author: Bart Swiatek
Gabe Newell: Single Player Games Will be More Popular Than Multiplayer
Gabe Newell, the head of Valve Corporation, said in an interview that he believes that in ten years single-player games will be much more popular and profitable than multiplayer titles. All thanks to the development of AI.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- According to Gabe Newell, the single player games of the future will be more popular then multiplayer games;
- The cause of this is to be the development of artificial intelligence.
Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve Corporation, responsible for Steam and the hit FPS series Half-Life, was recently interviewed by the editors of Edge magazine (via Wccftech). The subject of the interview was single player games, which, according to the developer, will become much more popular in the future than titles designed for multiplayer. And all thanks to... AI development.
"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," said the head of Valve Corporation.
How will the development of artificial intelligence affect games? In the following fragment, Newell presents his vision of the game of the future.
"If you could build a single-player game that just never ended, where I could play 20 hours a week and it just keeps growing and getting richer, and I’d be having as much fun 400 hours into this experience as I was in the first 20 hours… I think that is a way more likely scenario looking forward five years than it would have been looking forward five years ago. That’s going to be a tectonic shift in the industry, with AI becoming way more useful, and it shifts the value-optimization inflection point between multiplayer and single-player games," we read.