--:-- Host: Grand Theft Auto 6 is finally coming out next month. That game has been in production since like 2013, 2014. It's like a 12, 13-year development cycle. Crazy.
--:-- Anish Acharya: Games have long been one of the most complex products to create. But because you can have a helpful role from some of these specialized models, you no longer need to be a professional. There's having an agent look at something and try to recreate a game from scratch. There's also the meshing and merging of two games or two art styles.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Multi-billion dollar game franchises have been created using mods. Counter-Strike, for example, was a Half-Life mod. League of Legends was inspired by Defense of the Ancients, Dota, which was itself a Warcraft 3 mod. So imagine what the next 12-year-old game will look like.
--:-- Anish Acharya: AI is now making it possible to build 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?
--:-- Host: Remixing, and why cheaper development could unlock stranger genres and new IP. 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 been this incredible shift in the gaming industry and also what we're seeing from solo devs and 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 said that they're thinking a lot about the hardware and software interplay on Xbox. There seems to be a big shift. So I want to talk about that.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Yeah, maybe I'll start off. Anish, I'd love to hear your thoughts because you've been building some games in your free time.
--:-- Anish Acharya: Yeah, yes, I have. I thought 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. Astra was very good at using Blender. It could actually work directly within Unreal and Unity. In previous generations of models, they would just explain to the user, "Oh, you should do this in Blender, you should do this in Unreal." But Astra actually could operate the software for you. That was a huge unlock.
--:-- For the first time, you could have a hobbyist, someone who's never actually built any games before, use Astra to draft the game design document, generate some concept art, move that concept art into Blender, have them build 3D models from it, animate it, rig it, move it over to Unreal, and then basically add some music and sound files, which by the way can also be generated. Then you can export that as a playable. You literally have a game that you one-shot using Astra.
--:-- The other thing that's been very valuable is that Astra can also QA itself. It can take screencaps of the game and then learn from its own output. "Oh, I need to fix this bug or this doesn't look right." That's why the initial prototypes that people are building on X are actually surprisingly good. I think that was a huge technology unlock with a number of ramifications we're starting to see in the games industry.
--:-- The first effect is that it's dramatically shortening the time between idea and prototype. That's something Tim Sweeney talks about in some of his Twitter posts. AI is now making it possible to build niche games or esoteric genres that previously would not have been economically viable. Because you're shortening the time it takes to make a game, you can actually now split up a prototype of a strange or weird game idea. It costs less money, it takes less time.
--:-- I think that's actually huge for the games industry because one of the structural challenges in games is that it takes a really long time to make these games. Grand Theft Auto 6 is finally coming out next month. That game has been in production since 2013, 2014. It's a 12, 13-year development cycle. Crazy. I'm sure it's going to be an amazing game, but by any other software development standard, taking 10 plus years to make HR software or CRM or ERP is kind of insane.
--:-- Shortening the time from idea to prototype, let's see if we can get a five to 10 year dev cycle to two to five years. It's still going to take some time, but it'll enable game developers to take more risk, have more at-bats, take more experiments, and generally increase the richness and diversity of games that are created. I think that's really exciting.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Yeah, to build on some of those comments, it's interesting because we've seen two approaches emerge. I think the first thing that was really applicable to gaming was the emergence of 3.js manipulation. I think it was Opus 4.7, maybe Opus 4.8, but it just had this property which it was not designed to have. At least Anthropic said it did not, which is it was awesome with 3.js, which is in-browser 3D. It's interesting because the way it does it, it's laying things out almost on an element-by-element basis, in a way that would be maddeningly meticulous for a human.
--:-- Coding is one path to game generation, and what Astra did really well, to your point, was tool use. You could use Blender and Blender in the cloud really, really effectively. These are two megatrends within models, one kind of emergent and one programmed, that are converging to drive a lot of the acceleration in game development.
