GDC occurs just one week a year, but its influence resonates year round. While the main stage presentations and breakouts are great places to gather what’s on the cusp for our industry, I value just as much, if not more, the one-on-one connections with other attendees who bring their own creative concerns and objectives to the floor.
These on-the-ground perspectives are what I view as the key to banding our industry together and taking on the challenges that lie ahead. So, in an effort to go beyond the headlines, here are some timely undercurrents facing our industry that stuck with me for all who did not attend GDC.
AI: When, Where, for Who, and Why?
It probably comes as no surprise that AI was a major focal point of this year’s presentations. The GDC platform provides tech companies a rotating opportunity to share new and upcoming breakthroughs for our industry.
Yet, for all the assertive talk of disruption and change for the developer ecosystem, some AI-driven solutions still struggle to justify the spirit of their innovation.
It can be exciting to find new tools and ways to use them, but our top goal must always be to make a good game that people want to engage with. AI itself is interesting and has fantastic potential, but it is not, in and of itself, fun.
As an industry at an important inflection point, the forceful excitement for AI on stage seemed to meet a healthy skepticism from the crowd. Who are all these AI tools for — developers or players? Is AI integration even a selling point for gamers? If AI is used for a generative logic model or a gameplay assistant, are there other costs to creative vision and control? Are the solutions touted by tech companies even addressing the real problems developers or players face?
I appreciated the caution with which the GDC crowd seemed to treat these so-called revolutionary solutions. The team at Unlock Audio constantly and carefully considers the prospects AI offers us, and our alignment remains optimistic mostly around opportunities to combat the tedium of audio workflows — automating repetitive or time-consuming processes, i.e., scaling procedural productivity, not content generation.
We find little appeal in AI-generated music, voice, or audio design. In their current iterations, most AI essentially fills the role of tools that have existed previously without ultimately reducing time or cost. (For more on navigating voice talent and AI, dig into our earlier article by Voice Director Bonnie Bogovich.)
Across game art and audio, we maintain that human creators will always bring something more original, contextual, and emotionally tangible to the mix, not just a programmatic rehash. AI cannot produce or adequately mix the assets required for fully interactive audio or music systems. After all, audio libraries already exist to kick original sound design into high gear. Anything created using a computer + AI tools still requires a heavy editing hand to achieve the quality tomorrow’s games require, so for now, it remains best to lead and finish game audio with an expert human touch.
Decentralizing Creative Development
The game industry appears to be repeating a process the film industry already went through. Expansion and growth once led to an amassing of all creative and development disciplines under massive studio roofs, but current conditions seem to favor the greater financial and creative flexibility of collaboration between separate, specialized teams.
From large studio expats striking up new ventures to independent newcomers, many are recognizing the value of keeping internal operations lean while tapping into outside partners like Unlock Audio as flexible and powerful departments to execute their vision. This flexibility is even more apparent when transitioning to new projects, where the strengths and interests of internal teams may have been perfectly aligned to one project more than another.
That’s not a diss on anyone’s abilities and expertise — passion and stylistic fit per game are a quality of talent that we as an industry need to recognize and uphold if we’re going to prioritize highly crafted, unique games that people actually want to play; especially when the alternative is perfunctory profit models in disguise. And that’s where partnered sources like Unlock provide a tailor-made connection between the right roster of audio talent for the right game, always.
Balance of Quality and Quantity
Under the surface, what these two themes have in common is a growing sensitivity to what it all takes to tell great stories and make truly appealing games. Operationally, many development decisions boil down to challenges of quantity: numbers of assets, numbers of creators, dollars in the bank, and hours in the day.
As studios look to balance workforce with creative demand, solutions like temporary, widescale quantity outsourcing and generative AI offer some promise, but this comes with inherent risks to quality, consistency, and creative control.
Gamers aren’t concerned with how well a studio solved its quantitative quandries — they just want great games that justify their price.
When quality leads development, issues of quantity seem far more trivial. As an inverse to the quantity-led solutions of AI, the decoupling and specialization of departmental services, like game audio, from bloated operations provides quality-led, flexible solutions for developers to meet the critical moment of an industry in flux. My discussions at GDC underscored the need for pride and passion in our work and the reward for never forgetting the point of what we do: to tell meaningful stories and give people experiences that excite, entertain and inspire. And developers who share our obsession with quality will earn the recognition and respect of gamers by prioritizing what matters most, which will in turn reward them with a sustainable space in the industry.
