I write every other Tuesday for paid subscribers and recently covered the app Cursor that’s disrupting screenwriting; the Chinese AI that should scare you; the billion-dollar opportunity in eternal celebrities; and OpenAI’s Ghiblification moment.
When the latest trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI dropped two weeks ago, it became the most-viewed video game reveal in history. More than 100 million views poured in within 24 hours on Rockstar Games’ YouTube channel, and over a half-billion views came in that week from all sources.
That’s a staggering number, outpacing not only every GTA launch to date but even recent Marvel and Star Wars releases. This wasn’t just another gaming moment — it was a global entertainment event. TikTok creators posted parody edits within hours. Reaction videos flooded YouTube. Even mainstream news outlets, typically slow to treat games as culturally equal to film, covered this release. And the trailer was dropped in part to announce a delay in the release of the game itself — from the previously planned fall 2025 to just over a year from today.
But the most important part of GTA VI’s announcement wasn’t its trailer. It was what came next, in an alleged leak from someone working on the game. Buried deep in the trusty message boards of Reddit were the rumors that Rockstar Games would be deploying AI-powered crowds and NPCs — non-playable characters — designed to behave with unscripted, dynamic logic.
These characters wouldn’t just repeat looped lines or follow fixed patrols. They’d remember, react, and evolve. They’d go to the beach on certain days and stay at home on others. They’d remember if you’d hurt them before or been kind. They’d change moods if they were at a concert or stuck in traffic. In short, if the rumors are true, the characters of GTA VI will stop behaving like signposts meant to push game-players through certain missions and instead behave like . . . real people.
Even Red Dead Redemption 2, made by Rockstar years before the current AI wave, hinted at what was possible. Its NPCs changed dialogue depending on how often you bathed. Shopkeepers developed grudges. Animals migrated. Now imagine those same characters powered by generative memory and AI voice engines.
It’s basically an amplification of an existing strategy for Rockstar, and yet the ramifications will be profound. In fact, the integration of AI in video games may do more to disrupt Hollywood than any change within the studio system over the last decade. (Elaine Low wrote about the demand for Hollywood to produce interactive stories yesterday out of the Upfronts — but that is just tip-of-the-iceberg stuff.)
Today, I explore:
-
How AI becomes a retention engine in gaming stories
-
Marvel vs. GTA: Why the value of videogame franchises is on path to dwarf movie franchises
-
How the creation of AI NPCs bypasses guilds and agents
-
Why studio and streamer efforts to create strong games have sputtered
-
How games’ AI innovations change the understanding of what story is
-
Economic and storytelling advantages of gaming compared to TV and film
-
The jaw-dropping number of people who play video games — and the staggering valuations of gaming companies vs. Hollywood studios
-
How AI could make games and their companies even more powerful
-
The companies building more and smarter tech to give NPCs more skills
发表回复