Xbox exec claims AI will enable ‘anyone with an awesome idea to make a great game’

Xbox’s chief financial officer has discussed some of the benefits Microsoft believes artificial intelligence will have on game development.

As well as making the artform more efficient for existing professionals, Tim Stuart believes the technology will help democratise game development, creating millions of “citizen creators”.

AI’s ability to generate code, instances, art assets and more could enable “anyone in this room to be a game developer”, Stuart told attendees at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit, TechRaptor reports.

“The barista at your local Starbucks has an awesome idea for a game and they can now use Copilot and AI to go create a great mobile experience. “

While he thinks this reality is still “a little ways away”, Stuart expects to see “a pretty fast acceleration on putting the art plus the code plus the level design together” to create “some great games in the short while”.

Earlier this month, Xbox announced a multi-year deal with Inworld to build AI dialogue and narrative tools at scale.

“Together, we aim to deliver an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story & quest design,” said Haiyan Zhang, Xbox’s general manager of gaming AI.

Stuart elaborated on this subject during this week’s Wells Fargo event.

“On the developer side, you think about the millions and millions of dollars in a game spent on localisation, script, how you think about players moving from point A to point B and you have non-player characters have dialogue,” he said.

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“AI can take care of all that. You now say, ‘I need the player to get from A to B’ and instead of having to write thousands of lines of scripting or code, you just have the AI get you from A to B. Things like localisation and putting things in new languages.

“When we think about game testing, a million AI bots can run through a level of Minecraft and find where players get stuck, where they spend money, how they think about the level. So, this is—pun intended—game-changing for the developer.”