gizmodo.com: In a gold rush, the people who get rich aren’t the grubby prospectors digging for those nuggets in the muck; it’s the men who sell the shovels. In that vein, Google, with generative tools like Genie, Veo, and Gemini, is competing to become the biggest provider of AI for the gaming industry. I talked to the man at Google who’s in charge of selling the shovels.
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Credit where it’s due: it is incredibly funny to introduce the driving force for a “new”, “exciting”, “game-changing” technology with their experience working on two “new”, “exciting”, “game-changing” technologies that failed horribly. Nobody else remembers Google Stadia but me and Scott the Woz, and these dinguses running the AI boom are betting on that. Video games, like all forms of entertainment, has been the testing ground for many a poorly conceived idea – remember the Metaverse? Remember 3D gaming? – and while I’m less rabidly anti-AI than some of my colleagues, I just don't buy into the idea that AI will revolutionize anything but the lowest common denominator of games. The problem (in my eyes), is that gaming is becoming increasingly stratified, where more and more slop is plopped unceremoniously onto Steam or Epic, and major developers increasingly start going the way of Konami in the 2010s – gambling. Simply put, more games are trying to ape that LCD. Buser is right that a lot of gaming has transitioned from strictly designed games to live-service, where games are more or less developed actively. And, undeniably, these games are successful. I like to believe that the incredibly loud backlash to generative AI use in games like those in the article will combat the dollar-signs execs see in their eyes when presented with an infinite goop machine, but even I lack the optimism to hope for gamers. It’s a little bleak, is all.
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