AI is definitely coming to game development. While obviously, early uses of AI are for business clowns to try to fire all their artists and suck, there’s going to be an eventual stabilization of AI, where it’s utilized with curated training data sets to act as tools that empower developers, artists, and even non-developers to build game content fairly easily. This isn’t going to replace artists. The best art will be made *by artists*, but in order to be competitively *fast*, you’ll have to start utilizing AI tools to “fill in” the less important content, or speed up art production by automating tedious art-related-but-not-art tasks.

I have no doubt this will happen, and become commonplace over the course of the next five years. It’ll happen faster, but it’ll be ethically questionable for another few years, at least, and it’ll take some time to figure out how to draw boundaries that give these tools power, but also deal with protecting human work. It’ll be a weird few years, for sure.

I’m still convinced, however, that web3 is useless. Hearing folks at a conference today talk about how “Player ownership is inevitable!” and “Now is the best time to really dive into blockchain because the hype has disappeared!” It feels like a bunch of guys who found a tool that they really, really want to use, but still genuinely have no idea what it’s for or why any player would want it, but boy, it’s valuable, so just keep saying so as loud as you can and one day someone else will believe it, too! It’s bullshit.

“Player ownership” isn’t ever likely going to be tied to blockchain or NFTs. It’s never going to be interoperable. And listening to vets who’ve worked in early genuine “metaverse” iterations who sincerely believe that interoperability is a boondoggle, I’m more interested in their opinions about the validity of interoperability than I am in listening to the web3 bros, who are espousing some sort of utopia that they’re sure will materialize one day, even though it’s been technically possible since the beginning of gaming and yet no one’s ever, ever done it with any scale or success.

So yeah. AI yes. Web3 no. Development process, team structure and size, are all about to change pretty radically. I’m not sure for the better. It’ll make content creation easier, for sure. Which will undoubtedly reduce iteration time and help people make better games. But it’ll also make it much, much easier for there to be MORE games – so many that quality is really going to be the thing, not just “can you make a game”, but “can you make a game that stands out over the now-extreme level of trash noise.

It’s gonna be weird.