Raph Koster's Insights: The Future of Gaming, Soaring Budgets, and the Role of AI

mmorpg.com:

Raph Koster participated in a recent discussion with Edge Magazine on the use of AI in gaming, and a look towards the future. Among the major issues discussed are soaring budgets, live-service and narrative titles, innovation, and the ways all of these might impact what we’ll see in the years ahead.

Back in 2018, Koster asked colleagues to secretly tell him what their development budgets were. “I gathered all of the data together, inflation adjusted all of it, and put it on a graph,” he says, as cited by PC Gamer, and noted that, after adjustment for inflation, budgets are growing potentially by 10 times every decade. 

With those exploding budgets in mind, Koster thinks innovation might be particularly low for a while, until something comes along that “resets” things, and that the use of AI is going to continue growing with those budgets in mind. Yet, it’s not necessarily going to overtake the core, as he says AI tools “suck at generating plots”.

We’ve all heard that game development is expensive, and when the credits roll on something we’ve played, we can see just how many people worked on a project. Add in other resources and requirements, and Koster’s findings aren’t surprising. This in mind, the industries move towards the potential of generative AI technology is also not surprising, although many point to this as worrisome given rampant industry layoffs.

One of the other observations Koster makes is about live service games. As much as people may complain about them and their consistent temptation and sometimes outright asks to spend and spend, they’re extra important in this era of wild budgets. One of the things about this that Koster laments is the impact on narrative games. 

“I prefer playing narrative