# AI Reshapes Game Development Economics

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-11-12

## Transcript

Grand Theft Auto 6 is finally coming out next month.
That game has been in production since like 2013, 2014.
It's like a 12, 13-year development cycle.
Crazy.
Games have long been one of the most...
complex products to create.
But because you can have a help-filled role of some of these specialized knowledge, you no longer need to be a professional.
There is having an agent sort of look at something and try to recreate a game from scratch.
There's also kind of the meshing and the merging of two games or two art styles.
Multi-billion-dollar game franchises have been created using mods.
Counter-Strike, for example, that was a Half-Life mod.
League of Legends.
It was inspired by Defense of the Ancients, Dota, which was itself a Warcraft 3 mod.
So imagine what the next 12-year-old game will look like.
AI is now making it possible to build sort of niche games, like esoteric genres that previously would not have been economically viable.
What's a game that each one of you has been thinking about making for years and now you finally can?
What happens when making a game goes from a five-year production cycle to something almost anyone can start experimenting with?
A16Z General Partners Anish Acharya and Jonathan Lai discuss how AI is shrinking development cycles and opening game creation to people without traditional coding, art, or design skills.
They get into models that can operate tools like Blender and Game Engines, the rise of AI-powered modding and remixing, and why cheaper development could unlock stranger genres and new IP.
And they look ahead to AI-native games that generate characters, mechanics, and stories as you play, blurring the line between making a game and making a game.
and playing one.
It seems like there's just been this incredible shift in the gaming industry and also what we're seeing from solo devs and just tinkerers.
Tim Sweeney from Epic has come out and said a bunch of really interesting things about AI.
The CEO of Xbox, Asha, has also come out and sort of said that they're thinking a lot about the hardware and software interplay on Xbox.
And there seems to be a tide shift.
So I want to talk about that.
Yeah, maybe I'll start off and Anish would love to hear your thoughts because you've been building some games in your free time.
Yeah, yes, I have, yes.
So I thought there was a big technology unlock about a month ago with Astra because it was very, very good at directly using very popular game development software.
And so Astra was very good at using Blender.
It could actually work directly within Unreal and Unity.
And in previous generations of models, they would just explain to the user, oh, you should do this in Blender.
You should do this in Unreal.
But Astro actually could like operate the software for you.
And that was a huge unlock.
And so for the first time, you could have a hobbyist, someone who's never actually built any games before, use Astro to draft a game design document, generate some concept art, move that concept art into Blender, have them build 3D models from it, animate it, rig it, move it over to Unreal, and then basically add some music and sound files, which by the way, can also be generated.
And then you can export that as a playable.
And then you literally have a game that you one-shot using Astra.
And then the other thing that's been very valuable is that Astra can also QA itself.
And so it can take screencaps of the game and then it can learn from its own output.
Oh, I need to fix this bug or this doesn't look right.
And so that's why the initial prototypes that people were building on X were actually surprisingly good.
And so I think that was a huge technology unlock.
And I think that has a number of ramifications which we're starting to see in the games industry.
And the first effect is that it's just dramatically shortening the time between idea and prototype.
And so that's something that Tim Sweeney talks about, actually, in some of his Twitter posts, which is that AI is now making it possible to build sort of niche games or sort of like esoteric genres that previously would not have been economically viable.
But because he's shortening the time it takes to make a game, you can actually now just split up a prototype, a strange or weird game idea.
Because it costs less money, it takes less time.
And I think that's actually huge for the games industry because I think one of the structural challenges in games is that it just takes a really long time to make these games, right?
It's like, I think you and I were talking about this earlier, but like Grand Theft Auto 6 is finally coming out next month.
Yeah.
That game has been in production since 2013, 2014.
It's like a 12, 13-year development cycle.
Crazy.
And I'm sure it's going to be an amazing game.
But like by any other software development standard, right?
Like taking 10 plus years to make HR software or CRM or NRP.
It's kind of insane, right?
And so shortening the time from idea to prototype, let's see if we can...
get a five to 10 year dev cycle to, I don't know, two to five years.
It's still going to take some time, but I think it'll just enable the game developers to take more risk, have more at-bats, take more experiments, and just generally just increase the richness and diversity of games that are created, which I think is really exciting.
Yeah, I mean, to build on some of those comments, it's interesting because we've seen two sort of approaches emerge.
So I actually think the first thing that really was applicable to gaming was the emergence of 3.js manipulation.
And I think it was Opus 4.7, maybe it was Opus 4.8, but it just had this property actually, which it was not designed to have in it, at least Anthropic said it did not, which is it was awesome with 3.js, which is in browser 3D.
