As AI costs rise, there’s little evidence of major utility in game development
"Similarly, some artists find that image editor tools based on deep learning models do a solid job of speeding up tedious parts of their workflows. AI tools also do a reasonable job of some managerial slog, like transcribing and summarising team meetings. These things are not nothing – they’re solid little gains that free up staff to spend more time applying their skills to more interesting and complex tasks.
Those gains, however, are a long way from the dream that executives were sold. Those developers who have tried to use more complex AI tools in their workflows, often being pushed to do so from senior echelons of their companies, generally seem far less enthused by the experience. Setting agentic AI tools loose on game codebases reportedly runs into hard limits very quickly; the codebases are too big, too complex, and too specialised, and any code produced by the agents needs to be extremely carefully vetted by senior developers – a dull and time-consuming task."
There was a commentary a few days ago from Gamesindustry.biz, which basically suggests that Gen AI isn't as transformative as hoped. While it has actual productivity gains, it isn't a game changer and has real limitations.
is Gen AI in game dev good for "managerial slog" like summarising team meeting minutes, but isn't transformative for games dev?
Are there actual productivity impacts, such as allowing a smaller team to create something that usually takes a bigger team to produce?
Do you think it has the potential to transform how games are made, such as generating NPC dialogue without scripted lines?