At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion

"And at least part of that plan involves AI", reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment.

...having spent the past four days dashing between appointments with CEOs and developers, there is one sentiment that has remained consistent among almost everyone I spoke to. We need to make games quicker.

Amen. Twenty years ago, 3 years was a long dev cycle, and most games were churned out in 12-18 months. It also relied heavily on crunch, but maybe we could get back to 3 year dev cycles that don't, and that can be considered somewhat "normal".

Of course, it's one thing to say you want to make games more quickly, and quite another to actually do it. More to the point, how do you do it?

Well, I, for one, would start with the bloat that made its way into mainstay series. The icon barf of Assassin's Creed. Turning series open world that have no business doing so. Making a huge game as the first outing in a series instead of seeing if there's even an appetite for the premise in the first place.

One option is to make games that look worse. Given how super-detailed graphics seem to be far less important to a younger generation raised on Roblox and Minecraft, this would seem like a fair enough strategy. ... Yet there seemed to be little appetite for this strategy among the people I spoke to at Gamescom. Perhaps it's an unwillingness to fly in the face of conventional wisdom in an industry where frame rates are often fetishised. Perhaps it's more about simple pride in the craft.

So are we refusing to do what's actually necessary to keep people's jobs sustainable, or...?

So what's the alternative? One option is to use AI to speed up the development process. And it's an option that more and more studios are taking up. ... AI is the games industry's dirty little open secret – the majority of people I spoke to said they were using AI in some form or another.

And this is where I know a lot of people would like to stop reading, but I'd encourage you to continue anyway.

Utilising AI to generate snippets of code was a popular choice.

To date, this is the only use I've ever heard, as a programmer, as something that might be useful for my job. Not that I've done it. I can still come up with snippets quickly enough just from old fashioned documentation most of the time. But sometimes it's written so generic that it takes hours of your day or more to actually learn it. And that's not the most common thing in the world that I run into that.

I do wish the author broke down how much, and which pieces, of this came from developers compared to executives/managers/owners. I'm glad to hear that everyone agrees that shorter dev cycles are a goal worth pursuing. I'm not convinced AI gets us there, and I wonder how many programmers really feel it's speeding them along in their day-to-day such that it can reduce a development schedule by literal years.