And it's interesting because the way that it does it, it's sort of, it's laying things out almost on an element by element basis, like in a way that would be maddeningly meticulous for a human.
So coding is sort of one path to game generation.
And it felt like what Astro did really well, to your point, John, was tool use.
You could use Blender and Blender in the cloud really, really effectively.
So these are two megatrends within models, one kind of emergent and one programmed that are converging to drive a lot of the acceleration and sort of game development.
The thing, it's funny, you say 12 years to make HR software.
I think just the amount of time it takes is why there's so many sad stories in gaming.
Think of all the game stories that are left untold, right?
How many games were canceled?
three years into a six-year cycle or five years into a six-year cycle.
The market has moved on, player tastes have changed.
Totally.
You go through these financial cycles, you go through these creative cycles where the ideas that were creatively interesting three years ago now feel flat.
So it's just so hard to work on something for 13 years and see it all the way through and then have it be great.
It's a miracle that it works at all.
Yeah, for sure.
And the other aspect of these long development cycles, a lot of people don't talk about, but I think has a very real impact in the industry, is that the long depth cycles have a suffocating impact on this innovation.
Because if you're a producer at a AAA game studio, and you know it's going to take 10 years to ship a game and hundreds of millions of dollars, you're going to be very conservative in what you green light, right?
Interesting.
Right.
It's like you're going to green light sequels over new IP.
I think we're on the 20th Call of Duty installment.
It's granted that'll six, right?
Yes.
It's not a new IP.
You're going to skew toward genres that have established demand, right?
Which is why we see so many first-person shooters, third-person shooters over some experimental genre.
When you lower the bar for sort of shipping a game, right, it's going to take less time.
It's going to take five years into the 10.
Instead of hundreds of millions of dollars, it's going to take tens of millions.
It's still going to be expensive.
I think it just means that people can take more creative risk.
Totally.
You can actually ship a new IP.
You can take a bet on some game developers that have never actually shipped anything before.
And you can green light them and get them a budget to make something.
I think that's a really exciting story for the games industry and actually is going to unlock a lot of structural innovation.
Right.
And the other actually way to explore this new capability, though, is to increase ambition.
So imagine what the next 12-year game will look like.
Like GTA 7, you were talking today about how intricate the city is in GTA 6.
Yeah, yeah.
They have custom radio stations that they designed because they were just like, well, we have a year and this team isn't doing anything.
Let's just record a bunch of radio stations and stuff like that.
It's incredible, right?
But you imagine if they then spent 10 years with the current tools, forget about a city or even a world, you could build a universe with that level of detail.
Why not?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
It's like expand the scope of games, the ambition of games, take more creative risk.
I think AI can literally create an abundance there on games that wasn't previously possible because we can make games that have never been seen before.
You can take more creative risk.
And then another element that we haven't talked about that I think is equally important is that AI is also changing who can make games.
Because games have long been one of the most...
complex products to create, right?
It's a true multidisciplinary craft.
Like, you need to know how to code, you need to know art, you need to know game design, you need to know music and sound.
And so the execution for making a great game is just very high.
Like, much more so than just snapping a great photo or making a video.
Which are hard, but I think it's just a level of difference there.
But because you can have a help-filled role of some of these specialized knowledge, which you may not have.
I think you no longer need to be a professional.
You no longer need to have a full team of people that are all like specialized in different roles.
And instead, you can have AI kind of plug some of the gaps in your skills and knowledge.
And I think that's democratizing game creation in a way that wasn't previously possible.
That you can actually have someone with just an idea and some reference art work with Astra to sort of like iterate their way to a game prototype.
And of course, it's a prototype.
It's not a fully playable game.
And then many people, won't actually finish it.
They'll just make the first level of the scene and then they'll drop out.
But I think some percentage of them will make it through and then decide that they love game development.
They actually want to turn this into a job itself.
And I think we'll see an explosion in a number of game creators.
And I think that's really exciting.
You guys must talk to founders who are either creating tools for these kind of would-be AI-enabled game developers or they're trying to work on AI-developed games themselves.
And the thing that would seem the hardest thing to me would be just gain balance and making something that's actually fun and engaging.
There seems to be this kind of, it's an art and it's a real, it's something that does, I think, require human intuition and human know-how and kind of just a different kind of creativity.
What are you seeing there in terms of what AI can do?
So I think you hit it spot on.
I think the AI model is not going to replace human taste and create a judgment.
I think that is still, really, really critical.
And then there's a saying in the games industry that the last 20% of the game is 80% of the work.
