The Next Era of Games: Mods, Agents, and Infinite Worlds

Grand Theft Auto six is finally coming out next month. That game has been in production since, like, 2013, 2014. It's like a twelve, thirteen year development cycle. Crazy. Games have long been one of the most complex products to create. But because you can have a help fill the role of some of these specialized knowledge, you no longer need to be a professional. There is having an agent sort of look at something and try to recreate a game from scratch. There's also kind of the meshing and the merging of two games or two art styles. Multibillion dollar game franchises have been created using mods. Counter Strike, for example, that was a Half Life mod. League of Legends was inspired by Defense of the Ancients, DOTA, which was itself a Warcraft three mod. So imagine what the next twelve year game will look like. AI is now making it possible to build sort of niche games, like esoteric genres that previously would not have been economically viable. What's a game that each one of you has been thinking about making for years and now you finally can? What happens when making a game goes from a five year production cycle to something almost anyone can start experimenting with. A sixteen z general partners Anish Acharya and Jonathan Lai discuss how AI is shrinking development cycles and opening game creation to people without traditional coding, art, or design skills. They get into models that can operate tools like Blender and game engines, the rise of AI powered modding and remixing, and why cheaper development could unlock stranger genres and new IP. And they look ahead to AI native games that generate characters, mechanics, and stories as you play, blurring the line between making a game and playing one. It seems like there's just been this incredible shift in the gaming industry and also what we're seeing from solo devs and just tinkerers. Tim Sweeney from Epic has come out and said a bunch of really interesting things about AI. The CEO of Xbox, Asha, has also come out and sort of said that they're thinking a lot about the hardware and software interplay on Xbox. And there seems to be a tide shift. So Yeah. Want to talk about that. Yeah. Maybe I'll start off and, yeah, Anish would love to hear your your thoughts because you... You've been building some games in your free time. Yeah. Yes. I have. Yes. So I felt there was a big technology unlock about a month ago with Astra because it was very, very good at directly using very popular game development software. And so Astra was very good at using Blender. It could actually work directly within Unreal and Unity. And in previous generations of models, they would just explain to the user, oh, you should go and do this in Blender. You should do this in Unreal. But Astra actually could, like, operate the software for you, and that …