Game developer and studio founder Glen Schofield has shared his thoughts on AI, and while he doesn’t believe it will replace human labour any time soon, he thinks artists should take the time to learn some form of the technology now, before it is too late.
“I hear people saying soon you’ll be able to make a AAA game with 20 people because of AI. I want to believe it, but when I’m working through one of my levels, I’m always going, ‘Move that pixel over. That should come down. I want more wires. I want two blue ones there. And I want this exactly here’. And then we’re sitting there adjusting the camera. We’re doing this day in and day out, all the time. Now imagine that with the code, the art and everything else. It’s about being nuanced to hell,” Schofield – who is known for the likes of Dead Space and more recently The Callisto Protocol – said in conversation with Eurogamer’s sister-site GamesIndustry.biz.
However, while he doesn’t believe that AI as it is now is capable of the same nuance as human intervention, he wishes “artists would take notice that this is a great time to learn some form” of the technology.
“In five years, people will be coming out of school who know AI, while artists sit back saying, ‘I’m not doing it’. People said the same thing about performance capture and motion capture,” Schofield said. “I even had a couple of people quit because they were against it, which is the same thing I’m hearing now. They say it steals artists’ work. Too late! It’s out there now.”
“All I’m hearing is that we have to make development cheaper. We have to spend less money and we have to do it with fewer people. One word I don’t hear in any of that is ‘creativity’… You have to be creative 99 percent of the time,” Schofield continued, noting a new game needs characters and assets to bring it to life, and to create these, developers need to have the tools to do so.
“That’s what [AI companies] are making, tools to make my characters faster and animation better and all that. I’d like to see the integration of all of it, hopefully within one of the big engines,” he said. “That’s a lot of work, to integrate all these freaking tools that are going on. And these tools, will they make us more creative? Yes, in some ways they will. But do you think the animators are now gonna go home after four hours because their job is faster? No! We’re gonna be putting more and more stuff into these games, because we have more time.”
But then, what of the cost of these tools? Schofield reasoned he is “a gamemaker, not a toolmaker”, so he will have to either buy or rent the necessary tech. “Do you think they’re gonna give away the tools for free? No freaking way! They’re gonna be freaking expensive,” he expressed. “Everyone is gonna want their money back, and they know they have a short window to get it back because some of these AI companies are gonna fail.
“And then we’re gonna need to hire AI people to implement everything, and they’re gonna be expensive too.”
Schofield was executive producer on the first Dead Space game in 2008. He went on to develop spiritual successor The Callisto Protocol at Striking Distance Studios in 2022. However, Schofield left Striking Distance in 2023 after the game flopped.
In July of last year, Schofield wrote about his struggles in the industry post-Striking Distance, admitting: “It’s tough out there.”
