VR, NFTs, Metaverse Didn’t Take Over Video Games, But Neither Will AI

If you’ve heard this before please stop. A new technology has emerged, securing billions of dollars in funding and poised to disrupt the entire video game industry.

The latest technology to prove it is AI, the buzzword of 2023. Originally rooted in projects like ChatGPT and Midjourney, it now extends to … literally any company that says they’re going to use AI in some way, even if it’s nonsense.

Still, I’ve been down this road so long I just couldn’t believe the hype this time around. Sure, AI can do some great things, but the very same words I hear here are what I hear about a wide variety of other technologies, and basically all of them promise It didn’t work out as expected.

VR

Yes, the VR market exists now. No, we’re not that big compared to the industry as a whole, and we’re not going to switch to VR as the primary way we play games. When the future of gaming was heralded when the Oculus Rift first launched in 2016, the VR market grew to hundreds of billions of dollars and within 5-10 years it was the primary way we played games. predicted it would be. Year 10 is fast approaching, and now we’re debating whether Meta is just killing VR ambitions, or whether PSVR 2 will actually outsell PSVR 1.

Sure, there are VR enthusiasts out there, and tens of millions of VR headsets have been sold. I own two of them, and they’ve been sitting in my closet for years now, probably after dozens of hours of gaming compared to the thousands of hours I’ve spent on his PC and consoles. VR didn’t “fail” per se, but it didn’t live up to its insane hype and won’t fail anytime soon.

NFT/Web3

Once upon a time, a bunch of cryptocurrency buddies and venture capitalists who barely knew anything about video games knew that NFTs, unique digital items that could be sold in-game, were the next great form of microtransactions and could be huge revenue streams for games. I pitched the idea that it would be the source. The game industry of the future.

And then they continued their conversation and said things like being able to transfer these items between games, which the devs all said was very stupid. The industry was still ahead of its time, stepping into the concept with things like the Ubisoft Ghost Recon NFT, but it was quickly zapped. The Square Enix president is routinely ridiculed for being the only major gaming figure outside of Doctor Disrespect still pitching NFTs and blockchain games. Everyone else has abandoned that notion.

Although real blockchain games exist, outrageously Surely an awful, really awful game might have made some money for players at the height of this boom, but that quickly faded away (hello, Axie Infinity), and all that’s left is fleeing players. Only relative rubbish like Bored Ape games that let you pay thousands of dollars for “sewer passes” and other nonsense.everyone else too actual The gaming industry has run away from blockchain.

metaverse

This section doesn’t even have to be written by me. Because Ed Zitron wrote for me his excellent Business Insider article that I highly recommend reading.The collapse of the metaverse is very obvious, given that no one wants To tell The word 2023 that everyone in the tech industry has been yelling for the past few years.

There were really only two ideas for the metaverse. The first was Mark Zuckerberg’s, who proclaimed the future of mankind and even renamed an entire company (which you’ll regret now). But his ideas were tied to VR, which, as we made clear, is far from mainstream adoption. he also terrible Horizon Worlds, a VR experience on earth, was the flagship of the concept and was so bad that even Meta employees were forced to log in by their bosses. Now that user numbers are plummeting, what is he looking at? Ai.

The second metaverse was, surprisingly, tied to the second one, web3, NFT, and blockchain. This version, written about Macy’s, Disney, and others buying up extremely empty metascopic virtual real estate like Decentraland and Sandbox, has more concurrent players than Steam’s first roughly 300 titles. It was less of a “game”. This was nothing. It’s always been nothing, but real video games have done this better, and long before you thought someone in the tech industry invented this idea and Neil gave it a name he stole from Stevenson, the virtual We have created a community with the world and millions of players to join.

AI

Forgive me if I’m skeptical of the idea that AI will come to the gaming industry like a meteorite.Yes, I morning In fact, I’m more impressed with this technology than the last three points on this list. At the same time, however, these largely predictive, far from “intelligent” AIs are clearly overrated. No, I don’t think mid-journey will replace game concept artists. No, I don’t think ChatGPT will replace Narrative Teams. No, I don’t think a company billed as “his ChatGPT for AAA games” will be able to design his own Fortnite in seconds.

Are there aspects of AI that can be used in game development? Certainly, it’s probably more useful than the other technologies on this list. But the idea that AI will completely rewrite the rules of game development and how we interact with games will never materialize. Next He No one believes GTA comes out of predictive texts or (stolen) art generators. This is far from the reality of the industry. But of course that’s nothing new.

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