Elon Musk has recently inserted himself into gaming culture wars bemoaning what he and others believe are âwokeâ portions of the market. Now, Elon, a gamer himself, says that heâs starting his own AI-based game stuido with xAI to âmake games great again,â in a quote tweet of a follower saying that developers and game journalists have been âideologically captured.
This of course raises many questions about the viability of such a project, even with Muskâs vast resources. Despite his accomplishments, many of his predictions and ideas donât exactly come to pass. His past claim that everyone would soon be using X as a banking app, for instance, comes to mind.
What exactly an âAI game studioâ consists of is unclear, given that yes, AI has certainly taken off in many fields, but it has been rejected for widespread use inn gaming, and even hints of it in game art or storytelling have been roundly rejected by both players and the developers themselves. A central question would also be how many game developers would want to head over to an Elon-run AI-centric game studio.
The central premise here is odd, where he laments that too many game studios are owned by massive corporations. Musk himself is the richest man in the world. xAI raised $6 billion in Series B funding and may be valued at $40 billion. Electronic Artsâ market cap is $43 billion, for comparisonâs sake. By definition an xAI game studio would be run by...a massive corporation.
What kind of game would Elonâs studio make? His favorites have been Cyberpunk 2077, and most recently Diablo 4, where his clear times in that gameâs high end content are among the worldâs best. Those are both massively expensive AAA games that took years to make and went through their own trials and tribulations. Making something on that scale for an AI game studio backed by someone with little experience in making games would beâŠchallenging.
As for what a ânot woke, not ideologically capturedâ game might look like, who knows what the standards are there. This year, the games held up as meeting that criteria are ones like Stellar Blade, The First Descendant and Black Myth: Wukong, though those were very much played by gamers with a range of ideological positions, or a lack thereof.
Whether this actually amounts to anything is anyoneâs guess. Itâs difficult to know when Elon is just saying things, or whether one of his random musings (âhow much does Twitter cost?â) results in some earth-moving development. In this case, the formation of an AI-driven game studio coming together and producing something of value feels like an especially tall order.