--:-- Host: It's funny, you say 12 years to make HR software. I think the amount of time it takes is why there are so many sad stories in gaming. Think of all the game stories that are left untold. How many games were canceled three years into a six-year cycle or five years into a six-year cycle? The market has moved on, player tastes have changed. You go through these financial cycles, these creative cycles where the ideas that were creatively interesting three years ago now feel flat. It's so hard to work on something for 13 years and see it all the way through and then have it be great. It's a miracle that it works at all.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: The other aspect of these long development cycles, I feel like people don't talk about, but has a very real impact in the industry, is that the long dev cycles have a suffocating impact on innovation. If you're a producer at a AAA game studio, and you know it's going to take 10 years to ship a game and hundreds of millions of dollars, you're going to be very conservative in what you greenlight. You're going to greenlight sequels over a new IP. I think we're on the 20th Call of Duty installment. It's Grand Theft Auto 6, not a new IP. You're going to skew toward genres that have established demand, which is why we see so many first-person shooters, third-person shooters over some experimental genre.
--:-- When you lower the bar for shipping a game, it's going to take less time. Instead of hundreds of millions of dollars, it's going to take tens of millions. It's still going to be expensive, but it means people can take more creative risk. You can actually ship a new IP. You can take a bet on some game developers that have never actually shipped anything before. You can greenlight them and get them a budget to make something. That's a really exciting story for the games industry, and it's going to unlock a lot of structural innovation.
--:-- Anish Acharya: The other way to explore this new capability is to increase ambition. Imagine what the next 12-year game will look like. GTA 7. You were talking today about how intricate the city is in GTA 6.
--:-- Host: Yeah, they have custom radio stations that they designed because they were just like, "Well, we have a year and this team isn't doing anything. Let's just record a bunch of radio stations." It's incredible. But you imagine if they then spent 10 years with the current tools, forget about a city or even a world, you could build a universe with that level of detail. Why not?
--:-- Jonathan Lai: No, I think that's absolutely right. Expand the scope of games, the ambition of games, take more creative risk. AI can literally create an abundance in games that wasn't previously possible because we can make games that have never been seen before.
--:-- Another element we haven't talked about that I think is equally important is that AI is also changing who can make games. Games have long been one of the most complex products to create. It's a true multidisciplinary craft. You need to know how to code. You need to know art. You need to know game design. You need to know music and sound. The execution for making a great game is very high. Much more so than snapping a great photo or making a video, which are hard, but there's a level of difference there.
--:-- But because you can have a helpful role from some of these specialized knowledge areas which you may not have, you no longer need to be a professional. You don't need a full team of people that are all specialized in different roles. Instead, you can have AI plug some of the gaps in your skills and knowledge. That's democratizing game creation in a way that wasn't previously possible. You can have someone with just an idea and some reference art work with Astra to iterate their way to a game prototype.
--:-- Of course, it's a prototype. It's not a fully playable game. Many people won't actually finish it. They'll just make the first level or the scene and then drop out. But some percentage of them will make it through and decide that they love game development. They'll want to turn this into a job itself. I think we'll see an explosion in the number of game creators. That's really exciting.
--:-- Host: You guys must talk to founders who are either creating tools for these would-be AI-enabled game developers or trying to work on AI-developed games themselves. The thing that would seem the hardest to me would be game balance and making something that's actually fun and engaging. There seems to be this art, this real thing that requires human intuition and human know-how and just a different kind of creativity. What are you seeing there in terms of what AI can do?
--:-- Jonathan Lai: I think you hit it spot on. The AI model is not going to replace human taste and creative judgment. That is still really, really critical. There's a saying in the games industry that the last 20% of the game is 80% of the work. That's where all the magic comes together that makes something fun. The first 80% is just putting together a game that works. "Okay, great. You can start the game. There's a character in it. It can shoot things. There are monsters to shoot." That's the first 80%. The last 20% is so critical. How does the world feel? Going back to your point about custom radio stations in Grand Theft Auto 6. When you fire a gun, what is the sound of the gun? The shotgun should sound different from the pistol. When you use a laser gun, there should be a recoil for that. All the little details are what make a magical experience. That is going to be the province of humans for the foreseeable future. How does something feel? What do players want? How should this gun feel? Human taste and judgment are still critical in those situations.
--:-- Host: Yeah, and what is going to make me want to spend a thousand hours playing Grand Theft Auto or Baldur's Gate 3, these incredible games? I think it really is this level of detail, but also a sense of consequence and depth to a world. Maybe that is something that LLMs can actually help extend.
