m just real burned out on excessively depressing grimdark fantasy.
And Indie Devs aren’t even filling in the gap for me anymore. Granted, I see a lot of interesting concepts put out with them, but they way too often come with disappointing execution. The last two indie games to really floor me were Neon White and GhostRunner.
Games are just in a really weak place right now. I honestly find I’m spending more and more time on the NSO virtual console games.
I’m drowning in a deluge of great games to play, personally. The exception there being first-person shooters and racing games, and racing games are starting to fill in the gaps.
There’s the advantage, too, that quickly made games can be adapted to suit current trends, avoiding the pain of, say, launching a live-service shooter years after the genre has been saturated.
Ah yes we need quick money trend slop.
Were you around to play games 20 to 25 years ago?
Yeah living my last 25 now.
All that to say that adapting to trends creates genres and results in honing in on better versions of the original idea. There will be bad versions along the way, but it’s good to get that much iteration. We used to get that much iteration.
I don’t think corporate is able to follow the idea. It’s politics. If they follow the idea the idea must come from their boss. It’s just buzzwords to me.
Fortnite is a still-very-visible version of this exact concept. They were able to iterate quickly. Mostly because they just adapted their dud of a horde mode game into a completely new genre using the same mechanics, but they still did it quickly and found that success. We’re also seeing it in the likes of Getting Over It, Lethal Company, Vampire Survivors, and plenty of other games that spawned imitators.
Sorry but my brain is shutting down after iterate quickly. To much corporate bullshit, you can repeat those words 1000 times and they don’t mean anything because with all respect you’re saying some bullshit. Trends don’t make money. Shaping trends make money. Actually shaping trends and exposure but despite the huge exposure look how hard is to shape trends. With AI they can shape shit somebody already created and nobody likes to see same shit 1000 times.
“Iterate quickly” isn’t corporate bullshit. It’s just English. There are always those that tag along to something successful and find success themselves, like Terraria and Starbound to Minecraft; or Apex Legends and Fortnite to PUBG. But if you spend 4 years chasing an idea that came out in 2017, you end up with Hyperscape or Concord, unless there’s truly such an insatiable appetite that customers can’t get enough. In a world of live service games, they look to retain those players for years. Decades ago, they didn’t. We had so many first person shooters coming out every year, single and multiplayer, that it would be a full time job to count them all. Most of them brought new ideas to the table, and across many releases it would take years of
iterationtrying things that are slightly different than the last idea that would eventually lead to things like aim down sights becoming a fairly standard feature of the genre.
Could you instead make them better? They’re already mostly shit and you wanna pump 'em out faster so quality drops even more? 🤦♂️
Do you think they get better if they take longer to make? These development times are a fairly recent phenomenon.
A problem with AAA games is the development time is longer, the time spent working on the final game is not.
Time and time again when a game as been “in development” for 5/7/10+ years, the game that shipped was only really being worked on for the last year or two, once they finally got the design and gameplay nailed down and worked on the final game. Anthem is one of the more egregious examples in that some of the developers working on the game learned at the E3 presentation a year before launch that the game involved flying.
There’s an iceberg of effort and only a fraction of it gets released.
It’s not a gurantee, but cutting the time down when QA is already paper thin ain’t gonna make shit better and likely won’t even retain the quality it currently has.
Who says the time getting cut is in QA? Maybe the games just scope down.
The use of generative AI tools implies scope isn’t going to change at all.
Probably, which means the developers (or managers) didn’t really identify the problem.
That’s the fear the author raises, yes. I always say people are fluid, and we expand to fit our containers, whether that’s our schedules, filling our homes with junk, or anything else. Hopefully what the industry is coming to realize is that their container is smaller than they think it is, but yes, scope creep is a real threat. I’m rooting for the industry to scope down.
Who says the time getting cut is in QA?
History and Common Sense.
I read this as shortening development time (“quicker”), not necessarily reducing the sheer amount of slop they pile in and call “content.”
This is absolutely c-suites pushing for constant development to be a smoother, faster repetition; lots of DLC, or SaaS.
Games generally, in every budget class, take longer to develop but they are not generally worse.
Doom 2 came out less than a year after Doom.
Does that mean you would prefer sequels to just be glorified map additions to the game you already own? If Doom 1 and 2 were done today, Doom 2 would have been a DLC.
Nah dude, today we have Death of the Outsider, and Blood Dragon, both doesn’t need the base game to run and is standalone, even though they use the same asset and engine from their base game. Not to mention ODST and Reach, both come out within 3 years of Halo 3. All phenomenal, even though they’re using same engine, same asset, with some additional content and new map. The scope is also significantly smaller than the base game. They’re all standalone even though they’re DLC.
Also Tear of the Kingdom use the same map and asset, and it’s considered sequel instead of DLC. same thing goes for Majora’s Mask which they did within a year after Ocarina of Time. It’s totally fine to do that as long as the game is good.
And GTA Vice City was originally planned as an expansion to GTA III, then turned into an independent game and released just a year after GTA III.
Maybe that’s the problem.
I would like to see more games where the draw is novel and interesting gameplay concepts and proportionally more effort is put into that than standing out visually etc. Hopefully this brings things more in that sort of direction.
You won’t get that from AAA studios: that’s largely indie territory today.
The issue with creating novel and interesting gameplay is that it’s not a straight-line process. It takes a lot of experimentation and failure. That doesn’t match with the large teams and assembly-line process of AAA game development.
An indie game developer, especially one who just works on the game in their free time but otherwise has a day job, is 100% free to experiment and redo their game design hundreds of times. Often this doesn’t mean throwing the game away but instead making lots of small games for game jams or just to build a portfolio of projects.
