The annual Game World Spring Festival Gala is coming again. According to the official website, the Game Developers Conference 2024 will be held in San Francisco from March 18th to 22nd.
As the largest and most influential industry summit in the global gaming industry, this year's GDC will use "AI" as the keyword, and Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, Adobe, Epic, Unity, Roblox, Tencent, NetEase, and Pico will participate in related conference activities.
In addition to 16 AI themed summits, game companies, AI technology and tool providers will also participate in forums to share and showcase the latest developments in AI enabled games.
Looking back at the 2023 GDC Conference, AI has become the biggest keyword. Microsoft, Ubisoft, Roblox, Tencent, and others have all shared AI's innovations in game production/operation, including cost reduction and efficiency improvement, creating new gameplay, and so on.
But at that time, the application of AI in games was still in a relatively early stage, mostly for generating tools such as text, images, and code for AI. For example, Tencent AI Lab developed a self-developed 3D game scene automatic generation solution; The Ubisoft AI tool Ghostwriter can automatically generate NPC scripts, write game storylines, and create task content; Unity utilizes AIGC technology to convert text input into game asset creation, among other things.
From the theme of this year's GDC key conference, it can be seen that AI has penetrated into more aspects of the gaming field and achieved significant results. This year's GDC conference will hold hundreds of conferences, covering multiple themes such as AI, VR, AR, audio, visual, programming, storytelling, and product management.
On the one hand, AI has penetrated into more production processes, including improving picture frame rate/clarity, game content review, training and teaching, etc; On the other hand, AI has also penetrated into more game categories, such as MMO, social, combat, etc.
It is worth noting that on March 18th, the Nvidia GTC Conference will also open together with GDC, and games will be one of the focus categories of this conference. According to NVIDIA's official website, in the gaming field, this GTC conference will explore how to create virtual characters and worlds through generative AI and path tracking.
With the development of AI technology over the past year, several AI tools with the potential to deeply empower games have recently emerged.
For example, Sora, which caused an industry "earthquake" with OpenAI, pointed out that during large-scale training, Sora demonstrated many "interesting emerging features", including the analog digital world.
In this feature display, OpenAI uses games as an example: researchers provide Sora with a prompt containing "Minecraft" (Minecraft game) once, and Sora can render HUD, high fidelity rendering world, and game dynamics that are very similar to Minecraft games, while also controlling player characters.
Figure | Screenshot of the demonstration video for the Sora version of Minecraft
In addition, there is the AI 3D tool DUSt3R, which recently made it onto the GitHub platform trend chart. It does not require any prior information on camera calibration or viewpoint posture, and can generate 3D scene reconstruction through simple photos or change the original production process.
Guotai Junan pointed out that 3D production is an important component of game production, especially with a high demand for large-scale games such as open world. Due to the high production threshold, there is still a need for significant costs related to modeling, art, and other related expenses. If rapid modeling technology similar to DUSt3R matures, it is expected to significantly improve efficiency in this process, or increase the supply of high-quality games and large-scale games such as open world.
"2024 will be the year of robotics, game AI, and simulation," said Jim Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia.
Last year's GDC conference provided a surprising answer for "AI+gaming", and we will wait and see how it performs this year.