Andrew Maximov has been working in the computer games industry for 12 years, but despite all that experience he still marvels at the amount of money spent on building the biggest titles.
“I used to work for PlayStation and the last game that I worked on, just production alone cost us $220 [£176m], and then you double that for marketing, and you are in half a billion dollars for every game that you put out there, which is a bit unsustainable for most companies.”
He believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a crucial role in keeping the soaring costs of game production down, and save video game designers vital time by automating repetitive tasks.
His company, Promethean AI offers developers a set of tools to craft their own virtual worlds. Mr Maximov hopes to disrupt the way games are currently produced.
“What we’re trying to do is replace that with a system that can learn directly from artists, so that artists can be the authors of their own automation.”
Humans will still play a key role in the production process. AI will work hand in hand with the human and enable them to be more creative.
“We can create a vision for a game and then the artist can click a button and ask an AI to give them feedback. Then they will get examples from their library of concept art and digital ideas that are relevant to their project,” Mr Maximov says.
Sometimes the AI comes up with surprising ideas.
“I remember once we were trying to build a police station and we asked the AI to populate it, and it came back with a doughnut on every desk.
“Another time, we were building an apartment and it kept consistently putting a sock under the coffee table. We wondered if it was a bug but it turned out we had labelled it a bachelor apartment so I guess that it was logical to some extent,” he says.
