This Sunday marks 25 years of Xbox. To commemorate the occasion, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote a lengthy post on X cataloging Microsoft’s long history with gaming that goes back long before the original Xbox was released on Nov. 15, 2001. However, while the post mostly reads like a typical anniversary blog from a gaming executive, the last chunk implies the company may be going in a new direction with the most controversial technology of the moment: generative AI.
“While modern games demonstrate the heights of human craft in ways unimaginable just decades ago, the cost, resources, and risk required to create them have grown just as dramatically,” Sharma wrote. “As a result, too many ideas never become games, and too many games fall short of what their creators imagined. For decades, this has been the unavoidable tradeoff of ambition. We must change this.” Sharma recently described Microsoft’s gaming division as “not healthy,” and declared Xbox was in the middle of a “reset” that has already led to more than a thousand job cuts and the sale of several beloved studios, including Double Fine.
Sharma’s next paragraph provides some insight into how the company may try to turn things around. “Throughout human history, the scale of what we could create was determined by the people, capital, and resources we could command,” Sharma continued. “That relationship is beginning to break. A single person will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations. A small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. And our largest studios will be able to pursue ambitions as far beyond today’s games as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is from its first entry in 1982.”
While Sharma was careful never to use the term “AI,” the idea of a “small team” being able to “build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars” only seems feasible in the context of this technology. Modern AAA video games tend to require more developers, not fewer, and as a result, development costs have been rising across the industry.
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