Welcome to AI Week | GamesIndustry.biz

This week we’re kicking off a new editorial format on GamesIndustry.biz: a series of articles, interviews, and research on the most significant issues in the industry, and their impact on developers, publishers and players. For the debut, there was only one candidate: artificial intelligence.

AI is the great technological talking point of the moment, across all industries: it has absorbed billions in investment and promises outright transformation of everything from medical diagnosis to administrative support. The games industry, sitting at the intersection of technology, art, and media, is perhaps uniquely impacted. It has developed its own forms of AI for decades, and generative AI has been enthusiastically embraced by some quarters of development – but those in more traditionally creative roles see it as a transparent threat to their profession, and it’s increasingly seen as a negative force.

Executives see the potential to offset steadily climbing development costs and increasing difficulty in finding success in a mature market. Shareholders and investors expect to see the improvements that the technology’s evangelists promise. Players, meanwhile, swing from indifference to active hostility – assuming they know it’s there. The subject remains savagely divisive, to the point where it’s near-impossible to have a good-faith discussion that doesn’t deteriorate into acrimony.

Our AI Week output is a snapshot of the technology’s current adoption and perception, and a series of conversations about the impact it’s having on the art and business of making games. I will not claim that we’re able to tell the whole story – the topic is so vast, and the technology so fast-moving, as to make that impossible – but we have striven to show a wide range of perspectives and insights, and host good-faith conversation about how the games industry can find its way forward.

You can find it all on the AI Week homepage, which will be updated throughout the week (and our regular reporting will continue to appear on the GamesIndustry.biz homepage). We welcome feedback: you can contact the editorial team at editorial@gamesindustry.biz.