More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Yeah, it could still be a good while away. AI can help a lot in some places. Not so much in others. Like if you had modules and plugins that can work like legos to make a very simple game. AI can help get your initial game wired up. For the work of making it unique or interesting, AI can’t help as much. Though it could quickly spin up lots of graphics to choose from and such so that a person with no graphics skills could make their game have its own look. The other place it can help is in running tests. Like for new hardware that an engine or what not needs to support. It can even help add tests to some extent, but you still need a skilled person to look over what it did.
My understanding is that there are a lot of boring mundane tasks needed for maintaining the framework and such. The kind of thing that turns off opensource contributors. So maybe some of that can be offloaded and help get more people involved for free on a product that they can then use for free.
This is basically how modern development tools (I.E. the Unity Editor) work - they let you import all the resources then provide a framework for connecting it all together.
That said, this process of connecting everything is also one of the parts AI is actually worst at. As AI doesn’t understand context or logic, it can’t fit things together in a complex or meaningful way, nonetheless a unique way. Its for the same reason AI is bad at large/complex programming tasks (like game development). AI can make passable (albiet not great) individual art assets, but when you need to fit them together in logical ways, things start to fall apart. The same problem applies to testing. Tests where an agent effectively hits random buttons aren’t very useful, since they’re too inefficient. You need logical, structured and/directed testing, which AI can’t meaningfully do.
Basically, for easy, boilerplate stuff, its going to be largely done by the engine, or assets you import. Anything else is too complex or too important for AI.