--:-- Anish Acharya: I agree. I don't know that it makes it trivial to create a really fun game because that's really hard. It's an intersection of many things: some design, some serendipitous, some cultural, some social. Many things go into making a fun game. I do think, though, in this new era, sometimes creation is consumption. The vast majority of games are ever going to be played by one person. That is the creator in the future. That's okay, because there is programming or creating games for the output, for the artifact, and then there's doing those things as an activity. It's actually very tranquil to make a game and work on a game and create, especially because it has the art element. Seeing the assets come to life, seeing the characters say things you didn't program them to say. I really do think there's a sort of zen gardening aspect to game creation which will become increasingly popular.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: That's such a great point. Creation is play sometimes. You've seen that for Minecraft, which is one of the most successful and longest running games of all time. We've seen it even prior to video games with things like Legos, where people or kids are just creating things for fun and sharing it with each other. That is definitely the case with AI today as well. The act of creating something, bringing something to life, is itself fun. AI is just turbocharging what people can create. You don't need to know everything about code and art and 3D to make something that you can be proud of and have fun making.
--:-- Host: 100%. Anish, you built this Habbo Hotel themed kind of record shop. What was that process like?
--:-- Anish Acharya: It actually started with a conversation with a friend who's a DJ. He was saying, "All the online record stores look the same. It's just a list of songs." We were talking about how when we used to go record shopping in Toronto in the 90s, going to the record shop was like going to the barbershop. You go there, it's filled with people. You can't not have five conversations. There's someone at the back playing tracks really loud. There are mixtapes for sale. There are raves being promoted. It was a real social environment. He said, "Why can't online record shopping be like that?"
--:-- I thought, "That's cool. Let me try to actually create that." This was with Opus 5.5. I gave it a shot. I gave it just a couple of Habbo Hotel reference art components. It super exceeded my expectations because not only did it generate the room, it also somehow grabbed all kinds of 90s music. It had a creative R&B, a creative dance hall, a creative hip-hop, a creative soul. You could pick the track, look through the tracks, put them on. Then the DJ at the back would grab the record, put it on. People were dancing. It was very intricate. It was a total inspiration.
--:-- From there, I said, "What if I extended this and turned it into Queen Street in Toronto in the 1990s?" So I turned it into a whole street. The last touch, which I think was the most science fiction thing that would never have been possible, was I made it so that every one of the other storefronts was something that another player could come and build out just through prompting.
--:-- Anish Acharya: The interesting thing is that they could not just customize the art, they could customize the capabilities. My son went in there and created this pet adoption center, except you could actually adopt the pets and they'll follow you around. Wow. Of course, I didn't design this animal following capability in, but the coding agent updated my game engine to create that mechanic. In the past, it was really inspirational to have procedural level generation. But that's just dynamic content. Now we're talking about dynamic abilities. It's a whole universe.
--:-- Host: Has your son played Adopt Me from Roblox? Because that's something about... Is it similar? It's one of the most popular Roblox games.
--:-- Anish Acharya: Oh, maybe he has. That's how he came up with it. I'm like, "This is so creative."
--:-- Jonathan Lai: My son has also recently got into game development using AI. It started because he wanted to play a game called Ghost of Tsushima. It's a fantastic game, but you basically play a samurai in feudal Japan. As you can imagine, it's very bloody and kind of violent. I told him, "No, you're eight. You're not playing this bloody samurai game." But he really wanted to play it. He started talking to ChatGPT and asking about it. Somehow he discovered that he could build a Minecraft mod of Ghost of Tsushima.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: He used GPT to basically deconstruct the game because there are all these wikis online that break down how the mechanics work, how the boss battles work. Codex helped him build a Minecraft mod, which he installed. It's Ghost of Tsushima except as a Minecraft mod. And it works. It works super well. He's been sharing it with his friends. Now at this point, he doesn't ask us to buy new games anymore. He's just like, "I want to play this game. I'm going to make it as a Minecraft mod."
--:-- Anish Acharya: That's an inspiration.
--:-- Host: What I also love about that is it illustrates the fact that as we think about how games get better, realism is not the only or even necessarily the most interesting axis for improvement. The fact that you can create a concept from two existing concepts that never would have existed is extraordinary.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: I think this is a good transition to talk about decompilation. That really feels like a new trend. There are different strains of decompilation. There is having an agent look at something and try to recreate a game from scratch. There's also the meshing and merging of two games or two art styles. I would love to disentangle all of these different things that are going on right now.
