Netflix Bullish on Gen AI for Games After Laying Off Human Game Developers (404media.co) 39
Netflix's gaming division is shifting focus to generative AI weeks after shuttering its premium game studio and laying off 35 developers, the company's newly appointed VP of GenAI for Games has announced. Mike Verdu, previously Vice President of Games, called the move a "once in a generation inflection point" that will "accelerate development" and create novel gaming experiences. The pivot follows the closure of Blue, Netflix's internal studio that had recruited veterans from major franchises including Call of Duty and God of War. "Pay no mind to uninformed speculation," Verdu wrote on LinkedIn, describing recent changes as a "planned transition."
queue a bunch of banal boring crap (Score:5, Insightful)
DON'T GET ME WRONG, AI has useful purposes. This isn't one of them.
AI creates banal stuff that has no continuity. Things look great at first then you start looking closer and it's just nuts & confusing.
AI also can't do emotion. It's just homogenizing a bunch of other works trying to figure out what's a commonality based on what you've asked for.
Only non-creative people have any delusions that AI will replace creative people. And it won't. Instead you'll just get a bunch of drivel, and that dept will lose money and eventually get cut.
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why do some people think that "we" want to interact with "AI" content? the specific reason i watch content is for human stories, interactions and experiences. real world life shit.
who in the hell is asking for this made up fantasy land content? oh thats right, nobody is. the AI scumbags in charge are just trying to force it down peoples throats
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A few years ago, I got a call from my ISP trying to sell me on a cable package that included "streaming of local channels". I told the rep that I have no need for such a thing because I already get my local channels over-the-air in higher quality for free. The rep seemed confused at first and then said to me "but... this is streaming!" as though how content was delivered mattered!
The same mistake is being made here. People want the fantasy of what AI can do for them, they don't want AI content for its ow
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It definitely wasn't on-demand streaming of local channels. I'm not sure that such a thing would even be possible, legally speaking.
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People want the fantasy of what AI can do for them, they don't want AI content for its own sake.
You're right. That's how Bernays said to sell things - sell a future fantasy view of the self, not the product. And in this case, the AI can do things for Netflix management. Sold!
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Business - "Oh no, employees save too much money working from home, and our building value is going down! We forgot about the money we save as a business the CEO is losing money!"
Business - "Everyone back to the office!"
This is the level of brilliance that workers deal with.
Re: queue a bunch of banal boring crap (Score:2)
I think you're confusing businesses with San Francisco's city government. Most of those businesses were leasing those buildings, they never owned them to begin with, and never cared how much they were worth.
After a bunch of businesses closed on market street because they had no customers (usually something they blame on Walmart, which doesn't work in this case given they banned Walmart a long time ago) and now the once thriving area had its taxpayers replaced with homeless, so they need something besides th
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Banal boring crap? Sounds like a perfect fit for the Netflix Original brand.
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Banal boring crap? Sounds like a perfect fit for the Netflix Original brand.
It's a miniseries that couldn't get major studio funding if it tried: Banal Boring Crap, part of the MCU.
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This is the point. Most of the art is banal and formulaic. What gives it its unique touch is tiny specs of creativity embedded within.
Which is why most of art creation is utterly banal menial work. It's how modern music industry, TV industry, cinematography, games production and so on can churn immense amount of products. They reduced "art" to a formula. And we already know that it works, because it's a massive industry.
And that is what AI is starting to be able to do. So you can have someone who actually h
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It sucks reading it, but I agree with what you said.
No one wants to be replaced, but the unfortunate truth is that they can be. Sure, can AI bring EXACTLY what they bring to the table as a person? No, but the uncomfortable truth is that it'll be enough typically for the masses, and they'll buy it.
AI might to be able to create art, act, voice synth 80-90% as good as a human and will likely just increase. That extra you bring to it isn't valued as much as it probably should be.
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AI creates banal stuff that has no continuity.
So . . . mobile games?
Queue the Profitable Addiction. (Score:2)
Flappy Bird became such a viral success that the creator pulled it from the App Store a month after initial release due to the mass addiction.
Yes. Flappy Bird. That banal boring crap.
AI only has to be creative enough to addict humans in order to find massive success. And we’ve already seen how easy that is. Hell, an algorithm can do it now.
Braindead (Score:4, Interesting)
Netflix was smart enough to help kickstart their game division by licensing something like Into the Breachhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/590380/Into_the_Breach/, probably on the back of the fact that not only is it a very tight and excellently designed but came from the team that also developed FTL, a game so good it is still popular today. Also both games were developed by mainly just two people.
Which C-Suite dumbfuck looked at what they had, games that even the most ardent of AI boosters would have to say we are years and years and years from a computer being to just "make it up" and nowhere near being able to balance in the ineterst of player enjoyment and say "this is good".
It's just so transparent these places see AI as nothing more than "if we replace the people we can keep the profits and fire the labor and noone will notice!". Delusional to the point it's almost criminal.
When AI can produce just the concept art for something like FTL (without training on what's already been made) then maybe we are 5% of the way to it making an actual complete, playable and actually enjoyable game. Games are made by people for people to play, it's art. We shouldn't have such boners to eliminate that for some VC margins.
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It's just so transparent these places see AI as nothing more than "if we replace the people we can keep the profits and fire the labor and noone will notice!". Delusional to the point it's almost criminal.
I agree with you 100%. Their hubris will be apparent once they reap what they've sown. Shit ideas lead to shit products. They'll fail, and no one will care.