And that's where all the magic comes together that makes something fun.
Because the first 80%, you could say, is just putting together a game that works.
It's like, oh, okay, great.
Like, you can start the game.
There's a character in it.
It can shoot things.
There's like monsters to shoot.
I think that's the first 80%.
The last 20% is so critical.
It's like...
How does the world feel, right?
Going back to your point in like custom radio stations in Grand Theft Auto 6.
Like when you fire a gun, like what is the sound of the gun?
Like the shotgun should sound different from the pistol.
And then when you use a laser gun, there should be a recoil for that and so on.
Like all the little details are what makes a magical experience.
And I think that is going to be the province of humans for the foreseeable future, right?
It's like, how does something feel?
What do players want?
Like how should this gun feel?
And so I think that's still going to be critical for human taste and judgment in those situations.
Yeah, yeah.
And like, what is going to make me want to spend a thousand hours playing, you know, Grand Theft Auto or playing, you know, Baldur's Gate 3, these like incredible games.
Like, I think it really is just this level, A, of detail, but also like I think a sense of like consequence and depth to a world.
And maybe that is something that LLMs can actually, like...
Help extend.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
What do you think, yeah?
Well, so, like, I agree.
I don't know that it makes it trivial to create a really fun game, because I think that's really hard, and it's an intersection of many things, some design, some serendipitous, some even cultural, some social.
So there's many things that go into making a fun game.
I do think, though, in this new era, sometimes creation is consumption.
Like the vast majority of games are ever going to be played by one person.
That is the creator in the future.
And that's okay, actually, because I think that there is, you know, programming or creating games for the output, for the artifact.
And then there's doing those things as an activity.
And it's actually very...
tranquil to make a game and to work on a game and create, especially because it has the art element, seeing the assets come to life, you know, seeing the characters say things you didn't program them to say.
Like, I really do think there's a sort of Zen gardening aspect to game creation, which will become increasingly popular.
I think that's such a great point, which is worth seeing that, you know, creation is play sometimes.
Yes.
Like you've seen that from Minecraft, which is one of the most successful and longest running games of all time.
Like we've seen it even prior to video games and things like Legos where people or kids are just creating things for fun and sharing it with each other.
But I think that is definitely the case with AI today as well, which is just the act of creating something, bringing something to life is itself fun.
And then AI is just turbocharging what people can create.
And so you don't have everything there, everything about code and art and 3D that makes something that you can be proud of.
Yes.
And have fun making.
100%.
Anish, you built this Hobo Hotel themed kind of record shop.
What was that process like?
Oh, well, it actually started with a conversation with a friend who's a DJ and he was saying, oh, all the online record stores look the same.
It's just a list of songs.
And we were talking about how when we used to go record shopping in Toronto in the 90s, going to the record shop was like going to the barbershop.
actually, because you go there, it's filled with people.
You can't not have five conversations.
There's someone at the back who's playing tracks really loud.
There's mixtapes for sale.
There's raves being promoted.
It just, the whole thing was like, it was a real social environment.
So he said, hey, why can't shopping, record shopping online be like that?
So I thought, hey, that's cool.
Let me try to actually create that.
So this was with Opus 5.5.
I gave it a shot.
I gave it just a couple of Habbo Hotel reference art components.
And it just, It super exceeded my expectations because not only did it generate the room.
It also somehow grabbed all kinds of 90s music.
So it had a creative R&B, a creative dance hall, a creative hip hop, a creative soul.
You could pick the track, you could just look through the tracks, put them on, then the DJ at the back would grab the record, put it on.
People were dancing out a little.
So it was very intricate.
So it was a total inspiration.
And then from there, I actually said, hey, what if I extended this and turned this into Queen Street in Toronto in the 1990s?
So I turned it into a whole street.
And the last touch, which actually I think was the most sort of science fiction thing that would never have been possible, was I made it so that every one of the other storefronts were something that another player could come and build out just through prompting.
But the interesting thing is that they could not just customize the art, they could customize the capabilities.
So my son went in there and created this pet adoption center, except you could actually adopt the pets.
and they'll follow you around.
Of course, I didn't design this animal following capability in, but the coding agent updated my game engine to create that mechanic.
So now, you know, in the past, it was really inspirational to have procedural level generation, but that's just dynamic content.
Now we're talking about dynamic abilities.
It's a folder of the universe.
Yes.
And has your son played Adopt Me from Roblox?
No, no.
Is it similar?
It's one of the most popular Roblox games.
Well, maybe he has, and that's how he came up with it.