--:-- Anish Acharya: I'd highlight two trends that are happening that are getting turbocharged by AI. The first is that the games industry has long been driven by modding. Modding is the concept of taking a game that you already love and building an add-on extension to it that changes the gameplay somehow. Then it becomes its own game, its own genre. Historically, some of the biggest games in the games industry have come from mods. Counter-Strike, which is a really big esport, was a Half-Life mod. League of Legends, one of the most successful MOBAs of all time, was inspired by Defense of the Ancients, Dota, which was itself a Warcraft 3 mod. My favorite one, Fortnite and PUBG, were inspired by a PlayerUnknown battle royale mod of Arma.
--:-- Multi-billion dollar game franchises have been created using mods. This is the history of how some of the best and biggest games in the world have been created. AI is making it really, really easy to mod games right now. Exactly like the way my son did, an ordinary player or someone who loves an IP or a game can basically point Astra to it and say, "Make me Ghost of Tsushima, except add this. Add voxel-based crafting, add the relationship system from Animal Crossing." Then you can just make it and see if it's fun. If it is fun, other people start playing it and it becomes a genre in itself and blows up in a big way.
--:-- Part of this goes back to the creation loop. It's hard for someone to create something new using a blank canvas. If you put a text prompt in front of someone and say, "Make me a game," you wouldn't know where to start. Working within the framework of an existing game that someone else has made and just saying, "Add this thing, remix it with this other thing," becomes very powerful because it gives you a place to start and a place to remix from.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: You mentioned modding. The two other areas I've seen are decompiling such that you have the source code and the assets. This gets really interesting for beloved but old games. You take games like Knights of the Old Republic, for example. BioWare is out of business. BioWare is never going to make another Knights of the Old Republic game. Thinking about extending it or forking it is really cool.
--:-- The third, maybe most futuristic one I've seen, there's this guy, Blendie, who's been doing a lot of these amazing things on X. He'll take the assets from two existing games and combine them into a third game, which is just a totally out-there concept. But it works, and some of the games are really fun.
--:-- Anish Acharya: On the retro games front, I think what sparked the Xbox Labs announcement when Asha talked about wanting to support AI and new frontiers of development was specifically that there were so many community projects popping up that were taking Halo, the original 2001 Xbox game, and decompiling and recompiling it for modern platforms. I think there were four community projects that I heard of that made Halo a playable web GPU game. You can play Halo in the web now. It's really incredible.
--:-- Going back to what you were saying earlier about 3.js, 3D on the web has never been more powerful or more accessible. Xbox is likely seeing things like this happen and saying, "We used to have whole teams that would take a Windows game and port it over to the iOS ecosystem, or take old games that are defunct and try to remaster it." Now AI can help a lot of those efforts. You're taking an established IP and exposing it to a new audience. Kids today that have never grown up with Knights of the Old Republic can now play it on a console or a PC or a device that's relevant to them. I think it's really, really cool.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: There are genres of games that have really high production cost or have historically had where you simply don't get the ROI. People love RTS games. Everybody has been obsessed with RTS. There have been so many efforts to make a great iPad RTS, and we never really got one. Now I think we're going to see a complete renaissance of genres like RTS.
--:-- Anish Acharya: So true. It's what I'm personally really excited about. I love this really niche genre of games called job simulators. It's such a strange concept. You basically play a day in the life of a particular job, and it's typically not a glamorous job. You're not the president or something. The one I played most recently is this train conductor simulator.
--:-- Host: Oh my gosh, amazing.
--:-- Anish Acharya: You can be a conductor of subways and trains in various cities around the world. I've been a Tokyo subway conductor. It's exactly as it sounds. It's not glamorous at all. Show up for work. You have a timetable to make. You drive this train and stop at every stop along the way and pick up passengers. You have to do it perfectly. If you're late and the last car doesn't make it in so not everyone can get on the train, your paycheck gets docked for that. It's such a niche genre. I can't imagine that many people want to be train conductors. But if they are, now you can make games like this. People like me who really love it will pay a lot of money to play these games.
--:-- Anish Acharya: I find it really fun.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: It's funny. If you look at old computing magazines and the rankings of top software, number one is usually VisiCalc and number two is Microsoft Flight Simulator or early flight sim games. I think simulator as a genre really has a hold on people. People love sims.
--:-- Anish Acharya: It's an evergreen kind of game. Maybe there's a particular type of job that resonates for various people, but you never had a chance to discover it because the simulator genre just wasn't that big. Now you can role play a day in the life of almost any job in the world that you can envision. Wouldn't that be really cool?
