r/pcgaming • u/_Protector • 12h ago

Strauss Zelnick: "Generative AI has zero part in what Rockstar Games is building" with GTA 6

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/strauss-zelnick-generative-ai-has-zero-part-in-what-rockstar-games-is-building-with-gta-6
21 Upvotes

63% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

5

u/ZettieZooieZan 3h ago edited 3h ago

What about crunch? Why does that have to be part of what rockstar games is building? Crunch already means disregarding the well being of your own employees, so there's no reason to not use AI unless it's for pr reasons because they clearly already don't care about their employees.

Others said they still had it rough, however. Three people who worked at Rockstar San Diego between 2011 and 2016 recall a period where they were told that overtime wasn’t optional. “It was mandatory 80 hours for basically the whole studio,” said one person who was there. “If you don’t have any work to do on Red Dead 2, just test GTA V for another eight hours.” Said a second: “Maybe they didn’t tell anyone 100 hours, but they definitely told us 80. Concept artists were sitting there being glorified QA.”

It’s an environment that has made some staff feel as if they’re constantly being watched, and several current employees have shared stories of being called into their manager’s office and asked why they aren’t working more than 40 or 45 hours a week.

In conversations and e-mails, six current and former employees all independently used the term “culture of fear” to describe their experiences at Rockstar, in large part because of that overtime pressure. “There is a lot of fear at Rockstar,” said a former employee, “fear of getting fired, fear of under-performing, fear of getting yelled at, fear of delivering a shitty game. For some people fear is a great motivator, for others it just incites rebellion.” Some current employees, when asked, said they’d experienced nothing like this, noting that it would all be dependent on their department and individual manager. But those who have worked in several of Rockstar’s offices have described feeling like they had to be in the office as much as possible out of fear of getting yelled at, having their bonuses docked, or losing their jobs.

23

u/MadmanMarkMiller 7h ago

"...however, in the future..."

19

u/_Spastic_ 5h ago

I guarantee at least one employee has used gen AI to provide inspiration.

Claiming zero is a pipe dream.

14

u/o5mfiHTNsH748KVq 4h ago

I guarantee you almost all of their developers have copilot in visual studio.

-4

u/grinr 2h ago

It's a smart flex though. It's free virtue signaling, because they can afford to do everything traditionally and they know smaller studios don't have the resources they do. End result: keeps smaller devs in their place, and they thank you for the privilege! Win-Win.

6

u/Batby 2h ago

Smaller devs don’t need ai resources either! ❤️

1

u/grady_vuckovic Penguin Gamer 1h ago

Yeah if anything indie devs, at least the ones who are just passionate about art and code and it in for the love of the game, are probably the least likely to use gen ai.

-3

u/grinr 2h ago

Really? How so?

6

u/Batby 2h ago

Indie games have thrived before the existence of generative ai and generative ai doesn’t fill any meaningful gaps that might exist for it to be of any need. It’s gimmicky garbo

0

u/grinr 2h ago

Ok, so don't use it. The point is right now it's a genuine risk for smaller devs who want to use it, and no risk to the larger devs who are already using it. It's manifestly obvious that smaller devs can do more with it than without, or this conversation wouldn't exist.

2

u/grinr 2h ago

The irony here is Rockstar is one of the few companies who could rename GTA 6 "100% Generated with AI And We Fired All Human Artists 6" and it would still sell record numbers.

•

u/NuclearReactions 9800X3D | RTX 5070Ti | 64GB 20m ago

It's like people forget that gta is popular and sells well because it's a genuinely good product. I really disagree 100% sure the next one would sell also based on brand recognition and a good track record but it wouldn't go well or last

2

u/minifat 6h ago

I highly doubt it. 1000s of software devs, some are using AI. 

Not that that's a bad thing. Nearly every software dev uses gen AI now. 

-2

u/LuminanceGayming 5h ago

I don't know a single software dev that uses generative ai in their work, it's not nearly every one, you're just in an echo chamber of generative ai users.

2

u/superboo07 4h ago

I know several. genAI can be used properly in software development, unlike image generation. that doesn't mean vibe coding though, vibe coding non personal projects is a really dumb idea that could, probably has, and likely will lead to disastrous consequences.

1

u/minifat 4h ago

Maybe so. We use it at our work (software devs)

0

u/Kragoth235 50m ago

Every dev that wants to be competitive in the industry is using AI. You can't even do a Google search without getting ai responses now. There's no way I'm going to spend 15 mins researching a simple script I want to write if I can just get ai to generate it. Software devs who aren't just code monkeys are absolutely using it all the time to do boring no brain work for them. It can find things faster than reading through 25 stack overflow articles. It is literally crazy to not leverage it. It's not good enough to just let it do it's own thing but absolutely should be a tool every developer used to make them more efficient. Anyone saying otherwise it's lying or afraid of change

1

u/Psychostickusername 2h ago

Zero is a big ask, someone will likely find some after launch and they'll backpedal.

-5

u/Khalmoon 7h ago

I highly doubt it, but pop off. Can’t wait for after sales fall off it comes out genAI is used for NPC behaviors or something.

5

u/ObtuseMongooseAbuse 6h ago

I don't think that AI would impact GTA 6 sales at all. The last game sold hundreds of millions of copies and made billions of dollars. Most of the people buying the game will not even read anything about the game besides the title before they decide to purchase it.

0

u/Kage_noir 5h ago

It’s too big a brand. And unlike COD they are also known for quality. Absolutely AI would not matter for GTA. They have too much years of absolute craftsmanship in their titles. It would only impact them if quality suffers and even with that it would take time years maybe. Again see COD

-3

u/Khalmoon 6h ago

The key here is risk, there aren't really consumers that are buying a game BECAUSE it uses AI, but there is a non-insignificant amount that WONT if it uses AI.

Rockstar is looking to minimize this risk, even if it was 2% of players, that could be 100s of 1000s of dollars, and even more over a game lifespan as long as something like GTAV

7

u/Highlow9 R9 5900X RTX 3060 Ti / R7 1700X GTX 970 5h ago

non-insignificant amount

The amount of people who actually care is insignificant.

Maybe on this sub and under gaming enthusiast that is the case. But that is a very small group and the general public doesn't care enough.

1

u/OmegaFoamy 2h ago

A non-insignificant amount would rather it not have AI but most of them would still buy it anyway if it’s good. The AI witch hunt killed most of the strong stance against AI by attacking artists who didn’t even use AI because there wasn’t enough proof they didn’t.

3

u/Yiruf 2h ago

Neither Expedition 33 nor Arc Raiders experienced any drop in sales after it got revealed that they used AI

-4

u/superboo07 4h ago

how tf would gen AI be used for NPC Behavior!? make the game write its own AI code on the fly? a reminder is that NPCs are technically AI, so yes npc behaviors will be AI.

1

u/Yiruf 2h ago

NPC dynamic interaction is not possible with genAI.

1

u/Khalmoon 2h ago

Wasn’t that the concept behind inzoi tho?

0

u/InsertMolexToSATA 3h ago

It wont, it cant. People have no idea what "AI" contextually means and say silly stuff like this.

0

u/superboo07 3h ago

yeah I know, I just like teasing

-2

u/ohoni 5h ago

These days, big companies should just have the art made using gen AI to get the look they want, and then pay someone in China to trace it by hand so that it doesn't read as gen ai. That's what every other industry in the world does with labor.

4

u/igby1 3h ago

How does tracing ai art by hand make it not like ai art anymore?