I'm like, this is so creative.
Sure, sure.
I think that's a great example.
So my son has also recently got into game development using AI, and it actually started because he wanted to play a game.
It's called Ghost of Tsushima.
It's a fantastic game, but you basically play a samurai in feudal Japan, as you can imagine.
very bloody and kind of violent.
And so he told him, actually, no, you're eight.
You're not playing this like bloody sandbox.
But he really wanted to play the game.
And so he started talking to, you know, the chat GPT and asking him about it.
And then somehow he discovered that he could build a Minecraft mod of Ghost of Tsushima.
No way.
And then he used GPT to basically deconstruct the game because there were all these like wikis online to break down how the mechanics work, how the boss battles work.
And then so yeah, so essentially Codex helped him build a Minecraft mod, which he installed and then it's Ghost of Tsushima except as a Minecraft mod.
And it works?
It works.
It works super well.
He's been sharing it with his friends and now at this point he doesn't ask us to buy new games anymore.
He's just like, I want to play this game.
I'm going to make it as a Minecraft mod.
I think that's an inspiration.
What I also love about that is that it says, you know, it illustrates the fact that as we think about how games get better, realism is not the only or even necessarily the most interesting axis for improvement, right?
Just the fact that you can create a concept from two existing concepts, we were talking about this, that never would have existed is extraordinary.
I think this is actually a good...
transition to talk about decompilation and and that just really feels like a new trend and it seems like they're kind of they're different strains of decompilation there is kind of having having an agent sort of look at something and try to recreate a game from scratch.
There's also kind of the meshing and the merging of two games or two art styles.
And yeah, I just, I would love to kind of disentangle all of these different things that are going on right now.
Yeah.
So how do we do those two trends that are happening that we're getting table charts?
So the first is that, you know.
The games industry has long been driven by modding.
And modding is the concept of, like, you take a game that you already love, and then you build, like, an add-on extension to it that changes the gameplay somehow.
And then it becomes its own game.
It becomes its own genre.
And historically, some of the biggest games in the games industry have come from mods.
And so Counter-Strike, for example, which is a really big esports, that was a Half-Life mod.
League of Legends, one of the most successful MOBAs of all time, was inspired by Defense of the Ancients, Dota, which was itself a Warcraft 3 mod.
And then my favorite one, like Fortnite and PUBG, were itself inspired by a player unknown battle royale mod of armor.
And so, multi-billion dollar game franchises have been created using mods, and so this is just...
This is the history of somehow some of the best and biggest games in the world have been created.
And AI is making it really, really easy to mod games right now because exactly like the way my son did, an ordinary player or someone who loves an IP or a game can basically point the astro to it and say, hey, like, make me Ghost of Tsushima, except add this, right?
Like, add voxel-based crafting, add the relationship system from Animal Crossing, and then...
you can actually just make it and see if it's fun.
And like if it is fun, then other people start playing it and it becomes like a genre in itself and it kind of blows up in a big way.
And some part of this is going back to like the creation loop.
It's hard for someone to create something new using a blank canvas.
So if you just put a text prompt in front of someone and say, hey, make me a game, you wouldn't know where to start, right?
And so that's why...
working within the framework of an existing game that someone else has made and then just say, hey, like, add this thing, remix it with this other thing, I think it becomes very powerful because it gives you a place to start and a place to remix from.
Yeah, it's interesting.
So you mentioned modding.
I think the two other areas that I've seen, you know, one are sort of decompiling such that you have the source code and the assets.
And then this gets really interesting for beloved but old games.
You know, you take games like Knights of the Old Republic, for example, which, of course, Bioware is out of business.
And, you know, Bioware is never going to make another Knights of the Old Republic game.
And you think about extending it or forking it.
Like, that's really cool.
And then the third, maybe most futuristic one I've seen.
There's this guy, Blendy, who's been doing a lot of these amazing things on X, B-L-E-N-D-I, where he'll take the assets from two existing games and then combine them into a third game, you know, which is just a totally outer space concept.
But it works, and some of the games are really fun.
I was going to say, on the retro games front, I think what sparked the Xbox Labs announcement when Asha talked about wanting to support...
you know, AI and sort of like new frontiers of development was specifically that there was just so many community projects popping up that were taking Halo, like the original, I think it was like the 2001 like Xbox game.
And then they were decompiling and recompiling it for like modern sort of platforms.
And so I think there were four community projects that I heard of that made Halo a playable web GPU game.
And to basically play Halo in the web now.
And it's really incredible.
And it's going back to what you were saying earlier about 3.js.
