Every studio I have worked in could tell you the cost of an artist day. None of them could tell me the cost of a decision that got reversed six months later.
That gap explains most of what is currently happening with AI in game production.
Luke Dicken spent a decade at Zynga and finished up as Head of AI at Take-Two before his entire team was laid off earlier this year. He gave a long interview to 80 Level last week, and one passage has been rattling around my head since. Asked whether AI is a realistic answer to ballooning AAA budgets, he turns the question round and asks where the ballooning actually happened. How many projects went through repeated resets. How much of the money was spent building the thing that eventually shipped. Then he lands it: “No amount of automated asset generation is going to fix a broken steering wheel.”
