Unity, the software company that 70% of mobile games use, is deploying generative AI in games. It’s a massive strategic play that the company’s CEO says will drive similar growth in gaming to the 2D to 3D transition, or the rise of mobile in gaming: a 10X transformation in gamer experience.
And it’s a change that has been five years in the making.
“This is what we’ve been dreaming about since we watched our first Star Trek episode … imagine the Holodeck,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello told me in a recent TechFirst podcast. “We’ve been wanting this for a very long time. We’re gonna get it.”
Investment firm Andreesen Horowitz says that the generative AI revolution will radically transform gaming and — as they particularly highlight — the art, science, and business of making games. But as gaming industry analysis firm Naavik zeroes in on, the biggest opportunity is not in producing the various elements and components that go into games, but in fundamentally transforming the in-game experience itself. With generative AI embedded in an actual game and not just the tools that make a game, infinite levels, infinite worlds, and infinite variation become much more possible. And with on-board generative AI, multiplayer games that are largely populated by non-player characters (NPCs) can become richer and more believable.
In short: much more real.
Startups like Inworld AI are already offering AI characters built via ChatGPT-like large language models to “craft characters with distinct personalities and contextual awareness that stay in-world or on brand.”
But cost is a potential concern.
ChatGPT costs $20/month and as a subscriber, I’m severely limited on the number of queries that use the most advanced GPT-4 model. Inworld AI offers 2,000 API minutes for $20/month, which is much more affordable, but does it scale to millions of players in games that might have hundreds of AI characters somewhat simultaneously?
Riccitiello says Unity has solved that problem. In fact, the company started solving it five years ago.
“We call it Project Barracuda,” Riccitiello told me. “And what that allows is the runtime that’s on the device, on your iPhone or Android device or PC or console, that runtime can now have essentially an AI model inside of it to drive those things. So it can be done locally. So as those actions are driven locally, it doesn’t cost anything.”
That runtime, Unity says, is on four billion devices globally.
And it will enable, the company says, gaming worlds that feel fully alive. In some cases better and more interesting, Riccitiello says, than his actual human friends.
“I think this is 10x the potential transformation because I don’t think anybody looks at their games and thinks of them as real worlds,” he told me. “They’re sort of scripted fantasy worlds … we’re about to find out what happens when we make these worlds fully alive in terms of how it feels to the player. I can’t wait.”
Imagine the NPC you’re sharing a foxhole with in a battle game pulling out a picture and showing you their girlfriend or boyfriend. Imagine rich backstories and contexts for everyone you meet that persist over time and evolve as you interact with them over weeks and months and years. Imagine games that generate new gameplay as you progress through the game, providing levels and challenges, contexts and experiences that perhaps no one else in the entire world will ever play but you.
The mind does boggle a little at the possibilities.
Plus, of course, the potential challenges in an industry that has spawned a psychological condition recognized by the World Health Organization as “internet gaming disorder.” Making the worlds it creates even more immersive, even more real-feeling, even more socially rewarding will have negative impacts on some.
Of course there’s also a huge opportunity in game making itself.
Unity thinks that game designers and developers can be up to 10 times more product using AI, and that while AI per se won’t take anyone’s job, developers or artists or writers who use AI will take work from those who don’t. (It is worth noting that Unity just laid off about 8% of its own staff, about 600 people, as it “restructures specific teams in order to continue to position itself for long-term and profitable growth.”)
And generative AI, Riccitiello says, won’t be able to make complex and compelling games on its own.
“While these models will eventually produce simple games … the Flappy Birds of the world, I think the rich and complex things are gonna be very hard for these models to produce,” he says.
One reason why: LLMs study the world to learn what to output. But studying a game is very different than a webpage or a PDF: it’s a dynamic world with a logic all its own where interactions between characters change the actual gameplay in real time.
That sounds compelling.
But AI is advancing so quickly that it’s hard to say what it will or won’t be capable of in the near to mid-term future. And, if AI is built into the engine that creates — and now in the generative AI world runs and operates — millions of games, wouldn’t it be capable of learning from them as well?
Estimates vary, but in 2021 Accenture estimated that the global gaming industry was worth around $300 billion. If generative AI creates 10X growth over the next few years, games will represent a very significant proportion of global value creation.
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