I think 3D on the web has never been more powerful or more accessible.
And so I think Xbox has likely seen things like this happen.
And they're saying, hey, we used to have whole teams that would just take a Windows game and port it over there.
to the iOS ecosystem.
We'll take old games that are defunct and sort of like try to remaster it.
But now AI can help a lot of those efforts and you're basically taking an established IP and you're exposing it to a new audience.
Like kids today that have never grown up and they've never actually had a chance playing Knights of the Old Republic.
But now they can.
That's right.
And potentially on a console or on a PC or a device that's relevant to them.
I think it's really cool.
I also think that there's...
genres of games that have really high production cost or have historically had, you know, where you simply don't get the ROI.
Like, you know, people love RTS games.
Everybody has been obsessed with RTS.
There's been so many efforts to make a great iPad RTS.
And like, we've never really, really gotten one.
And, you know, now I think we're going to see this complete renaissance of genres like RTS.
So true.
It's what I'm, yeah, I think Tim Sweeney talked about this as well.
It's what I'm personally really excited about.
I love this really niche genre of games called job simulators.
And it's such a strange concept.
It's like you basically play a day in the life of a particular job.
And it's typically not a glamorous job.
You're not like the president or something.
The one that I played most recently is this train conductor simulator.
Oh, my gosh.
Amazing.
Where you can basically be a conductor of subways and trains in various cities around the world.
And so I've been like a JR, like a Tokyo subway conductor.
It's exactly as it sounds.
It's not glamorous at all.
You show up for work.
You have a timetable to make.
You got to drive this train and you got to stop at every stop along the way and pick up passengers.
And you got to do it perfectly where if you're like late on like, you know, stopping like the last, like the last car doesn't make it in.
So not everyone can make it on the train and you get your, your paycheck is docked.
Wow.
And so.
It's like such a, it's a niche genre, right?
Like I can't imagine that many people want to be train conductors.
Yeah.
But if they are now, like you can make games like this, right?
And people like me who really love it will pay a lot of money to play these games, right?
Is it fun?
I find it really funny.
You know, it's funny.
If you look at, like, old computing magazines and you look at, like, the rankings of top software, number one is usually, like, VisiCalc, and number two is, like, Microsoft Flight Simulator, like, early Flight Sim Games.
And, like, I actually think, like, simulator as a genre just really has a hold on people.
People love sims.
That's right.
It's, yeah, it's just an evergreen kind of game.
Maybe there's like a particular type of job that resonates for various people, but maybe you never had a chance to discover it because the simulator genre just wasn't that big.
That's right.
But now you can role play a day in the life of almost any job in the world that you can envision.
Like, wouldn't that be really cool?
Feces.
Did you guys ever play Untitled Goose Game?
Oh, I know about this game.
I know about this game.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a goose simulation.
That's right.
That's right.
I was going to say.
I actually enjoyed it.
So maybe I am into the sim genre.
Yeah, and this chievous goose.
It was really big during the pandemic.
That's right.
I don't know what that says about me.
Actually, going back and kind of like merging the conversation about RTS games, like one thing that I've seen are kind of like agent orchestration schemes that look, like classic art like there's the age of empire skin over your like agent orchestration yes there's a minecraft yeah yeah structures are different quad code exactly exactly what do you what do you guys think of those is that is that like a a toy kind of rendering is that kind of just an extension of the fact that you know it does kind of feel like a game to be managing your agents like that or is that like like is that at the start of a new sort of genre of simulator?
I mean, I think it could be, you know, like being the general manager of a line of business at any...
company at Credit Karma or Google or wherever else is, it is a sort of sim, you know?
You're sort of working with all of these teams and you have a limited amount of control and you have incomplete, imperfect information and then you have market forces.
So I don't know that it's that different.
I actually think that now you can trivially create these really ambitious interfaces.
So in that world, you might do that and it might actually be optimal, whereas in the old world, the cost was so high, it just was insane.
It made no sense, you know?
Yeah, that's right.
Sure.
I think one thing that the GUIs, the graphical user interfaces that are inspired by games being used for agent management makes me think of is that the average consumer finds agent orchestration to be...
Non-intuitive, right?
Like working from a command line, trying to manage your agents, you know, using the primarily text-based interface, that is non-intuitive.
And so I do agree that there will probably be a more mass market visual interface that an everyday consumer can use to manage like a collection of agents.
And say, and whether it looks like StarCraft or Egypt Empires are factorial, that I'm less sure of the exact implementation.
But it does feel like we're early in sort of like figuring out user interfaces for primarily agentic workflows.
