Former Microsoft Xbox VP says AI is "the big question mark" for the future of gaming — he believes "There won't be a line where it's 'AI' and 'not AI' anymore"

The use of generative AI in game development has been quite a hot topic ever since the AI boom began and publishers and studios have experimented with the technology.

A lot of discussion has been centered around how AI might streamline the development process, but speaking in a new interview with The Expansion Pass, former Microsoft gaming and Xbox VP Ed Fries says "there's even more potential" in how AI could affect gameplay and design.

"For the future, I think the big question mark is really AI ... there's kind of obvious advantages where AI's gonna make building games faster and cheaper, with smaller teams, and those are great things if they're done well. But I think there's even more potential with AI to change the experience itself," he said.

Fries went on to note that it's difficult to predict the impact new technologies like AI will have on game development, as well as the type of games that developers create. He cited Microsoft's Kinect — the infamous motion-tracking device that originally shipped with the Xbox One — as an example of a novel idea that ultimately didn't gain significant traction. But with AI, he says, devs are still figuring out how it could be used.

"With AI, it's like that," he continued. "What new possibilities is this gonna open up? Really, the game designers are gonna spend the next years wrestling with this new technology, and trying to meld that into what games are today, and what players expect from games, in ways that make them better, and don't just make them worse."

Ed Fries on Halo, Bungie & Building Xbox | Xbox 25th Anniversary - YouTube

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In the midst of that process, many in the wider gaming community are standing in fierce opposition to AI, with that resistance fueled by the appearance of jarring "AI slop" art in games like Crimson Desert as well as NVIDIA's extremely controversial DLSS 5 tech. Fries, though, believes that AI will become a permanent fixture of game development regardless of public opinion, and says it's already being used in tons of different ways.

"I would say virtually every game team is doing it already. And AI is being integrated in so many ways that it would be impossible not to use AI," he asserted. "So, like, it's built into Photoshop now. You've got an artist, they're drawing something, they want to take this character and move it to a different part of the scene. It's gonna fill in where that character was — guess what? That's generative AI filling in where that character was."

"Even Microsoft Paint has something called 'Generative Erase' now. It's like the simplest program on your machine, [and] it has AI erase built into it now," Fries added. "AI's gonna be built into everything. There won't be a line where it's 'AI' and 'not AI' anymore. It's just going to be smarter software that solves problems better for people."

Ultimately, despite ballooning costs that've driven up the price of just about everything, I do think Fries is right in saying that the genie is out of the bottle, and that AI is here to stay at least in some capacity moving forward.

My hope, though, is that the industry settles on ways to integrate AI ethically and responsibly, and uses it in ways that optimize workflows and support the people building games, rather than in ways that replace them, supersede human creativity, and steal the work of others to fuel generated outputs. Only time will tell.

💬 Do you agree with Ed Fries?

The use of generative AI has undoubtedly become a huge topic in the gaming industry, with discussion ramping up in recent months as more and more games integrate it more directly.

I'd like to hear from you: do you agree with Ed Fries that AI will inevitably become a core part of game development, or do you believe that its projected importance is being overestimated? Let me know in the comments, and vote in our poll, too.

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