Couple that with the fact there aren’t nearly as many AAA studios as there are indie game developers working on hobby projects and you can see why AAAs are at such a disadvantage when it comes to experimenting with novel and innovative game designs. Indie game don’t need to all be successful to make it hard on AAAs: out of thousands of indie games only one needs to be successful.
I appreciate that this is truly a post commenting on the article and not just a link to an unreflected article 🙌
I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.
More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.
The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.
I definitely want to see more publisher-driven “game experiments”. Imagine a studio putting out a 3-hour vertical slice of a PS2-era-style experimental game idea for $5. Now imagine, a publisher puts out about 20 of these such games a year (and mostly loses money on them - since $5 isn’t a lot and those 3-hour segments need polish) but then, occasionally one of them hits it big - and then the publisher grants them a greenlight to make a trilogy of 14-hour games after figuring out that people enjoy it.
20?? The devs gonna burn out just as fast.
To clarify, the idea would be to have smaller studios each independently making games. So for half a year, one studio may only have the responsibility of a single 3-hour demo.
That’s the dream. Even $5 is probably low-balling what they could get away with.
These guys no longer understand games.
Good. Hopefully that plan involves less massive open world games with 2000 collectables that needs 150 hours to complete
Looking at you, Ubisoft. We’re ready for another Rayman game
You’re gonna be disappointed as fuck. Open world games are so formulaic and actually easier to shit out than a well-crafted linear experience. Especially when youre using generative tools. Huge maps are NOT hard to create or fill when you don’t give a fuck about quality.
It will mean they’ll offer less, cost more and have even more bugs and crashes.
The enshittification of videogames.
Which part?
It is shitty in many ways. First, I view videogames as art (because they are art) and taking out the human element just makes them a product created by a machine. Coding is a form of human expression. I understand the capitalist urge not to pay people, but replacing people with AI is a moral wrong. Microsoft, for example, after purchasing many studios over the past few years, has fired over 15,000 people in 2025 alone, despite making record profits and charging us more for new games.
I would be terrified if I were a full-time coder. Like many other occupations, programming jobs are in jeopardy. I would be considering other fields or specializations because these corporations plan to replace them all. Google already is saying that more 25% of their code is written by ai. That will only increase and bleed over to game development.
Second, by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary, you are creating an inferior product. Just throwing a game in early access because it isn’t complete isn’t a good solution and there are hundreds of games currently in that status. Personally, I avoid anything that is early access, with a few exceptions. I get the point in the article about making games with lesser graphics, which I am fine with if the project warrants it, but it feels like these companies don’t care what the product is as long as it sells. They are going to create ai-slop and charge us more for it. This is how the AAA industry dies.
Sources:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/29/24282757/google-new-code-generated-ai-q3-2024
I’m a coder, and I’m not in fear of losing my job. Definitely not long term. They can chase this trend all they like, but they’ll soon realize what they need people for. Or, something I find less likely, they don’t need those people, and you can’t un-ring a bell. Sometimes new technologies shrink the need for a certain kind of job, like farming, or they erase the need for it altogether, like telephone switchboard operators. I don’t see AI shrinking this profession all that much, and if it does, there’s nothing anyone can do that will undo it. Even Comcast can’t make people stick with cable using all the nastiest tricks in the book; sometimes things just become obsolete.
by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary
“By any means necessary” are your words, not mine, nor the article’s. I too took issue with the article saying that early access can just be a fallback; that’s not actually solving the problem and just kicking the can down the road. But we got tons of great games made in under 3 years, even with high production value.
This is how the AAA industry dies.
As we know it. But it might be how it finds a path to sustainability rather than the feast or famine of betting your career on a project that took 7 years to make. Rather than perpetually updated live service games, AAA used to make sequels on a rapid cadence. Rather than games that take dozens of hours to finish, often filled with a bunch of busy work, we used to get games that took a fraction of that, often with far better pacing.
*me looking at most of the graphical-atrocity indie games I play non-stop still being in “Early Access” after 10+ years* Yes, games taking too long to make definitely is the problem. Quantity over quality. Work faster, not smarter. Sounds like a winning strategy AAA-studios, good luck!
Passion project updated by a private indie with no obligation to shareholders is the best kind of game, just ask Project Zomboid :)
Tried asking but couldn’t hear over the warcrimes in Rimworld and artillery in Factorio.
Knowing the latest developments in “world models” that you can use to walk around in VR and interact with the world, I think it only a matter of time until GTA or similar games adopt that tech over manually layouting and skinning their worlds.
Someone out there is looking at the people mad about chatgpt losing personality and they’re gonna cram it into games.
Make games QUICKER!? So they are going to give up on quality and just have the consumers test however many A’s they have as a slogan games now…
There are, were, and always will be games made in shorter development cycles. It’s just that people are finally coming to the conclusion that longer cycles shouldn’t be the norm.
That will backfire hard when AAA gaming implodes next year and consumers will demand quality over quantity. But I expected no less from a bunch of execs high on profits who never even booted up a game in their life. The bonus crap they promise you for a pre-order or a deluxe edition at the end of many trailers paint a grim picture. We’re not just talking about cosmetic either and I know some games have done this for a while but it’s across the board now when AAA sales are actually going down. Nobody has time or money for that slop.
My plan is to buy less games, if anyone enjoys sandbox games, physics, etc. I recommend just spending a month learning blender instead, then it becomes funner than most “creative” games available.
i want AAA to mean more gameplay options, more horizontal and vertical progression, tired of the graphics focus, lost comsetic progression, elden ring at least brought it back