Yeah.
Yeah, so John, one thing I'm really curious to hear from you on, obviously Tim and Asha have come out.
you know, really supporting the kind of community around AI developed games, which is awesome.
But do you think that their companies and ecosystems are set up to really capture the value from this trend?
Or do you think that they're currently in an awkward position today knowing that they need to change?
Yeah, I think that's a good question.
I think, I mean, if you just take modding as an example, historically, the original owners of IP, have not benefited that much from the mods that have been created on top of their IP, right?
And so I think the original creators of Dota didn't really benefit that much from League of Legends when that was created.
I'm not sure if the original Half-Life developers owned that much from Counter-Strike.
And so I think there is a gap in terms of business models that need to be figured out.
sort of if you're really embracing AI as like a remixing, modding, decompilation, recompilation engine that empower your player base with, like how do you as a company benefit from that sort of commercially?
I think folks are still early in that.
Like I've heard, you know, I've heard talk of folks like trying to figure out if there's like a revenue share or royalty that can go back to the company and therefore you're powering like creators, but you know.
I think there's a lot to be figured out there still.
I mean, the strongest form in my mind is Minecraft, you know?
Like, Minecraft really benefits from the mods ecosystem.
But it's interesting because we've interchangeably used the words remix and extend.
But I actually think that, you know, all of the additions that extend the core game and maybe share a core foundation of community plus a base game, that actually really benefits the IP owner.
Whereas when you're forking the game, there is no benefit.
In fact, you might even be splitting the community.
That's right.
I think it goes back to something which I know you and I have talked about separately, which is how do you create new forms of distribution for the next generation of AI games or games that are created using AI?
I think today, many of these games are still going through traditional distribution channels.
They're being posted on Steam, on the App Store.
You know, if you're making something in Roblox, it's still within the Roblox ecosystem.
And I think there is an opportunity for a company out there to also create a distribution platform.
Yeah.
Which natively harnesses and empowers all these AI game creators that are making stuff.
And it doesn't really exist today because of the fact that all the games are going through traditional channels.
Right.
Well, you should check out Spawn, actually.
You know, Spawn, we're not investors, but I'm a huge fan of what they're doing.
It's Jacob and team.
They've created this sort of shared community plus game generation platform.
And what you do is you work with this embodied agent named Savi.
So she's in all the games with you.
She can like not only take bug reports in the platform, but she can modify the game while you're in it.
Like a co-pilot.
Yeah, that's right.
And then you, and she can create portals for you so you can kind of step into other games.
And you can bring other players with you.
Every game is multiplayer by default with the same community.
So it's early, but it's the most impressive, ambitious effort I've seen at doing something like this.
And I'm sure there'll be more.
Yeah.
No, I think that's, I think that's exciting.
And I'm a fan of Jacob.
I've been following the company for a while.
I think the broader opportunity for, hey, how do you create a community that basically persists between games, right?
And so you're not just, here's a couple of people to play this game and a couple of people to play this game and they're not interconnected.
I think that is a huge opportunity, right?
And I think Minecraft and Roblox are great examples of this where once you're inside the Roblox ecosystem, if you ever...
get bored of one game, like you've beaten the game, where there's like hundreds of thousands, if not millions more sort of experiences that you can participate in, right?
But can you contrast the two, John?
Because here's one thing I've noticed.
Like Roblox, all the games are extremely different.
So it feels like the kind of core shared game, if you even call it that, is actually pretty thin.
Whereas in Minecraft, the core shared game is very rich.
Do you think you need to have a really rich game?
Because it feels like the pure sort of portal-based worlds.
without a shared core gaming mechanic are harder to get off the ground, or is that not true?
I think having a, I think the benefit of a Minecraft model where it's more centralized, right?
Like everyone starts off playing the same game.
And to your point, you're forking, you're modding it, you're making it your own when you create your Minecraft mods.
I think the benefit of that is that everyone has a shared sort of experience.
and you're familiar with the IP and you're kind of departing from that.
And so like the Minecraft mods are almost like fan fiction, right?
But everyone's like watch the same Game of Thrones series, right?
And so they know who Daenerys and Jon Snow and what the watch is and, you know, and so on and so forth.
And Minecraft has a lot of that shared culture, right?
After the Enderman and like the dragons and, you know, and that feels very different from a more decentralized approach, which is what I would characterize Roblox as.
Because people can enter the Roblox ecosystem from any game.
Yes, that's right.
Like I mentioned that earlier, like Jailbreak, there's a bunch of other games like Brookhaven.
And then you have a very different experience and then you have to learn like where to go from there and how to be a creator.
