The CEO of Take-Two, Strauss Zelnick, recently spoke about how new technologies will or will not affect the development of video games. Precisely, he spoke of artificial intelligences and the use of cloud.
Talking about emerging technologies like Chat GPTZelnick said he doesn’t believe AI will impact the overall costs of developing a game. According to Zelnick, if development gets easier, the developers will probably want to add more to the game, so the costs will be the same.
“The belief of college students is that Chat GPT it will allow them to ask the AI a question and have an answer for their homework,” Zelnick said. “The problem is, if the question is, ‘Describe what really happened the night Paul Revere’s ride,’ and everyone they get the same question, which happens in class, and everyone uses ChatGPT… oops, everyone will send the same essay; That’s how it worked last time I checked.”
Zelnick compares the rise of ChatGPT to the historic rise of hand calculators in an era before the spread of computers.
“ChatGPT is today’s calculator. It didn’t exist when I was a kid, I hate to admit it, but it did, so I had to do the math by hand. Then came the hand calculators and the parents got angry and thought: “Oh, the kids won’t have to learn math anymore”, while the answer is yes, we still have to learn math, in fact, we absolutely have to learn it, but with a tool that makes it easier. ChatGPT is the same thing”.
“We’re entering a very exciting era with new tools that are going to allow our teams and those of our competitors to do really cool things more efficiently, so we’re going to want to do more, we’re going to be even more creative.” However, this will not allow a rival team to easily create a GTA clone and achieve success, according to Zelnick.
Furthermore, Zelnick admitted that Take-Two believed in the cloud and that she was an early supporter of the recently closed Google Stadia. That said, Zelnick he is not convinced that this is a revolutionary technologyespecially after what happened to Stadia.
“Cloud gaming is a technology, not a business model“he said. “It’s a distribution technology. And our view is that wider distribution is always a good thing in the entertainment industry. If we can reach more consumers with our properties, we are happy to do so, provided conditions make sense, and I believe that wider distribution over time will benefit us in many ways, including the cost of distribution, which I believe will decrease .”
“That said, I never thought cloud gaming represented a sea change, because I believe that if you’re willing to pay $60 or $70 for a AAA title, one is also willing to buy a console, and I think Stadia understands that. So, bringing high quality titles to consumers who don’t own a console will probably have an effect, but I don’t think it will be a revolution in the industry. I think it will rather be an evolution of the sector. And there are still technical challenges to face.”