--:-- Host: Did you guys ever play Untitled Goose Game?
--:-- Anish Acharya: I know about this game.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: I know about this game.
--:-- Host: It's a goose simulation. I actually enjoyed it. So maybe I am into the sim genre right now.
--:-- Anish Acharya: That mischievous goose. It was really big during the pandemic.
--:-- Host: I don't know what that says about me. Chaos agent.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Going back to the conversation about RTS games, one thing I've seen are agent orchestration schemes that look like classic RTS. There's the Age of Empires skin over your agent orchestration.
--:-- Anish Acharya: There's a Minecraft one too.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: All the different structures are different quad codes. Exactly. What do you guys think of those? Is that like a toy kind of rendering? Is that just an extension of the fact that it does kind of feel like a game to be managing your agents like that? Or is that the start of a new genre of simulator?
--:-- Anish Acharya: I think it could be. Being the general manager of a line of business at any company, at Credit Karma or Google or wherever else, is a sort of sim. You're working with all of these teams. You have a limited amount of control. You have incomplete, imperfect information. Then you have market forces. I don't know that it's that different. I think now you can trivially create these really ambitious interfaces. In that world, you might do that and it might actually be optimal. In the old world, the cost was so high it was insane. It made no sense.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: One thing that the GUIs inspired by games being used for agent management makes me think of is that the average consumer finds agent orchestration to be non-intuitive. Working from a command line, trying to manage your agents using a primarily text-based interface is non-intuitive. I agree that there will probably be a more mass market visual interface that an everyday consumer can use to manage a collection of agents. Whether it looks like StarCraft or Agent Empires or Factorio, I'm less sure of the exact implementation. But it does feel like we're early in figuring out user interfaces for primarily agentic workflows.
--:-- Host: John, one thing I'm really curious to hear from you on. Obviously, Tim and Asha have come out really supporting the community around AI-developed games, which is awesome. But do you think that their companies and ecosystems are set up to really capture the value from this trend? Or do you think that they're currently in an awkward position today, knowing that they need to change?
--:-- Jonathan Lai: That's a good question. If you just take modding as an example, historically the original owners of IP have not benefited that much from the mods that have been created on top of their IP. The original creators of Dota didn't really benefit that much from League of Legends when that was created. I'm not sure if the original Half-Life developers owned that much from Counter-Strike. I think there is a gap in terms of business models that need to be figured out. If you're really embracing AI as a remixing, modding, decompilation, recompilation engine that empowers your player base, how do you as a company benefit from that commercially?
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Yeah, I think folks are still early in that. I've heard talk of people trying to figure out if there's a revenue share or royalty that can go back to the company, therefore powering creators. But I think there's a lot to be figured out there still.
--:-- The strongest form in my mind is Minecraft. Minecraft really benefits from the mods ecosystem. But it's interesting because we've interchangeably used the words "remix" and "extend." I actually think that all of the additions that extend the core game and share a core foundation of community plus a base game actually benefit the IP owner. Whereas when you're forking the game, there is no benefit. In fact, you might even be splitting the community.
--:-- Host: That's right. That's right. Yeah, I think it goes back to something which I know you and I have talked about separately, which is how do you create new forms of distribution for the next generation of AI games or games that are created using AI? Today, many of these games are still going through traditional distribution channels. They're being posted on Steam, on the App Store. If you're making something in Roblox, it's still within the Roblox ecosystem. I think there is an opportunity for a company out there to also create a distribution platform which natively harnesses and empowers all these AI game creators. It doesn't really exist today because all the games are going through traditional channels.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Right. Well, you should check out Spawn, actually. We're not investors, but I'm a huge fan of what they're doing. It's Jacob and team, and they've created this shared community plus game generation platform. What you do is you work with this embodied agent named Savi. She's in all the games with you. She can not only take bug reports on the platform, but she can modify the game while you're in it.
--:-- Host: Like a co-pilot.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Yeah, that's right. She can create portals for you so you can step into other games. You can bring other players with you. Every game is multiplayer by default with the same community. It's early, but it's the most impressive, ambitious effort I've seen at doing something like this, and I'm sure there'll be more.