But both approaches are totally viable, right?
But I do think, yeah, I do think it's just a philosophical difference in terms of like how you want to extend the game and harness the community.
And both can work.
Yeah, both can work for sure.
Going back to our discussion about studios and publishers, what do you think they're the most excited by and what do you think they're the most worried by right now?
I mean, I think getting their costs down has got to be super exciting.
And just being able to create more IP with less financial risk seems to be hugely exciting.
Look, for a lot of these studios, I think even the studios, they kind of...
live and die by winning the right to develop a game for a publisher.
And then if the game doesn't do well, they may not get it again.
So you have hundreds of people that are overworked like crazy.
It's got to be one of the worst qualities of life just being in that industry.
I mean, people do it anyway because they love it.
Yeah.
But it's tough, you know.
So I think that just the quality of life of the average person in the industry and then honestly the quality of the business should go way, way up.
Yep.
I think maybe what is worrisome to them is I'm guessing that, you know, Xbox, I guess.
Microsoft owns Minecraft, but they wish they had an asset like that that was closer to a network and a social product than a pure entertainment product.
I'm sure Fortnite, despite being the most beloved game in the world five years ago, it's not really discussed as much.
So I think there's this holy grail, what you call, John, a never-ending game or a forever game, but it's so hard to get there, and maybe with these technologies, they'll have a better shot.
Yeah.
Yeah, so in my conversations with game developers, I would say in general, they're all using AI already.
I think AI has become table stakes in terms of just like tools that you use to basically be more productive, right?
Instead of using AI to generate game design docs, to generate concept art, to quickly iterate on an idea and go to prototype, as I mentioned earlier.
It's like shortening the distance in time between an initial idea and prototype.
I think everyone's like universally like really excited about that.
I think...
I think of that as sort of like wave one of AI adoption amongst sort of game studios.
I think the next wave, which is what Anisha's leading to you that's even more exciting, is how do you make AI to create like new types of gameplay, like new game mechanics, new game genres that don't exist today, but could massively expand the market for games, right?
So you're not just making GTA 6, but like faster and cheaper.
You're making a new type of game, right?
That couldn't exist before.
I think the...
The article I wrote earlier on the concept of the never-ending game, it's something that I'm personally passionate about.
I'd love to see happen.
But the holy grail for an MMR is a game which infinitely sort of adapts itself to what the players want.
So if you land on a beach in an MMR and then you're supposed to go to the forest, that's how the game starts.
But, you know, maybe you really love the ocean and you decide to stay in the beach and you build a ship and you, like, sail off in the ocean.
Like, MMO today couldn't, like, handle that because it's scripted linearly.
They expect you to go into the forest and maybe there's a thing that happens that sets you up on a quest.
But in an adaptive MMO, one that, you know, maybe is built using, like, world models, for example, like, you could literally generate an entire quest line for someone who really likes the ocean.
Now there's pirates that are attacking you.
There's like a nautical, you know, warfare element, etc.
And then I feel like sometimes these discussions always go into science fiction.
But you remember in Ender's game, they had the concept of the mind game.
And it's that the game is just adapting to what Ender wants to do at any given moment in time.
And I think it's possible that we'll see our own version of the mind game at some point.
And I think that would be the game that like...
you can't stop playing because it adapts itself to whatever you want to do at any given moment in time.
I mean, perhaps we're playing it at this moment.
Yeah, exactly.
The Matrix side.
Yeah.
Well, or yeah, or Ender's game itself, right?
The story is that he's in the game.
Yeah.
That's it.
What games do you guys have the most amount of hours in?
For me, I've played Witcher 3.
I've completed it twice.
Nice.
I have completed a bunch of times and I just absolutely love it.
The other game that I actually adore is Dune 2000.
That was my favorite RTS growing up.
It's so, so good.
And actually, somebody had already ported it over to play on Mac and it's as good as it ever was.
So for RTS fans, if you haven't played that, I highly recommend Dune 2000.
I probably put thousands of hours into League of Legends.
Some of my best friends and friendships have been made in that game.
And so I think that has to be probably my most played game.
And then probably closely behind that is StarCraft.
Nice.
I played all of the versions, you know, Back to Boot War, the StarCraft 2 and so on.
And it's a classic example of a game which the audience for hardcore RTS is just dwindowed over time because it's such a hard genre to play.
Like it matters how...
like what your APM is, like you can't play competitively without feeling bad about yourself because like everyone else is playing.
It's like so much faster and better at the game than me.
