As AI continues to be shoehorned into game development with more regularity, Michał Nowakowski – joint CEO of Witcher 4 developers CD Projekt – has said he “knows for a fact” games built purely with generative AI are on the way. Mercifully, he’s got “doubts” about whether this method’s the ideal way forward, meaning there’s no need to worry at this juncture that Ciri’ll soon be battling hordes of ChatGPThouls.
“I was in a conversation with a person who started a studio and was telling me: ‘I’m running a primarily AI-based studio. I can have 40 prototypes within a week, two weeks from now I can have five games that I chose are going to be the best and, three weeks from now, I’m actually launching a game’,” Nowakowski recalled while being Edged In Person. “Maybe that’s going to be successful, but I have some doubts whether this is really the path to follow.”
The exec said this on the heels of Epic Games revealing plans to intergrate support for AI models like Claude and Gemini into Unreal Engine 6 with the aim of speeding up the development process and cutting away “tedious work”. That’s not the same as generating a game in its entirety from scratch, but is noteworthy given the close relationship CD Projekt have developed with the Unreal Engine makers, to the point that Nowakowski clamed elsewhere in the interview that to his knowledge they’re currently the only studio Epic allow to “go into the black box of Unreal Engine” to tinker with its innards. So, there’s a chance they have had or will have some input on what UE6’s AI integration looks like.
Regardless of how it factors in futher down the pipeline, using AI to generate the basic pitch a game’s built on comes with unique issues, especially if you’re trying to use said pitch to convince publishers to back your game. “How can I be sure that this developer can make the quality they’re promising?” 11 bit external development director Rufus Kubica said in response to our Edwin about extensive use of generative AI in protoypes during a chat at this year’s Digital Dragons. “If everything is done with AI, how do you know they have the artists to make it happen?” He added that leaning on the tech this much also means “it’s kind of easier to overpromise quality early”.
AI aside, the approach the game development Nowakowski’s recommending can help studios stay afloat as of right now is simply to be “lean and cheap”. “There’s an unprecedented number of games being launched every year, and the fight for attention is tougher than it ever was,” he said. “In the end, whether you can continue making games largely depends on whether you were successful enough to fund another project of your own. If you’re lean and cheap, and are able to really target the group you want and live off that, then you’re in a good spot.” As such, he reckons medium-sized studios whose costs aren’t tiny, but don’t necessarily have a strongly established target audience face the most difficulty.
I’d argue CD Projekt aren’t in that boat, but given how often key figures there are still talking about the need to earn back audience trust after Cyberpunk 2077’s troubled initial launch, it certainly seems something they’re very cognizant of.
