There was never anything stopping them from doing that without AI. They don’t do it because their executives and investors want the large Return on Investment that they can only get with big blockbusters. They don’t care to take over the indie scene because it’s often focused on titles that are niche and risky.
There’s a possibility the profit margins could just get that juicy. You could have a skeleton crew work on a game for a shorter amount of time and get it out there making money.
Really, I’m not entirely opposed to AI but the mindset here is definitely one I cannot gel with, one that making more, larger, faster art is more worthwhile than making it yourself. Even if AI could make whole characters and settings in someone’s style, the people working on it often want to make it themselves. An AI can’t condense all your inspirations and personality and the meaning you would put into a work for you. AI does not even truly understand what it does, it’s only providing a statistics-based output. Even the best, most complex, most truly intelligent AI imaginable is not replacement for an artist, because it isn’t that artist.
AI can’t create anything itself, it’s a tool to help artists create explore, expedite, and improve. An AI can’t condense all of your inspirations and personality and meaning in the same way a drawing tablet can’t. It’s all in how you use it. You can infuse it with your learned experiences at training, guidance, inference, and post-processing to make it more closely adhere to your statistics.
Ultimately AI still seems to serve better to expansive games that need to be filled with a lot of content than small works of passion.
We’ve been talking about indie game devs this whole time, but we haven’t even touched on amateur games devs. For small scale, I think this is where we’ll see the biggest impact. People with fewer or no skills might get the helping hand they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and get started.