Unbundling the game engine: The rise of next generation 3D creation engines
a16z.com
a16z.com
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source
Perhaps it doesn't qualify by some arbitrary "next generation" status, but Unreal does?
I'd consider it still proprietary, at that point you'd want to add Snowdrop (ubisoft), RAGE (Rockstar), REDengine (CDPR), Frostbite (EA), etc.
Source doesn’t fall under this there are dozens of other proprietary engines out there.
A "next gen" game engine would let me open it up and describe the type of game I was making and then plop me into a scene with all of the basics set up via non-desctructive, procedurally-generated content that I could edit and refactor in a real-time environment and then one-click-export to common platforms.
For example, I could type "a open world 3d game", or "a pong-like 2d game", or "a 2d platformer" or "an fps", and each of those prompts would generate a default scene, with whatever other detail I wanted to add to the prompt. Then I would be dropped into a beautiful landscape - to take the first example - which I could then use procedural tools to start building. A paintbrush lets me paint a city outline which is then procedural cut up into city streets and sprouts buildings. I click on one of the buildings and switch it's property from "realism" to "toon", with the 'on all related meshes' option checked, and the city flips from something out of GTA to something out of The Simpsons. I finish the design to my current liking (it can always be edited later, in real time), so I click the "add populous" button and it randomly generates some folk for me. I click on one of them and start giving him a backstory and quests. Etc, etc, etc. I have an idea, I get all of the boilerplate nonsense done for me, and then I start crafting. That's the dream.
All of that is entirely do-able right now, today, with zero AI necessary (yay, wave function collapse!). And yes, AI could make that first bit pretty easy, so I'm not against it alltogether. Just saying that its usefulness, after that, is far more in the "generate other assets based on the ones I've already created" category, rather than the "drop in a character and autoconfigure my physics" arena.
This strange idea that I would ever want an AI to be creative, instead of the very natural idea that I want AI specifically to do the tedious, complicated, error-prone bullshit that is inherent with how we interact with computers, in the most auditable, and precisely-editable way is just so exhausting. Let it go, guys; nobody wants AI generated creative work. We want AI to make creative work so easy that anyone can do it.
I tried to make something in Unity, it is such a waste of time, watching tutorials you see magic like "you import this model from X but notice it looks shit, that is because you need to go in this menus here and tick this checkbox here". Or I had the issue where I tried to make a character run, the C# code worked fine it moved the character around as I pressed the keys, but the run animation did not played even if I done all the steps correctly and the animation was 100% working, there was no fcking error,warning or hint on what is going wrong - just a waste of time for a solo person to try create a small thing (I do not want to sell any game so I am not a threat for the pro devs and I had not intention to put it on Steam either so please don't send me hate comments)
For the first part, you can literally just buy game assets like this, if not find them for free.
For the second part, game environments are designed. You can't just "make a city in style X" and drop a player model somewhere and expect it to be fun.
And overall, the more you trust the AI, the less of your own creative vision you have control over. Either the AI is creating everything, looking as generic and mediocre as all AI art does no actual sign of unique creative vision on your part, or else you have to put in effort, in which case you don't need the AI.
This is why AI, for all of its potential good (and I do believe that potential exists, no technology has an inherent moral or ethical axis) can only inevitably be a cancer on society, because those developing it, putting up the funding and pushing the research, want the ends without the means.
It is weird seeing my hobbyist game dev and professional enterprise software world collide like this. Articles like this made sense when Facebook was willing to put up billions for VR services. But that was a bust, and now you have tons of consultants spinning their wheels. There is no reason any game studio or publisher needs to be told what game engine is good, I don't even think they care as long as they can make a good game. It's not a huge organization that you are trying to rally around some kind of decision.
I suspect that the most felt impact of AI tooling will be an increase in shovelware generic games. I also suspect that curation will become even more important as developers try to shove as much AI crap as possible in every aspect of the game with little consideration for how fun or entertaining it'll make the overall experience.
An industry vet I know recently complained to me specifically about a16z, unprompted, after seeing some of their PR like this. He recently raised 8 figures for his games startup.
If your goal is to build a viable business instead of just scam your investors, you probably either have to try and compete with Roblox by creating an ecosystem where you siphon revenue off of your customers and their customers simultaneously, or sell actual product (sort of like how Epic bankrolls their stuff using revenue from their games) alongside tools.