Hell-bent on finding something, anything, that will entertain subscribers but doesn’t require paying for labor, Netflix is launching a new AI video game thing. The news, per Aftermath, comes less than two weeks after Netflix shuttered its AAA gaming studio, Blue, which seemed poised to turn Netflix’s gaming department into something worth playing. Oh, well, Netflix dropped the big TUDUM on Blue in favor of, you guessed it, generative AI.
According to Aftermath, the news comes via a LinkedIn post from executive Mike Verdu, who, after three years “building Netflix games from the ground up,” recently took a new job as VP of GenAI for Games. As such, Verdu promises to harness a “‘once in a generation’ inflection point for game development and player experiences using generative AI.” After years spent reading press releases from tech companies, one can guess what comes next. Say it with us:” This transformational technology will accelerate the velocity of development and unlock novel game experiences that will surprise, delight, and inspire players.” Why do all AI boosters talk this way?
Verdu remains vague about all this, but he is “focused on a creator-first vision of AI.” We suppose that means an actual game designer will repeatedly type prompts into a hallucinating AI engine until the designer gets something remotely similar to what they saw in their heads. Regardless of how awful that sounds, Verdu says he hasn’t “been this excited about an opportunity in this industry since the ’90s.” It’s an excitement only shared by those who already have a meaningful investment in AI, not the people wondering why Google Search sucks so much now, or the game designers laid off in favor of an algorithm that makes everything look like a shitty Pixar movie. For now, we can comfort ourselves knowing that no games will come of this. We wish it didn’t require shutting down an actual game studio to give Netflix’s AI team something to do.
It’s been years of this AI stuff, thousands of jobs lost, the internet has been spammed to hell with slop, and none of the most valuable, profitable, or powerful companies in the world have given us any reason to use it. At this point, why should anyone believe them?
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