Peter Molyneux thinks AI will allow people to create video games with just a text prompt

[Alfonso Maruccia]

A hot potato: According to renowned developer and producer Peter Molyneux, AI will become a game-changing technology over the next 25 years. Molyneux, known for creating numerous gaming hits in the past, has a controversial recent history, with some criticizing him as a hype-driven digital conman.

Are you waiting for the AI bubble to burst so you can go back to enjoying art and entertainment products created by human beings who can actually make a living from it? You'd better get comfortable. According to Peter Molyneux, AI will soon become an even bigger asset for the video game industry than it is today.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Molyneux was asked to consider what the next 25 years will hold for the gaming industry. The British designer predicted that generative AI algorithms will eventually be used to create "huge parts" of games, including AI-generated characters, animations, dialogue, and essentially every other meaningful in-game asset.

AI will also democratize video game development, allowing anyone to create games. A wannabe developer could simply input a prompt like "make a battle royale set on a pirate ship," Molyneux explained, and the AI would handle everything needed to turn that idea into a complete game. However, selling such a game would be a different challenge, as Sony's Concord fiasco clearly demonstrated.

Molyneux also mentioned that Hollywood's fascination with games will continue to grow, with studios and filmmakers increasingly looking to pillage stories and narrative worlds from the gaming industry. He cites Fallout and, "to some degree," The Witcher as two examples of how the industries are interweaving. Recent deals to bring Control and Alan Wake to the big screen follow the same trend.

Molyneux isn't alone in praising AI's potential to turn video game development into something that even stay-at-home teenagers can do. Big, immensely wealthy companies like EA are eager to employ AI to speed up development time, while skilled workers and actors are currently striking because they believe these algorithms will effectively take their jobs by replicating their voices and performances.

Molyneux built a solid career as a successful game programmer and designer, with notable titles like Populous (1989), Populous II (1991), Syndicate (1993), Theme Park (1994), and Dungeon Keeper (1997). However, in recent years, the British designer has had a string of disappointing ventures, including Godus and the puzzling "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?" experiment.

He also attempted to replicate the success of Second Life by selling NFT-based virtual estates with Legacy, but the game is no longer even mentioned on the company's official website. Molyneux later explained that the blockchain concept came from the publisher, as he had no deep understanding of it. He is now working with his company, 22cans, on a new "god" game titled Masters of Albion. Perhaps they'll experiment with a few AI prompts to see what they can create.

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Peter Molyneux thinks AI will allow people to create video games with just a text prompt

 

[The Talking Tech]

Some say he's a genius, others say he's just a pathological liar,

and I say he can't even meet his own expectations....

 

[MSIGamer]

Even if this would be somewhat possible - which seems quite fantastical to me - who is actually going to benefit from being able to create a game from text prompts? Most of these games would likely be zero effort, uninspired incohesive slop. Basically the latest and greatest version of asset flips. I guess it'd be a scammer's wet dream.

Creating meaningful things takes EFFORT. It takes having a VISION. Peter forgets that everyone can already make a game today with all the open source software available. It's easier than ever and we've seen what kind of garbage is flooding the market because of it.

Generating a bunch of random things and throwing them together without a message, without direction or without any kind of narrative does not make a piece of art. If anything it's making people not care and it's hurting the craft. It's what's already plaguing movies and games today. There are so many good things you can do with AI that people are very bad at. WHY would you want to gaslight all the artists and creators that made AI generated content possible in the first place and replace them with AI instead?!

 

[MasterAce]

I tried amuse. The default prompt is ”an astronaut in space”. I tried to modify it so that the space suit is black instead of white. It always came out as white, no matter how I changed the prompt. In a game every data structure and every logic system would need to be prompted to meticulous detail, and it still misses the mark because all it knows is what it was trained on. And it doesn’t understand the complete picture. Or that is the situation today, it really is much more limited than it might come off as. It’s not going to trivialize software any time soon

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Yeah huh. If you believe a single thing this man says, you should be institutionalized.

 

[i like foxes]

Recently I came a cross a game , about which AI usage was mentioned as being used . The game looked not bad although somehow not rich in terms of objects included . So , maybe AI could develop a whole game in the near future with good quality .

 

[toooooot]

Everything AI makes is based on what was already made by a human. I know, I know, so is everything people make.
A human can do it better. Better for another human to appreciate.
Use AI for science and stuff that we already shipped to computers to do rather than
making sure small artists cannot get even their little income because those crumbles will be vacuumed by MS and others.

 

[ZedRM]

Some say he's a genius

I'd say he's a smart guy with good intuition.

others say he's just a pathological liar

And some people are mentally-empty-glasses who couldn't tell their bum from a hole in the ground.

Peter is probably right. His idea and theory is within the realm of possibility.

 

[Watzupken]

You seems to be able to come up with anything with AI. However, the real question is how good is it? It can be done does not mean it will come up with anything good or meaningful. Games like any entertainment requires people who have the passion to make it fun and entertaining. There are a lot of games and movies out there that are outright bad because you get some random person to make them without any passion but for salary/ wages. So you can use AI to enable these random person to do the work faster, but is likely going to be garbage.

 

[Dimitriid]

If there's one guy who probably *thinks* that's how modern games are made is Molyneux: He's been blowing hot air for over 20 years and delivering close to nothing he promises so of course he thinks he should just speak a concept and it just magically is coded into existence.

Didn't work once for you Peter and it's never going to work for AI either.

 

[VariableSpike]

AI can be used as a tool to assist, especially with repetitve tasks, creating variations of a code structure where you just have small details changing in lots of places etc., but not weiting the whole bloody thing for you, Molyneux barking up the wrong tree, though that is absolutely nothing new for him.

 

[Stingy McDuck]

Was that title really necesario Alfonso, do you really need the clickbait? I'm reminded of an interview Peter Molyneux got at Rock Paper Shotgun by John Walker, that 'dude' could interview Peter Molyneux but instead decided to atack him on a personal level. It's funny how people who contribute little to this industry attack other people who have do left an big impact.

Edit: I change '*****' to 'dude', because the autocensor would just show *****, which actually looks worse than what I wrote.

 

[Bamda]

Even if this would be somewhat possible - which seems quite fantastical to me - who is actually going to benefit from being able to create a game from text prompts? Most of these games would likely be zero effort, uninspired incohesive slop. Basically the latest and greatest version of asset flips. I guess it'd be a scammer's wet dream.

Creating meaningful things takes EFFORT. It takes having a VISION. Peter forgets that everyone can already make a game today with all the open source software available. It's easier than ever and we've seen what kind of garbage is flooding the market because of it.

Generating a bunch of random things and throwing them together without a message, without direction or without any kind of narrative does not make a piece of art. If anything it's making people not care and it's hurting the craft. It's what's already plaguing movies and games today. There are so many good things you can do with AI that people are very bad at. WHY would you want to gaslight all the artists and creators that made AI generated content possible in the first place and replace them with AI instead?!

And the funny thing is, people think that games or movies are overpriced. LOL

 

[ZedRM]

And the funny thing is, people think that games or movies are overpriced. LOL

Many of them are.