LogInThe integration of AI in gaming is a transformative force, characterized by a dichotomy of benefits and drawbacks. Embracing a learning-oriented mindset, and navigating the complexities of AI is expected to help in the direction of maximizing productivity.
80 Level and Room 8 Group investigated the gaming industry's key trends: UGC, AI, and cloud gaming. In this article, we will dive deeper into AI in the gaming market, its controversial impact, and future perspectives.
Room 8 Group is an end-to-end strategic partner in external game development. Working across all platforms, the company provides creative and technical solutions across art, game development, technology, trailers, and QA for AAA and AA games.
The generative AI market in gaming has grown rapidly and is expected to continue expanding. It is projected to increase from $1.5B USD in 2024 to $1.8B USD in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8%. Factors driving this growth include competition in the gaming industry, demand for player-centric content, the need for scalability and flexibility in design, cost, and time efficiency in development.
Benjamin Paquette, Senior Game Director at Room 8 Group:
AI becomes an assistant in everything related to game design, copywriting, et cetera. If you are a writer, designer, or creative leader, you need to bounce your ideas like developers often do when using code pairing. This is where AI comes in handy. It speeds up the mundane and repetitive tasks, enhances brainstorming quality and, generally, the better you use that tool, the more creative and efficient you become.
Game developers are using AI in a number of key areas to enhance their games. AI is primarily used in three areas: improving animations (46%), automating code writing (37%), and creating art and level generation (36%).
AI helps enable more interactive experiences; it is revolutionizing the way dialogue is generated in video games. It has the ability to enhance storytelling and player engagement through dynamic interactions. Moreover, another AI use case is recommendation systems, which are transforming how players discover new games. By analyzing player behavior, gameplay history, and interactions, these AI-driven systems provide personalized suggestions that enhance user engagement.
Shayan Sanyal, Global Games Industry BD Leader at AWS:
We're seeing a lot of our customers integrate AI into non-playable characters. For instance, Saltwater Games and Jam & Tea actively use AI in their game development. With the help of AI, casual conversation between a player and a non-playable character is completely changing. They can literally talk about anything. If they want to have a conversation for half an hour, they can! I believe that things like that are going to change the way we play and interact with games over time.
Daphne Parot, CMO at Blacknut:
We see some opportunities for in-game recommendations — "If you like this game, let me recommend it to you." So, it's always a discovery of tools for customization because this is a real issue for players. AI is going to be a great tool for us to analyze their behavior.
As AI technologies become more sophisticated, many developers are increasingly turning to these tools to improve some aspects of game creation, from asset generation to level design and gameplay testing. However, there is a risk of diminishing developers' core competencies. According to a CompTIA report, 55% of companies currently utilize AI, while 45% are investigating its future implementation.
Manolis Emmanouilidis, Co-Founder at Arcware:
Here's the crucial point: It's all about how you choose to use AI. You can either leverage it as a tool to enhance your capabilities, or you can allow it to become a crutch that ultimately diminishes your own. I'm seeing a trend where developers are becoming overly reliant on AI, using it to speed up their workflow. While that can be beneficial in the short term, I worry that it could lead to a decline in fundamental skills. That's a real concern for the long-term health of the industry. We must use AI responsibly, ensuring that it empowers us rather than replacing us.
A global survey conducted by Global Advisor across 31 countries revealed that 54% of respondents believe AI products and services offer more benefits than drawbacks. 54% expressed excitement about AI products and services. However, 52% of survey participants admitted feeling nervous about them. Moreover, there is heightened fear that automation may lead to a decline in the quality and creativity of content.
However, our interviewees demonstrated another perspective on AI's role. They view AI as a tool for efficiency rather than a replacement for creative vision, emphasizing the importance of human-originated content.
Štěpán Kaiser, Global GameTech Lead at Revolgy:
I honestly don't believe that there will be fully AI-generated games because the heart of the game is still the design, narrative, story behind it, et cetera. If you want to create a basic mobile game where you just want to make some quick cash, I can very easily imagine that it can be 100% AI-generated pretty soon, but if you want to do a big AAA title, I think it will still need a soul inside of it. I can't imagine people really want to listen to AI-generated music or go to AI concerts. And I think it will be the same for games because it's also part of the art.
Scott Reismanis, CEO at mod.io:
There are businesses that see AI as a tool to help them do things faster and more efficiently, but they don't see it as replacing the creative vision and the role of designers in the final product. So, they want that content to originate from the mind of a human.
Apart from the mass adoption of different already well-known AI tools (like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others). Some of the key industry leaders are experimenting with AI specifically for game development needs. For example, Microsoft recently announced a new generative AI breakthrough called Muse, designed to assist with the development of gameplay ideas. It was trained on seven years of human gameplay data from the game Bleeding Edge. The goal was to test whether Muse could generate new gameplay footage. The final result showed that Muse could be used as a tool to predict and visualize how gameplay might change in response to developer input while still keeping the developer in the loop. Thus, it is expected that more models like Muse will emerge in the future, and game studios will implement them more actively.
Read the full version of the 80 Level & Room 8 research How UGC, AI, And Cloud Are Transforming Gaming for FREE and get insights into:
- How are other gaming industry leaders experimenting with AI?
- What are the ethical and legal considerations of AI?
- How many AI instruments are suitable for professional use?
- Will cloud, AI, and UGC converge? And what is the future of this combination?