--:-- Anish Acharya: Yeah, I think that's exciting. I'm a fan of Jacob. I've been following the company for a while. The broader opportunity is how do you create a community that persists between games? You're not just having a couple of people that play this game and a couple of people that play that game with no interconnection. I think that is a huge opportunity. Minecraft and Roblox are great examples of this. Once you're inside the Roblox ecosystem, if you ever get bored of one game, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions more experiences you can participate in.
--:-- Host: But can you contrast the two, John? Here's one thing I've noticed. In Roblox, all the games are extremely different. It feels like the core shared game, if you even call it that, is actually pretty thin. Whereas in Minecraft, the core shared game is very rich. Do you think you need to have a really rich game? Because it feels like the pure portal-based worlds without a shared core gaming mechanic are harder to get off the ground, or is that not true?
--:-- Jonathan Lai: I think the benefit of a Minecraft model where it's more centralized is that everyone starts off playing the same game. To your point, you're forking it, you're modding it, you're making it your own when you create your Minecraft mods. Everyone has a shared experience. You're familiar with the IP and you're departing from that. Minecraft mods are almost like fan fiction. Everyone watched the same Game of Thrones series, so they know who Daenerys and Jon Snow are and what the Watch is. Minecraft has a lot of that shared culture — the Enderman, the dragons. That feels very different from a more decentralized approach, which is what I would characterize Roblox as. People can enter the Roblox ecosystem from any game. You have a very different experience and then you have to learn where to go from there and how to be a creator. But both approaches are totally viable. It's just a philosophical difference in terms of how you want to extend the game and harness the community. Both can work.
--:-- Host: Both can work for sure. Going back to our discussion about studios and publishers, what do you think they're the most excited by and what do you think they're the most worried by right now?
--:-- Anish Acharya: I think getting their costs down has got to be super exciting. Being able to create more IP with less financial risk seems to be hugely exciting. For a lot of these studios, they live and die by winning the right to develop a game for a publisher. If the game doesn't do well, they may not get it again. You have hundreds of people that are overworked like crazy. It's got to be one of the worst qualities of life in that industry. People do it anyway because they love it, but it's tough. I think the quality of life of the average person in the industry and the quality of the business should go way, way up.
--:-- Host: I think maybe what is worrisome to them is that Xbox — I guess Microsoft owns Minecraft — but they wish they had an asset like that that was closer to a network and a social product than a pure entertainment product. Fortnite, despite being the most beloved game in the world five years ago, isn't really discussed as much. So I think there's this holy grail, what you call a never-ending game or a forever game, but it's so hard to get there. Maybe with these technologies, they'll have a better shot.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: In my conversations with game developers, I would say they're all using AI already. AI has become table stakes in terms of tools to be more productive. Instead of using AI to generate game design docs, to generate concept art, to quickly iterate on an idea and go to prototype — as I mentioned earlier, it's shortening the distance between an initial idea and prototype. Everyone is universally excited about that. I think of that as wave one of AI adoption among game studios.
--:-- The next wave, which is what Anish is leading to, is even more exciting: how do you use AI to create new types of gameplay, new game mechanics, new game genres that don't exist today but could massively expand the market for games? You're not just making GTA 6 faster and cheaper. You're making a new type of game that couldn't exist before.
--:-- The article I wrote on the concept of the never-ending game is something I'm personally passionate about. The Holy Grail for an MMO is a game which infinitely adapts itself to what the players want. If you land on a beach in an MMO and you're supposed to go to the forest because that's how the game starts, but you really love the ocean and you decide to stay on the beach and build a ship and sail off — MMOs today couldn't handle that because it's scripted linearly. They expect you to go into the forest. But in an adaptive MMO built using world models, you could literally generate an entire quest line for someone who really likes the ocean. Now there are pirates attacking you. There's a nautical warfare element.
--:-- These discussions always go into science fiction, but you remember in Ender's Game, they have the concept of the mind game. The game adapts to what Ender wants to do at any given moment. I think it's possible we'll see our own version of the mind game at some point. That would be the game you can't stop playing because it adapts itself to whatever you want to do.
--:-- Anish Acharya: I mean, perhaps we're playing it at this moment.
--:-- Host: Yeah, exactly. The Matrix, right?
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Well, or Ender's Game itself. The story is that he's in the game.
--:-- Host: What games do you guys have the most amount of hours in?
