Xbox CFO "excited" by AI believes it can handle localization, scripting, and more: "AI can take care of all that"

29.11.2023 - 17:15 / gamesradar.com / Hideo Kojima / Tim Stuart / Ai

Xbox's chief financial offer has said he's "excited" about the possibilities of AI in game development.

As first reported by TechRaptor, Xbox CFO Tim Stuart spoke at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit earlier this week and addressed the use of AI in game development. "On the developer side, you think about the millions and millions of dollars in a game spent on localization, script, how you think about players moving from point A to point B and you have non-player characters have dialogue.

"AI can take care of all that," Stuart stated at the event. "You now say, 'I need the player to get from A to B,' and instead of having to write thousands of lines of scripting or code, you just have the AI get you from A to B—things like localization and putting things in new languages.

"When we think about game testing, a million AI bots can run through a level of Minecraft and find where players get stuck, where they spend money, how they think about the level. So, this is - pun intended - game-changing for the developer," the Xbox CFO concluded.

Stuart also believes AI can open the door for more people to become developers. If there are 100,000 game developers around the world right now, the CFO said, AI can generate code and art assets, opening the path for effectively anyone to become one. Stuart said this can take the number of game developers from 100,000 to north of one million.

Right now, there haven't been many noticeable game developer reactions to Stuart's comments. You only need to look back over the last year, however, to see a litany of examples of high-profile game developers pushing back against AI. Earlier this year, for example, Hideo Kojima said humans should be above AI, and shouldn't replace humans as the creators of art.

Over on ResetEra, players themselves aren't best pleased with Stuart's position. "Using AI to localize a game is all you need to know how serious MS thinks of international audiences, which is zero," one player writes, pointing to how human beings are essential for capturing the language intricacies across localization.

"Ah yes, replace writers and translators with a machine. I'm sure the results will be good," adds another comment. "I feel like these examples are exclusively targeting people who don't know how games are actually made," writes another commenter. "They might make sense to someone whose primary response to you telling them you're a game developer is 'Oh so you play games all day?' But nobody else really."

You can read up on our guide to the all the upcoming Xbox Series X games to see what Xbox has lined up for its immediate future.