ASMA KHALID, HOST:
You're walking down a city street. You turn a corner, and you're swarmed by zombies.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME EXPLOSIONS)
KHALID: You fight them off with a folding chair. Explosions rattle the street around you.
VINCENT ACOVINO, BYLINE: You're basically beating up enemies in a dystopian version of New York City, and there's all this kind of, like, ooze spilling out of this onto the street.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KHALID: That's Vincent Acovino, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED producer who covers video games for the show. This game is called "Beatdown City Survivors," and it'll be released later this year.
ACOVINO: So, it's, like, a really old-school looking game. It's all, like, pixel art. That's reminiscent of retro kind of video games and arcade games.
KHALID: The game might look retro, but it says a lot about this current moment in video game development. The video game industry is massive, probably way bigger than most people think. It brought in around $187 billion in revenue last year, which is more than the film and music industries combined. Much of that money was made by big developers creating big games, but more and more small independent studios are disrupting the space, studios like NuChallenger, which is making "Beatdown City Survivors."
ACOVINO: Some of the biggest hits in the industry are coming from developers that are, you know, a team of one person. It kind of goes to show the power dynamics right now in the industry, where small, independent developers do have the power and potential to make big video games without the risk that comes with making a giant, multimillion dollar project as a big studio.
KHALID: Today, for our weekly Reporter's Notebook segment, Vincent takes us inside this evolving world and tells us how he thinks about it and how he covers it. That includes a recent reporting trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It's an industry trying to navigate a whole host of issues - massive layoffs, the advent of AI, games that take years to be released and that schism between big and small developers. ALL THINGS CONSIDERED co-host Scott Detrow picks up the conversation, asking what games like "Beatdown City Survivors" tell us about this current moment.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Why is this the game that you flagged that you wanted to start this conversation talking about?
ACOVINO: So I find the creator of this game and his story - Sean Allen Alexander (ph) - absolutely fascinating. Years ago, he worked for a major video game company. So he was on the other side of the industry, big budget games. Now he's making his own games. And he sees the industry right now at a crossroads. He looks around and says, why are we seeing so much volatility in this industry? Why are we seeing the mass layoffs that we're seeing? Right now, it takes an incredibly long time for big budget games to be released...
DETROW: Yeah.
ACOVINO: ...Games people are waiting for a long time for. He worked for Rockstar 13 years ago. Rockstar Games is the creator of "Grand Theft Auto." It's been that same amount of time since a "Grand Theft Auto" game came out (laughter).
DETROW: It's been that long?
ACOVINO: Yeah.
DETROW: So there's been more than a decade of this...
ACOVINO: More than a decade.
DETROW: ...Most recent one being - is that just because it's so ambitious or because it's ballooned, or what's the clear answer?
ACOVINO: Well, that's - that is kind of the question. If you ask someone like him, he says it's a combination of these ballooning budgets and also bad management strategies, and everyone just wanting it to be, needing it to be, a billion-dollar game. He says, why not make 10 games in the span of, like, however many years it takes to make one large, giant game?
SHAWN ALEXANDER ALLEN: Like, we're all taught not to put all your eggs in one basket. I don't know, you look at indie games, and we're putting on a lot of good stuff. And it's like, you can make 10 games in the span that you make this one game. Why don't you make 10 games and make different games? It's boring.
DETROW: So you've got all of these people like that creating these really interesting games. But at the same time, you have a handful of massive companies spending - what? - like, hundreds of millions of dollars developing the big 10 games?
ACOVINO: Yeah, so video game budgets are kind of, like, this closely guarded secret. But we know that, for example, "The Last Of Us Part II" - "The Last Of Us" has been adapted to, like, an HBO series.
DETROW: Yeah.
ACOVINO: So a lot of people are now familiar with that game. The second game in the series cost around $200 million to make, and that's fine.
DETROW: So beating, like, movie-level budgets.
ACOVINO: Oh, beyond.
DETROW: Yeah.
ACOVINO: Beyond - because these people have often literally thousands of people who work on them. That's fine if your game makes $500 million in return, but it doesn't always do that, and that's where the problems start. Like, for example, last year, there was a game that came out called "Concord," and that game had a big budget, a lot of expectation, and it absolutely flopped. And in one month, they shut that game down - a multi-hundred-million dollar project, most likely.