There's not a lot of developers that are trying to make like new and modern RTS games, you know, because the audience size doesn't support it if you just look at it from a pure like market sizing analysis.
But with AI, like I'm excited to see an explosion in RTS games, right?
I will be playing as many of them as I can.
Nice, nice.
I'm a big Crusader Kings.
3 fan, which isn't really RTS, but it is, like, it's, it's, it's really, it's like, I would, I describe it to people who don't know about it as, like, The Sims mixed with Age of Empires.
It's like, because you get, like, kind of personality management.
Just like relationships, politics.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
But then you also get kind of this over, this grand, like, overworld of, like, managing your dynasty and your realm and stuff like that.
So, so deep.
Wow.
Yeah.
Anyway, to close this out, what's a game that each one of you has been thinking about making for years and now you finally can?
I mean, I can go quickly.
So I grew up running a bulletin board system, which tells you what my age is.
So pre-internet, people would dial in.
And BBSs were famous for having these async multiplayer games because only one person could phone in at a time.
So you'd play your turns, you'd phone up, connect, play your turns, log off the next day, play your next turns, and see everyone else's turns at the same time.
Oh, cool.
So there's a whole genre of amazing async multiplayer games, including two written by one of the earliest employees at Google.
This was when he was still at Stanford.
His name is Amit Patel.
So he made a game called Baron Realms Elite and a game called Solar Realms Elite.
Unfortunately, he lost his source code for Solar Realms Elite, which is the better of the two.
But he has a game design doc and he has an EXE.
So for every genre of the models, I've tried like, hey, can you recreate the game?
And it has not been able to do it.
And I like now have a, what feels like a faithful recreation running on my computer.
Wow.
Wow, wow, wow.
That's a great story.
Yeah.
I think maybe something among a similar vein for me is I'm a big, Civilization player.
And I think the original Civ key has generated some of my most endearing childhood memories.
It's like the 16-bit Windows version of Civ that you needed floppy disk in order to play.
It's not playable today anymore.
It's a 16-bit executable.
But I would love to recreate that game on modern hardware stack.
Nice.
And then, you know, I've also...
long thought about like what does Civ look like with agents?
Because the fantasy of the game is that you are supposed to be the ruler of an empire.
And like, but that fantasy sort of breaks down over the course of Civ where you're micro-ing like literally every unit in your empire.
But, you know, at some point in time you could imagine, hey, what if there was Civ where every unit was an agent?
And they had their own sort of like...
agenda and goals and then you as the ruler of the empire, you're sort of setting strategy and then you're trying to influence your subjects to grow in the direction that you want them to, right?
And you can't just have them do exactly what you want.
You have to kind of look casual and sort of like influence and stuff.
John, I have amazing news for you.
This is Crusader Kings 3.
This game exists.
This game exists and doesn't use, you know...
like frontier AI at all.
Is that true?
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, yeah, pretty much.
I mean, you do, you have to manage like schemes and like, you know, different people's personalities and their opinion of you.
And like, sometimes people won't do what you want because their opinion of you is too low.
Like, they're different ways.
Like, if you want to, you know, conquer a realm or conquer, you know, a different territory, there are so many different ways you can do it.
You can, like, murder people who are, like, ahead of you in succession.
Like, it's super deep.
It's, like, yeah, it's, I think, like, it actually feels the closest to me, like, a kind of, you know, never-ending, endless game like you were talking about before in terms of, like, what will this feel like when it is super deep and super realistic and you get, like, way, way, way more permutations of choices.
So, yeah, you should definitely check it out.
During the pandemic, I got COVID in, like, the end of 2020.
And I started teaching myself C Sharp.
And I started making, like, a, like, sort of Japanese-style dating sim with Unity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, because it was right around, like, Unity's IPO.
And so I was just kind of, like, curious about, you know.
Unity.
Unity and, like, how it worked and, like, how easy it was.
It was, like, I mean.
I didn't, I, like, it was basically, like, branching dialogue trees.
So it wasn't really, like, that advanced in terms of programming.
And I, like, didn't really get that far.
There was, like, some basic unit, like, kind of, like, managing health and, like, thirst and stuff like that.
But it was, uh...
I actually think the dating, we're going off on a tangent now, but because you brought it up, I think the dating sims genre is actually right for...
Yes.
Yeah.
So there's a genre called Otome Games, which are basically, you know, dating sims for women to basically go on dates with like men of different personalities and archetypes and so on.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Fun note to end on.
Yeah, for sure.
Fun note to end on.
Thank you guys so much for joining.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Thanks, John.
This was great.
That was cool.
Yeah, first in many, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
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