The latest trends in video games from the 2023 global Game Developers Conference

• San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) – the global gathering of the greatest creative minds in the games industry – opened its doors for the second time since the pandemic in March 2023.
• For 2023 it was applications of artificial intelligence (AI) for game development, with the future shape of the gaming experience – with and without virtual reality (VR) – high on the agenda.

AI developments and issues

• For games developers the interest in this type of AI relates to speeding up and easing game development, but there were also concerns raised about jobs being replaced by AI.
• The positive consensus was that humans are still best placed to ask the right questions to generate game content, even if such content was created by AI.
• This should avoid the potential ethical and legal issues of unintentionally publishing content learned from a copyrighted source, a key issue for this kind of AI.

Welcome to the metaverse

• We know Meta has already gambled big in this area, and clearly companies like Pico are happy to sell devices to experience it.
• So it wasn’t surprising that several tool and game engine providers were positioning themselves as a useful resource when creating content for the metaverse.
• It’s clear from this year’s GDC conference that the goal for the next generation of game engines is to prepare for digital spaces like the metaverse.
• Welcome to the Mario-verse?