Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, during a recent earnings call, spoke about how new technologies will and won’t affect video game development, this time around focusing on artificial intelligence, according to IGN.
Talking about emerging technologies like ChatGPT, Zelnick stated that he doesn’t believe that AI will impact the overall costs of developing a game. According to Zelnick, if development becomes easier, developers will likely want to add more to a game.
“The belief among college students [is] that ChatGPT is now going to allow them to make a query and send their homework,” said Zelnick. “The problem is if the question is, ‘Describe what actually happened on the night of Paul Revere’s ride’, and everyone gets the same question, which you do in class, and everyone uses ChatGPT, oops, everyone’s going to submit the same essay, last time I checked.”
Zelnick compares the rise of ChatGPT with that of the historic rise of hand calculators in an era before computing was commonplace.
“ChatGPT is today’s hand calculator. When I was a kid, there was no such thing, I hate to admit, but it’s true, so I had to do math longhand. And then hand calculators came along and parents were up in arms and thought, ‘Oh kids won’t have to learn math anymore,’ and the answer is yes, you still have to learn math, turns out, you absolutely have to learn math, but you have a tool that makes it easier to do. And ChatGPT is the same thing.”
“We are ushering in a very exciting era of new tools and they’re going to allow our teams and our competitors’ teams to do really interesting things more efficiently, so we’re going to want to do more, we’re going to want to be even more creative. And no, it’s not going to allow someone to say, ‘Please develop the competitor to Grand Theft Auto that’s better than Grand Theft Auto‘, and then they just send it out and ship it digitally and that will be that. People will try, but that won’t happen.”
Zelnick also spoke about the current status of cloud gaming in the wake of Google shutting down its Stadia platform earlier this year. Speaking at the earnings call, Zelnick states that he never felt like cloud gaming platform would be a big change for the industry.
“That said, I’ve never felt like cloud gaming would represent a seismic change, because I think if you’re prepared to pay $60 or $70 for a frontline title, you’re also prepared to buy a console, and I think Stadia found that out,” said Zelnick. “So bringing high quality titles to consumers that don’t have consoles will probably have an effect around the edges but I don’t think it’ll be a revolution in the business. I think it will be more an evolution in the business. And there are still technical challenges to be addressed.”
