Xbox maker Microsoft has become a vocal proponent of generative AI in recent years, but it seems the company hasn’t rolled out a hard mandate across its internal studios. According to the head of Compulsion Games, the studio behind South of Midnight, its parent company has not mandated it make the most of AI tools.
Like so many others in the game industry, Microsoft has built and deployed a number of AI powered design tools and models it says will bolster video game production. Earlier this year, for instance, the company unveiled a model called MUSE it claims is capable of producing “complex gameplay sequences.”
Prior to that, it partnered with Inworld to create an AI design copilot system it suggested will help developers “explore more creative ideas, turning prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more.”
Yet, during a conversation with Game Developer at Gamescom LATAM, Compulsion Games founder and studio head Guillaume Provost confirmed Microsoft isn’t demanding its first-party teams leverage the technology.
“I can absolutely guarantee [that generative AI usage] is not mandated,” says Provost. “You’re talking to the studio that literally builds shit by hand. In the DNA of the studio that we have, we’re very craft oriented. We’re very art oriented.”
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Compulsion founder doesn’t believe generative AI will ever replace “artistic choice”
As for where he feels generative AI could slot into the production pipeline, Provost believes it’s incumbent on developers to really figure out where the utility lies.
“I think there are a lot of cases where it could be helpful in pre-production for us to do things like spitting out storyboards for us to see whether it makes sense or not— not really stuff that we use in production, but stuff that we want to accelerate.”
“Just based on the types of games that we make, I would say we are probably not the studio that will use AI the most, and I don’t think that bothers anything at Microsoft. The DNA of our studio is to handcraft things and to make them feel handcrafted, and that involves a lot of manual labor.”
Discussing how generative AI has frequently been heralded as the harbinger of unbridled creativity by some rather zealous execs, Provost says the technology isn’t really on his radar at the moment. He does, however, believe disruption has always been a part of the game industry.
He says there could be a path forward where generative AI technology empowers creatives who perhaps don’t have the technical skills or expertise of more experienced devs, perhaps democratizing development in new ways. That possible future, he adds, is probably some way off.
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“I think we’re not very close to that day,” he says. “That’s the long-charted route for where that goes. I don’t think it ever replaces artistic choice. Somebody always needs to decide [for instance] when you make a green chair or a blue chair, whether they go well together. The type of DNA that we have, would use AI where it is useful and disregard it elsewhere.”