--:-- Anish Acharya: For me, I've played Witcher 3. I've completed it twice. I absolutely love it. The other game that I actually adore is Dune 2000. That was my favorite RTS growing up. It's so good. Somebody had already ported it over to play on Mac and it's as good as it ever was. For RTS fans, if you haven't played that, I highly recommend Dune 2000.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: I've probably put thousands of hours into League of Legends. Some of my best friendships have been made in that game. That has to be my most played game. Closely behind that is StarCraft. I played all the versions — Brood War, StarCraft 2. It's a classic example of a game where the audience for hardcore RTS has dwindled over time because it's such a hard genre to play. It matters what your APM is. You can't play competitively without feeling bad about yourself because everyone else is so much faster and better. There aren't a lot of developers trying to make new and modern RTS games because the audience size doesn't support it from a pure market analysis. But with AI, I'm excited to see an explosion in RTS games. I will be playing as many of them as I can.
--:-- Host: I'm a big Crusader Kings 3 fan. It's not really RTS, but I describe it to people who don't know about it as The Sims mixed with Age of Empires. You get personality management, relationships, politics, but then you also get this grand overworld of managing your dynasty and your realm. It's so deep.
--:-- Anyway, to close this out, what's a game that each one of you has been thinking about making for years and now you finally can?
--:-- Anish Acharya: I can go quickly. I grew up running a bulletin board system, which tells you what my age is. Pre-internet, people would dial in. BBSs were famous for having async multiplayer games because only one person could phone in at a time. You'd play your turns, phone up, connect, play your turns, log off, and the next day play your next turns and see everyone else's turns at the same time. There's a whole genre of amazing async multiplayer games, including two written by one of the earliest employees at Google when he was still at Stanford. His name is Amit Patel. He made a game called Barren Realms Elite and a game called Solar Realms Elite. Unfortunately, he lost the source code for Solar Realms Elite, which is the better of the two. But he has a game design doc and he has an EXE. For every genre of the models, I've tried to get it to recreate the game, and it has not been able to do it. I now have what feels like a faithful recreation running on my computer. It's incredible.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: That's a great story. I think something along a similar vein for me is I'm a big Civilization player. The original Sid Meier's Civilization has generated some of my most endearing childhood memories. It's the 16-bit Windows version that you need a floppy disk to play. It's not playable today anymore because it's a 16-bit executable. I would love to recreate that game on a modern hardware stack. I've also long thought about what Civ looks like with agents. The fantasy of the game is that you are supposed to be the ruler of an empire, but that fantasy breaks down over the course of Civ where you're microing literally every unit in your empire. You could imagine a Civ where every unit was an agent with their own agenda and goals. You as the ruler of the empire are setting strategy and trying to influence your subjects to grow in the direction you want. You can't just have them do exactly what you want. You have to kind of cajole and influence and set policies.
--:-- Host: John, I have amazing news for you. This is Crusader Kings 3. This game exists and doesn't use frontier AI at all.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: Is that true?
--:-- Host: Yeah, pretty much. You have to manage schemes and different people's personalities and their opinion of you. Sometimes people won't do what you want because their opinion of you is too low. If you want to conquer a realm or a different territory, there are so many different ways you can do it. You can murder people who are ahead of you in succession. It's super deep. It actually feels the closest to a never-ending, endless game like you were talking about before in terms of what it will feel like when it's super deep and super realistic with way more permutations of choices. You should definitely check it out.
--:-- Anish Acharya: During the pandemic, I got COVID at the end of 2020 and I started teaching myself C Sharp. I started making a sort of Japanese-style dating sim with Unity.
--:-- Host: That's a lot of popular.
--:-- Anish Acharya: Well, it was right around Unity's IPO, so I was curious about Unity and how it worked and how easy it was. It was basically branching dialogue trees, so it wasn't that advanced in terms of programming. I didn't really get that far. There was some basic managing of health and thirst and stuff like that. But I actually think the dating sims genre...
--:-- Anish Acharya: ...is right for this. There's a genre called otome games, which are basically dating sims for women to go on dates with men with different personalities and archetypes.
--:-- Host: Amazing. Fun note to end on. Thank you guys so much for joining.
--:-- Anish Acharya: Thank you.
--:-- Jonathan Lai: My pleasure. Thanks, John. This was great.
--:-- Host: That was cool. First of many.
--:-- Host: Thanks for listening to this episode of the a16z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at a16z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.
--:-- Narrator: As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. It should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. Please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.
