Amazon Games boss says the games industry “needs” generative AI

During the middle of a voice actors' strike over AI protections, no less

Amazon Games

Right now, video game voice actors are on a SAG-AFTRA-organized strike and fighting for their livelihoods, taking a stand specifically against the use of AI to replace them. Naturally, that means it’s the perfect time for the boss of Amazon Games to say that the games industry needs generative AI and that there aren’t any actors in games. 

In an interview with IGN, head of Amazon Games Christoph Hartmann spoke about all sorts of things, from its upcoming Tomb Raider game to its slate of MMOs and the state of the MMO landscape as a whole. He also had a lot to say on generative AI, and some of it is quite… interesting. 

Hartmann said that the risk of creating something new and interesting is very high in the games industry, especially in the triple-A space. The solution to this, apparently, is using generative AI to speed up the process. 

“My hope is that AI will help,” Hartmann says. “It’s not going to solve it all, but will be one thing where we, for example, can shorten the life cycle. I think games development takes way too long, like five years per game … hopefully AI will help us to streamline processes so hand-done work will go fast.

“I think we as a games industry need it, and AI is hopefully going to also help us to come up.” 

Hartmann, who said he had to be “careful” when talking about the SAG-AFTRA voice actors’ strike, said that AI could help companies “have new gameplay ideas” without sacrificing jobs. If it’s going to take away anything, he says, it will be “the really boring parts,” like coming up with new gameplay ideas, I guess. 

He also goes on to say that games “don’t really have acting,” which is a weird thing to say, and that AI could be the solution to localization, which is an even weirder thing to say. 

“I think what could be super helpful is localization,” Hartmann said. “Right now, we’re localizing our game into a certain set of languages. Basically, does it make sense to have it in a language, yes or no? Having AI will actually help us. 

“That's why I'm thinking it's not going to make it cheap, it's just going to make us translate our games into more languages. Which is great for gamers, because there's countries which maybe not everyone speaks perfect English and they would love to have in a local language, but they're half the size. And I think those are where AI will help us. I don't think it's something where I think actually will create more likely jobs than it will take jobs away.” 

Well, okay then. You’d think that, if somebody’s going to be hired to help a game get localized into more languages, it would be localizers and not generative AI developers, but I guess that’s why I’m not an executive at a triple-A games company. 

Amazon Games just announced its newest game at Gamescom Opening Night Live. We went hands-on with King of Meat in a preview earlier in the month, and found it to be a frantically fun dungeon-crawler with creative potential.