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This response seems more like a typical kneejerk slashdot troll against AI in game development than an objective take on the article. While there are valid concerns about AI displacing human creators, the majority of your comment relies on speculation, fallacies, and emotionally charged language. Let’s see if you agree -- I won't plonk you just yet, if you can defend some of your more egregious assertions
Netflix was smart enough to help kickstart their game division by licensing something like Into the Breach
Fair point: Licensing *Into the Breach* was a strong move by Netflix, leveraging a well-designed i
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Mentioning *FTL* for context is also relevant here. So far, this comment is on track.
Yes, of course. When Spielburg made ET in 1980 none of the producers took the fact he also directed Jaws into account when hiring the man. Past successes have no bearing on future oppurtunites. Brilliant.
only useful if it can create complex concept art
Really my assertion is that is incapable of prodcuing art whatsoever. It can produce images, it can produce frames of video but none of it is "art".
potential of AI to assist with smaller, more manageable tasks in game development
We call those "tools" and yes, but lets live in the real world and realize "new tools for devs" is not what Netflix is talking about not is it what the multi
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>When AI can produce just the concept art for something like FTL (without training on what's already been made)
You've just set a standard for AI that humans are incapable of. FTL came because developers learned from material of the past. Roguelites were a thing for decades. So were procedurally generated levels. So was space ship management and combat. FTL merely combined those into a single iterated package.
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Yeah it's almost like there's a difference between a human brain taking in their perceived expereiences, putting that into the context of their personailty and context of their lives a producing art is different than a machine scrolling through millions of images or video frame without context and trying to build a fascmille of what it's been told these are with no context.
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Your desperation to draw a distinction, where for purposes of outcome there is none, says nothing about AI.
It merely betrays biases you failed to address.
Mike Verdu? who? (Score:4, Funny)
"Vice President of Games"
What a title, what a guy!
"once in a generation inflection point"
You go Mike! - get those buzz words spewing out of your perma-tan pearly white toothed gob, ya filthy animal!
"planned transition"
See, Mike, I reckon this is a "planned transition" from your brain direct to the garbage can.
News Flash, Mr. Verdoooo, it's real hard to make good games and "Gen AI" is currently probably about good enough to make a clone of "flappy bird"
In one fell swoop, Netflix has written itself out of the serious business of games production until such time as one Mikey Verdoo'ski is given a two finger salute by the Netflix CEO when it is finally realised the guy is one giant douche bag.
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News Flash, Mr. Verdoooo, it's real hard to make good games and "Gen AI" is currently probably about good enough to make a clone of "flappy bird"
a little better than that. [github.io]
Not to take away from your overall point or anything, but generative AI and gaming are going to merge. It's inevitable.
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News Flash, Mr. Verdoooo, it's real hard to make good games and "Gen AI" is currently probably about good enough to make a clone of "flappy bird"
It only has to be better than the humans ... doubtful that it's going to be any worse than the latest "Shoot Everything - with Zombies!" classic.
They are in for a challenge. (Score:2)
Because AI generative tools aren't good enough they are in for some challenges.
Youtube is flooded with AI generated stuff now that ranges from voice actors reading human written texts (some of them are decent) to AI generated texts read by an AI bot. (They can start decently for a few minutes and then they are like listening to a person reading last years stock market)
AI pictures are varying too much and can give a lot of more or less malformed limbs randomly.
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The funny part here is that conclusion you drew from this is the exact opposite that I drew from it.
Your assumption is "one guy doing a job of what took a small team and it's actually decent enough to get some viewership, within about a year of tools needed for it hitting the market" is what it's going to be.
For the rest of us that understand how development works, we know that this is going to improve, even if more slowly than the initial burst. And with how good it is now, there's very little chance that
Remember Concordia (Score:2)
Could be. But I've heard a lot of "Your game has to have a very, very unique artstyle" these days.
Obviously that's not true about all games, but its pretty clear to me that games that look very similar to other games won't get noticed unless they have some very unique gameplay elements. Gamers automatically ignore anything that looks like it might have been made in RPG maker right now.
After the Doom Of Concordia studios aren't going to try to create games that looks just like everything else. If you put tha
"An accusation of 'boondoggle' has been lodged." (Score:2)
all good as long as these will be played by AI (Score:2)
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They're pretty predictable typically, except when attempting to do something creative.
They're lying to investors. (Score:2)
I have to wonder (Score:3)
This isn't specifically about this Netflix initiative, more about the broader AI scheme.
"AI" requires an absurd amount of power, and we keep reading about new power plants being needed, old plants being restarted, etc. That in itself is very expensive, and we already see the AI companies pitching their supposed benefits to government officials at various levels - and probably promising the usual "lots of jobs will be created" in order to get massively subsidized. Given this and other related news stories, though, it seems obvious (in the short term, at a minimum) the outlook is that far more jobs will be lost to this "AI" than the few that'll actually be created by building and/or spinning up the power plants. It seems so bloody obvious that I have to think that even an upper-level government official would see through it... but am I giving them too much credit?
Competition (Score:2)
If you make games with "AI", then any game you make will be the sort of game which anyone with "AI" can make. You'll have a thousand equal competitors.
If you want to succeed, (unfair or anticompetitive trade practices or dumb luck aside,) you need to make games which are good in a way which it's difficult to do. That means you need something your competitors lack. Uncommon human talents, and otherwise in game concept, management structure etc, the kind of situation which allows them to make a game good in a
Buddy Pine summed it up best (Score:2)
Translation (Score:2)
Their game development team is getting *nowhere* so they are trying to appease investors / shareholders by saying they're going to use AI instead. They are hoping to buy time. I wish them luck.
Netflix shouldn't have done games to begin with (Score:3)
Whenever you think peak stupid has been reached (Score:2)
Something like this comes along. Incredible.
THE NAME (Score:2)