DETROW: They just shut it down. You - if you bought it...
ACOVINO: You can't play it.
DETROW: ...You can't play it.
ACOVINO: They refunded it.
DETROW: You know, this is all...
ACOVINO: Yeah.
DETROW: This is all interactive, online playing mostly now. It's not like you - to go back to that 16-bit era...
ACOVINO: Yeah.
DETROW: ...You get the cartridge, you put it in, you've got the game forever.
ACOVINO: Exactly. And I think also because these games require constant development, if the projects shrink in size or if they're not successful, then they have to let people go.
DETROW: I think that all gets to AI in this industry. What's the best way to frame how developers are using AI right now? And I imagine it's two very different answers when you talk about those two sides of...
ACOVINO: Yeah.
DETROW: ...The industry.
ACOVINO: So I talked to a lot of developers at the conference, as well, who have very different opinions about AI. One demo I saw showed off a "Call Of Duty" kind of game, and this was a demo that was given to me by Elvis Liu at Tencent, which is the biggest video game company in the world. They're a Chinese company.
And basically, the demo shows you interacting with your squadmates. So you speak to your squadmates, and they will listen to you and interact with the environment in very specific ways. So if you say, like, go behind the red car or the rust-colored car, they'll know exactly what you're talking about, and they'll do it. This is interesting for the player, but Elvis Liu at Tencent says it's also helpful for the development of these video games.
ELVIS LIU: In our case, we have more than 17,000 in-game objects in one - just one map and numerous locations. So it would be infeasible to use the traditional methods to issue a command with all these targets. So voice control or voice command becomes the only efficient way to communicate with AI.
ACOVINO: So that's one example of a thing that kind of made sense to me. You hear from independent developers, and they are largely not excited about this. Many of them are kind of skeptical of what it means for their own creativity in this industry. And so, like, when I speak to, like, people in narrative or art departments, they're like, well, this is a part of the job that I like to do. Like, I don't want to automate the...
DETROW: Yeah.
ACOVINO: ...Part of my job - they're like, maybe if it sent emails for me but not, like, if it writes my story. One person I talked to was Keita Takahashi. He developed a game that people of my age love very much called Katamari Damacy, and it's like, this absolutely ridiculous game. It has a great sense of humor. It's basically, you're rolling up a bunch of small objects on the world into a giant ball, and then they become planets in the sky.
DETROW: That sounds relaxing.
ACOVINO: (Laughter) Yeah, it's absurd, but on purpose, and it has a great sense of humor. But Takahashi was very blunt about the AI thing, and actually, he brought this up unprompted in a different interview I was doing. And here's what he said.
KEITA TAKAHASHI: Who care about the AI? Like, I mean, AI is just business stuff, like, because they just want to make more money.
ACOVINO: So that's an example of someone who is just very purely an artist who is completely not interested in generative AI stuff.
DETROW: All right, so you're at this massive conference, tens of thousands of people. Two different similar questions...
ACOVINO: Yeah.
DETROW: ...What are your favorite things about video games right now as somebody who plays them? And what are the most interesting storylines that you're paying attention to as somebody who reports on them?
ACOVINO: Yeah. I mean, the conference really hit this home for me. The industry right now is just filled with so many video games that are great, especially because we've had this explosion of smaller teams making games. Like, there are just too many video games to play that are great. So that's, like, a great problem to have for the industry and for someone like me who, like, loves playing games.
But I think when it comes to the most interesting question facing the video game industry right now, to me, it is the AI question because, you know, 5 to 10 years ago, we saw Meta go all in on VR. And everyone was like, oh, maybe this is the next big thing, and it's not.
DETROW: Yeah.
ACOVINO: And it's really not. And I think you need broad enthusiasm from both video game players and the industry to be - for something like that to really happen. And that's - I don't know yet what's going to happen 'cause it feels like the big tech companies, like NVIDIA and stuff, are pushing it hard and want AI to be the future of games, but I haven't seen the same sort of excitement on the other end.
DETROW: That's Vincent Acovino, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED's resident gaming expert. Thank you so much.
ACOVINO: Thanks a lot.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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