Support NeoGAF

[Calverz]

This is exactly the direction of travel the last few years. Shit is not sustainable and they see AI as the answer. When they should be looking in the mirror and asking themselves if budgets and scope etc need to be as big as they are? Or even easier ask themselves two questions:
1. Does this really need to be open world?
2. Does this really need to be a live service game?

 

[DragonNCM]

At this point where all games are shit & need 5+ years to develop AI is a real solution. Human narrative gets fucking bad.

 

[ProtoByte]

If you want to blame it on cultural issues, okay, but I have a follow up question: Why are asian-region devs suffering from the same issues?

Huh. Thats funny. I would've thought you'd imply that they aren't suffering the same problems.

But you're right, there are to a large degree. It isn't because they're chasing cutting edge graphics, as you know. Metaphor took 8 years and it's barely distinguishable from last gen Persona 5 in terms of asset quality or design tenets, for example.

I think they're mostly having the same problems as the west, and developed having those issues in the 7th gen of consoles. It's easier to find the quotes, articles, tweets, and videos from western game devs to confirm their issues, but I do think it's easy enough to tell that the Japanese sphere - which maybe has an established senior layer that is even more entrenched and worshipped than the western side - is dealing with the same stuff.

If you want a case study, it would probably be best to look at Square Enix. Their production processes for AAAs has been inefficient for the last 20 years.

 

[DavJay]

If that man says superglue is edible, super glue is edible.

 

[semiconscious]

This is exactly the direction of travel the last few years. Shit is not sustainable and they see AI as the answer. When they should be looking in the mirror and asking themselves if budgets and scope etc need to be as big as they are? Or even easier ask themselves two questions:
1. Does this really need to be open world?
2. Does this really need to be a live service game?

yep. sometimes, the cheaper solution & the better solution aren't always the same solution...

 

[JimmyRustler]

Who said games must always be bigger? It's either Todd Howard or Take Two's biggest head, I can't think of another one.

Funnily enough I think it was Oblivion that started the trend back in the day and then it just spread around.

But the problem is really that not enough people are willing to pay full price for a short game. Simple as that. Every now and then some game slip through the cracks like Space Marine 2 last year, but overall the risk of failure is probably too high.

 

[Esppiral]

This coming from Nintendo is kinda hilarious

 

[LazyParrot]

How about going back to making games that don't take hundreds of people half a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to make?

 

[DreamcastSkies]

How can game development jobs work alongside AI without the job disappearing from what the AI generates?

 

[baphomet]

AAA advice from a man who's made maybe 2 of them in the past 30 years?

 

[rodrigolfp]

This coming from Nintendo is kinda hilarious

Just because they never made anyone doesn't mean they don't know how it is.

 

[zizou6971]

This coming from Nintendo is kinda hilarious

Sakurai is not a Nintendo employee

 

[Hookshot]

How was he saying it?

Was it ~"I'm using AI, get fucked, Kirby with 6 fingers!!"? Or "If people want to keep improving the realism they'd need to find ways to cut down the cost and time using some AI on the simpler tasks?

 

[Zephyranthes]

Sakurai's approach to modern game development, which involves such practices as giving himself IV fluids so he can keep working while terribly ill, is absolutely unsustainable.

More reasonable and self-preserving approaches already exist without the need for AI.

 

[K' Dash]

It's kind of scary hearing it from him specifically tbh, knowing the workaholic he is.

Exactly, also makes many of the replies here seem idiotic. If Sakurai says this, everyone should be listening.

 

[TGO]

Just an excuse to usher in AI.

 

[sachos]

I've been saying this here for a long time now, the ideal future would be AAA devs using the help of AI to get shorter dev times and AA and solo devs could use AI to reach quality levels that would be pretty much impossible for them in the past years. That is my hope, of course there will be tons of slop but creative people will rise i think.
Also there is an even bigger "AI future" that could render all this discussion pointless if generative AI video gets good enough and fast enough that you can infinitely explore it in real time, instant infinite explorable worlds at the click of a button. That would change thinks quite a lot but i still predict that traditional gaming with human crafted games (using AI as a tool or not) will keep coming out.

 

[xrnzaaas]

It's pretty interesting to hear that from someone whose career is tied to Nintendo. That's one of few companies right now that doesn't have to worry about the development process of their games. Nintendo's top games don't have 200 mil+ budgets and they don't have to sell millions of copies to break even... and they still do that, because they have a very dedicated fanbase.

AI isn't a magical solution to the industry's problems, just like upscaling isn't a solution to poor optimization. It's a combination of different factors - there are too many games coming out, budgets and projects are often poorly managed, some games are too big and they take too long to develop (risking the fact that current trends may change) and there's an increasingly aggressive chase after monetization.

 

[KXVXII9X]

I hope he's just dangling that while preparing a full-blown Kid Icarus: Uprising remake for the Switch 2.

I've been wanting a sequel or remake for the longest time. Just played Uprising the other day and enjoyed it. It just needs mu h better controls and camera.

 

[kevboard]

it's a mistranslation btw.

 

[calico]

5+ year dev cycles are insane (with very few guaranteed-to-succeed exceptions), and not just because of the expense of developing for so long but because of how much the market can shift in the interim. Most studios need to stay nimble and be able to respond to changing trends; being locked into a project for so long makes that impossible. This is how studios end up doing stupid shit like developing a Wonder Woman game for multiple years beyond the point at which it was guaranteed to flop, or having to delay a game for months to minimise the woke content they already spent months putting into the game.

If AI makes it possible to get back to a far more reasonable ~2 year cycle, without sacrificing quality, it will be hugely beneficial to studios. Beneficial in terms of it being more likely that the target will still be in the same place by the time they get to release, and in terms of making it more viable to take risks to begin with if it's taking much less time to reach a point where they can know if that 'riskier idea' is working out or not.

There are also some things which AI can potentially make possible in gaming which we currently just don't get because they would be prohibitively expensive with a human workforce. These possibilities don't really get enough consideration, but that is a slightly different topic.

 

[Danny22]

just make shorter games like on xbox 360/ps3.
I would prefer 8-20h games over 50-100

Do you remember the obsession people had with 'hours of gameplay' during PS3 gen? EVery single linear game had some variation of 'short hours of gameplay' by professional reviews which would bring down the score.

Consumers were obsessed as well (to an extent still are) whether it provided 'bang for your buck'