Game studio finds making video games with AI doesn’t work
Keywords Studios, a support company that aids game development with art, localization, and other services, discovered you can’t use AI to make video games. Not good ones, anyway.
A new report from Game Developer says that, in addition to helping out with Alan Wake 2 and Tears of the Kingdom and not paying their workers' severance in 2023, Keywords also spent six months trying to make generative AI develop a video game. And it didn’t work.
Keywords called the research Project Ava and said they used hundreds of tools over six months to see how AI could support game development.
"Whilst the project team started small, it identified over 400 tools, evaluating and utilizing those with the best potential,” Keywords CEO Bertrand Bodson said. “Despite this, we ultimately utilized bench resources from seven different game development studios as part of the project, as the tooling was unable to replace talent.”
"One of the key learnings was that whilst GenAI may simplify or accelerate certain processes, the best results and quality needed can only be achieved by experts in their field utilizing GenAI as a new, powerful tool in their creative process."
Now, I don’t want to say “I told you so,” but we’ve been saying for months that AI isn’t smart or imaginative enough to do what creative people can do and will only make worse games. Bodson says Project Ava will never see the light of day outside Keywords, and while he’s keen to see how AI can “support” creatives in their work, the only other area Keywords is openly using AI at the moment is automated customer service.
