For gamers, Gabe Newell is just as iconic as the video games he helped bring out into the market. Valve has been around for years and it’s over the years that we’ve seen some incredible IPs release that has gained attention from gamers all over the world. However, as of late, the development studio has mainly focused around multiplayer video game titles which is the trend right now. However, Gabe Newell doesn’t feel that trend will last too much longer as he personally feels a big resurgence is about to happen for single player video game titles.
Recently, Valve took a step back into the single player video game development with the likes of Half-Life: Alyx. This VR title was a jump back into the Half-Life universe and while it has catered attention back to the single player video game franchise, there are bound to be plenty of more developers working on single player titles that will be more popular than the multiplayer hits available today. This is all due to the advancements being made for artificial intelligence.
Gabe Newell spoke with EDGE magazine where he brought up AI and how the advancements right now are looking great. In his opinion, it looks like in five years we could have AI that is capable of mimicking a human’s intelligence. This will, of course, help the video game industry as well with AI being added into the game to help the narrative not only feel more realistic and entertaining but likely a bit more lengthy.
We’re starting to head towards a period where that’s going to reverse again, driven by what’s happening with AI. Right now, the OpenAI bots are better than 99-point-some percent of all the Dota players in the world. That’s actually a surprisingly narrow challenge for artificial intelligence. Beating humans is easier than entertaining humans. But over the next several years – and if you ask me, my little spreadsheet calculation is it’s about nine years – we’ll have artificial general intelligence that can do anything a smart person can do. It’ll probably initially take something like a billion dollars to build one of these silicon humans, but then they’ll just keep getting cheaper, and it’ll get cheaper really quickly, and eventually reach the point where you have ten or a hundred people living in your computer all the time. And harnessing that will mean single player games get a lot more interesting.
It would certainly be an interesting feat to see AI make a big jump in the video game industry. We certainly have seen our share of poorly implemented AI in video games as well which could make either for some hilarious moments in video game campaigns or incredibly frustrating.