Feels like the inevitable rise of AI powered content generation will at least free up _some_ resources at some point, right?
The idea was that your small indie team could keep up with the big content demand since you had algorithms generating seemingly evergreen content for your players.
What happens in practice is that the players begin playing your game at a meta level, learning how the generative process itself works; effectively removing the benefit of procgen content. As an example, consider Spelunky which claims it can generate millions of unique caverns to explore. If you assess that claim visually, it's true. But watch the streamers play and you will see that they 'speak' the algorithm. By observing the shape of a cavern in one area of a map, they know the algorithm had to make a specific concession elsewhere in the map. So this content isn't really procedural for them anymore.
Even if the "AI" content generators get more intelligent, it won't free up resources. Mechanically interesting content, as demonstrated by the indie games of the last decade, is just a different form of handmade content. A designer hand made the procgen algorithms. Players ultimately bond with the designer(s), no matter what meta level they build the content at. In a hand-built game you might start to get a sense for where the designers hide treasure chests. In a procgen game you learn the algorithms themselves and how to predict and abuse them.
There's another form of game content, story content, which remains an edge for humans. Algorithms, or "AI" if you must, can't compete here. It would be the same as waiting for AI that can write award winning movie scripts.
The marriage of story content and mechanical content is a superior game-making formula to the procgen approach. So the _some point_ you refer to is probaby far away still.
If you want to calculate how much "AI generation" or "procgen" is freeing up resources you also want to look at how long people are playing these games for and how many resources were used in making them. If indie teams of 2 or 3 can collectively make the world play their games for longer than it plays games made by much bigger teams, then that's a definite freeing up of resources. And this is what's happening today to some extent.
Pedantically, wouldn't that be increasing the consumption of resources defined as man-hours?
> Pedantically, wouldn't that be increasing the consumption of resources defined as man-hours?
Only if you remove the distinction between paid employee man-hours and consumer man-hours (which, economically, is an externality, yes, but generally treated as a positive one, called 'engagement').
The best, most enduring games all seem to have procgen, randomization, or a "construction kit" for slower procgen: player-made levels and curation.
I think it's right to be ambitious in the long term though. Procedurally generated levels in 10-20 years are going to be wildly more advanced (and satisfying, and unpredictable) than now. I also wouldn't bet against award winning movie scripts in my or my kids' lifetimes.
Humans aren't really good at making an area feel wild or natural... we stink up the place with hidden order. So algorithms that generate terrain, tree placement, tree shape, etc are already outperforming humans because their form of pseudorandom is more natural-feeling than our own.
I don't know how famiar you are with the industry so apologies if I'm over-explaining, but check out SpeedTree if you want to see one of these products. It's really cool.
Tooling for 3D modeling/texturing/rigging/etc is significantly more complex and powerful than it was 20 years ago, yet Pixar doesn’t need fewer artists for a movie today compared to Toy Story - in fact quite the opposite.
AI techniques useful to artists will get folded in the tooling and enable artists to make even more detailed/complex games & movies, but that doesn’t mean the AAA games of 2030 will require fewer artists.
However, talented small teams will likely be able to leverage them to create things that would have been inconceivable from a small team a decade ago.
Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.)
So, yes, we will see AI in content generation, but it isn't going to be in the form of replacing art bottlenecks. It will manifest in new tooling for artists, who will become more productive, and there will be even fewer artists who have good mastery of these tools, and the demand of quality will increase further. Which would lead to similar bottlenecks to today, though I believe artists will be paid better, and it will become even tougher to break in.
But are the artists treated better than they were a decade ago?
The wife of a good friend of mine is a digital artist. She works on films. The pay in her field is crap, as are the working conditions - meanwhile, competition for paying jobs is fierce.
When computers became an order of magnitude cheaper, the demand for, and the pay rate for computer programmers sky-rocketed. It doesn't seem like the same thing happened with artists.
The pay is OK but not fantastic: generally in the 60-80k range, depending on experience. Many of the very low paying jobs ($15/hr types) have disappeared. And I do know decent artists that frequently get recruiter calls, albeit usually for a couple large poorly managed studios that have trouble filling positions.
I think it depends a lot on the exact nature of the work being done as an artist. If it's more technical, it seems to demand better wages, but in games there are still some fairly nontechnical roles that are either paid poorly or farmed out to offshore agencies.
Work conditions still aren't great, but this is mostly at bigger studios.