Destructoid Checkpoint: The games industry has stopped apologising for AI

For the last few years, generative AI in games arrived with a sense of embarrassment from the people trying to convince you that it was the future. It was a disclosure on a Steam page,  or an apology after a suspicious-looking background asset has surfaced. Each time, there was a promise that it was "just a tool" and that nobody's job was at risk.

This week, the embarrassment appears to be gone.

In the space of a week, Epic Games launched a storefront client it proudly called "vibe coded", Microsoft started a new Xbox division built for the AI era, and Ken Kutaragi, the creator of the PlayStation, told an audience that AI-generated experiences are the future. None of them sounded defensive about it. In much the same way that AI has been positioned as a strength to investors, that same language is now coming through to consumers.

The question remains, however, whether the people buying the games have moved with it, and if they haven't, whether it matters.

Epic and the great vibe coding debacle

On 14 October, Epic released a preview of its rebuilt Epic Games Launcher and told everyone exactly how it was made. "Programming is hard," its announcement read. So instead, it had vibe-coded the thing.

The joke was the strategy. Epic paired it with a dig at Valve, claiming the new client starts up to 46% faster than Steam. This can be considered a traditional misfire from Epic, as nobody is complaining that Valve’s platform takes too long to start.

Tim Sweeney has said Epic is retooling for maximum AI acceleration, and the launcher arrived days after reports that developers on an upcoming Marvel and Star Wars shooter had been told to go AI-first.

It's a pretty dramatic all-in moment from Epic, and as Tim Sweeney tends to do, he made himself the lightning rod for attention by saying that the broader industry expects best-in-class tools like Unreal Engine to embrace AI and provide worthwhile tools and features.

The reception was what you would expect online, but it gets harder and harder to discern whether online reactions to anything are truly representative of the real world.

Xbox embraces AI a bit more cautiously

Microsoft took a different tactic, but still arrived in the same place. On 13 October, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists tasked with exploring "emerging technologies."

The memo is careful with its vocabulary, seeming to dance a little bit around what they are doing, although I think everyone is wrong about why. The group is led by Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, previously a Microsoft vice president for Azure OpenAI and AI infrastructure. Their stated focus is the recent wave of games that are being decompiled and rebuilt to run on systems they were never intended for.

It is clear that this announcement happened fast; most of the new Xbox team is showing themselves to be reactive and assertive, but also need to not say or do anything that could be interpreted as them being okay with random folks out there doing this. IP is still IP, after all.

The striking part is the stance. A platform holder looking at hobbyists gnawing away at its back catalog would once have reached for the lawyers. Sharma instead called these projects "unmistakably good outcomes for players", even when they challenge Xbox's business models. A part of me wonders if this is because, in a market that seems to be flailing for consistency, Xbox doesn’t really know what its business model is right now.

It's honestly hard to predict where Xbox sees this one going, but it will certainly be interesting to watch it play out.

Kutaragi sees an AI future

In a 4Gamer interview published on 9 October, Ken Kutaragi, the engineer behind the first three PlayStations, argued that games have stopped being where technology moves fastest.

He expects real-time AI video and audio generation to reach console speeds. At that point, he says, hand-built levels and scripted logic give way to experiences generated from what the player thinks and feels. He puts the prize at growing the market from ¥30 trillion to ¥3,000 trillion.

It is worth keeping in mind that Kutaragi is now CEO of Cyber AI Entertainment, so he is selling the future he is describing and gassing up AI makes a lot of sense for him. Personally, I have seen VR described as the future of gaming multiple times now, and it failed each time, so I am not sure if I buy into Kutaragi's vision just yet.

I should also be clear that he did seem to be talking about passive experiences rather than interactive ones, as his point was about real-time video and music, but when the man who made the PlayStation says things are a transitional form, it lands differently from a startup founder saying the same.

Is the fight over?

No, but I do think the battleground is changing.

Look at what this week's three announcements actually touch: Epic's AI built a launcher. Xbox's AI ports old games to new hardware. Neither puts a generated voice in a character's mouth or a generated painting on a wall. They sit squarely in the territory players seem most likely to tolerate: infrastructure, convenience, access. Industry confidence is loudest exactly where resistance is weakest.

This is very much of the play for acceptance.

Kutaragi is the outlier, because his future goes straight for the creative core. He is also the least likely to care what games think, however, as he sees a future where AI is inevitable, so he’s just getting ahead of the curve.

Players have lost the argument over whether AI should be used in the industry at all. We appear to have lost it some time ago; this week the industry just stopped pretending otherwise. What remains is the argument over what it is used for, and there, players still have some say. Support the good, original, human-made art that you still want to see succeed, and step away from the upcoming glut of likely very attractive games that have taken advantage of AI.

It’s the only play that’s left.