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Comprehensive Report

8min read

Will AI make game developers unemployed? Unity has a different view

Jingyu 2024/07/31

Summary

While deepening its presence in the gaming industry, Unity's efforts in the physical industry are beginning to bear fruit.

It is said that at this year's ChinaJoy conference, China's "Spring Festival of Games", the audience must first participate in a small survey before entering the venue: choose yes or no on the question "Will AI destroy humanity?"

It has to be said that game fans are all too familiar with this issue. After all, in many doomsday games they have played, machines or robots representing AI have replaced humans and become the masters of the earth.

Even beyond games, AI has replaced manual labor, allowing large companies to reduce costs and increase efficiency at a much faster rate. Back to the game industry itself, cloud vendors, AI big model companies, and even infrastructure companies such as game engines are also integrating AI and big model technology into their products, making game production easier.

AI seems to have the potential to bring new changes to gaming products valued at hundreds of billions of dollars?

Before ChinaJoy opened, the game engine giant Unity held its 2024 Global Developers Conference in Shanghai. At the conference, Unity China CEO Zhang Junbo was interviewed by Geek Park and talked about the impact of AI on the game industry and Unity's goal of "overflowing" into more physical industries.

Zhang Junbo believes that if AI technology can really produce games at the current level, large game companies may indeed face huge changes, game teams will become smaller, and the threshold for realizing truly good ideas will be lowered. However, if the revenue scale of the game market cannot grow accordingly, the game industry will face a "new balance."

Outside of games, Unity's active attempts in automotive smart cockpits and industrial digital twins have allowed people to see the new growth curve and potential of this game engine company.

The following is the transcript of the live interview, edited by Geek Park.

Unity China CEO Zhang Junbo delivered a keynote speech at the Unity Global Developers Conference | Unity

AI may take away coders' jobs, but it's good for game creators

Geek Park：Now, although Unity has launched Sentis and Google Cloud also says that it has AI to help game developers, it cannot currently completely replace a lot of productivity to save game teams time. Do you think that in 3-5 years, is it possible that AI will have a certain impact on game production organization?

For example, through AI, what a team of 1,000 people used to do in a game company can now be done by just 30 people in the future. Will this happen in the future when giant game teams become countless small studios?

Zhang Junbo: Yes. If AI capabilities become better, and if fewer people are needed to produce games of the same type and quality, there will be two problems. One is that there will be fewer people working in the industry, and the other is whether we can produce more games, so that everyone can have more choices. Not everyone can play the same game. If there are more good games, everyone's creativity will be released.

In the past, if you wanted to make a game, you needed 1,000 people, 2 billion yuan to set up a project, and very few people could get 2 billion yuan. Now, if you only need 20 million yuan, you can make it and it can be released. Therefore, AI capabilities can make everyone's creativity more possible and realize it at a lower cost, and players can play more. AI will create more creative people. In the past, the ratio of creative people to programmers was higher, and the ratio to artists was probably lower, because you need many people to make an effective idea, but now creative people have more time to use their skills.

In the past, a company had five planners and 30 to 50 programmers for one game, and these five planners could only listen to one person, who had the final say. In the future, I will start my own company and do what I want.

The game can achieve this level now because 1,000 people have only a 2 billion budget. That’s why this effect was created. But is this the end-game effect? ​​Maybe I’ll invest another 2 billion, and the result will be even more different. I’ll be a simulated earth, and I may earn more. In general, this is a cost-effectiveness, that is, if AI improves production efficiency, it will increase the output per unit of investment, and everyone can play more good games.

In the entire game market, everyone is willing to spend money, and many gamers can only charge 68 yuan a month. So no matter how many games you have, I only have one 68. The entire market exists here, and there will be another balance in the end. Before, 68 could only be the top 10 games, and everyone controlled 80% of 68. Will there be 1,000 games in the future, and they will be evenly distributed here, eating up 80%, and everyone will have a better chance to earn more. AI can improve production efficiency, which is good for the game industry. Programmers' jobs may be taken away, but creators' jobs will not be taken away.

Geek Park: CoPilot on Github can help people write code, which is equivalent to one person being able to generate a small game. For WeChat small games, its coding ability is almost OK, which is equivalent to one person, as long as he is creative enough, he can easily make a small game like Sheep Catch a Sheep.

Zhang Junbo: Yes. The cycle is faster. In the past, it was too expensive to realize ideas, but now the cost of realizing ideas is lower.

Wherever there is a screen, we will go there

Geek Park：Today we talked about non-games and revealed some information. The biggest highlight is in the automotive industry. Unity has accounted for 85% of the smart cockpit industry. But for a To B industry with a long investment cycle, why does Unity invest so much in this direction?

Zhang Junbo: We have a long-term vision for the automotive industry. Because Unity is ultimately a screen, we will render content wherever there is a screen. Now car companies have screens all over their cars, and these screens need to render content, and 3D interactive content is a very natural thing. So this is how we look at the automotive industry, and this is the future.

It is still in the initial stage. So the application of smart cockpit, such as vehicle control, ADAS, and map, is basically a must-have in the car. Map is still a bit advanced, but ADAS is very basic. Using 3D to make you feel better and look better is just the beginning. Through these, we have delivered 3D technology to the car. The screens in the car will eventually free people from driving. They will have more time to consume more content, which can be games or various experiences. The screen in the car is large, the sound is good, and the experience is good, which is much better than playing mobile games.

So I think that in the future, HMI (human-machine interaction) is the first step, and the OEMs are responsible for it. So we have to talk to the OEMs. This is a different business model from the traditional game industry. There is another way to cooperate with the OEMs. Our first step is to get in. In many cases, it is because the industry has started on its own. Then sometimes we take the initiative to PD some OEMs, to persuade them, to do POC for them, and to convince them to do it.

But more companies know that they need to use 3D. The ecosystem, Android, 8155, 8295 (chips) in cars are closer to mobile terminals. So if they want to make 3D content, they will default to or first choose Unity, because Unity is easy to use and powerful. The technical staff in their company, or two people who have switched from the game industry, can start.

Traditional industrial software for cars is only used by a few people, and only a few people use it for car-mounted software, which increases the cost. With Unity, the cost of trial and error is low, and people can use it immediately. So we see that why our acceptance is very high and the coverage rate is very high, many reasons are still due to the value of the engine itself and its ecosystem.

Unity's market share in the smart cockpit market has reached 85% | Unity

The scale is not large at present, but if you arrange it globally, there are 70-80 million cars in the world each year, and car companies have their own models. So if we can achieve a market share like mobile games, it is actually still very large, because now it is not only electric cars that have smart cockpits, but also some gasoline cars. The Mercedes-Benz E series mentioned by Daimler today is a gasoline car. Of course, you can't expect to play games on gasoline cars, because the battery will be consumed in a short time. Only electric cars can play games, and the smart cockpit still uses 3D technology.

So the market is quite big. And the smart cockpit will also be used to develop in-car apps, mobile apps, and various high-value products that will be covered on future cars. So there may be car configurators, and this series of derivatives will also include car user manuals. So we think that cars are something that is worth doing, and they are not necessarily smaller than mobile phones.

Although the stock of cars is only 80 million per year, if people replace a car every ten years, the stock in China will be several hundred million per year, and the number of cars is increasing. If we can find a third-party content to put on the car, we can make profits from it. So this market is not smaller than that of mobile phones.

Geek Park: This means that Unity’s plan for the automotive sector is not 3-5 years, but will take longer.

Zhang Junbo: The screens in the car will be more than the screens at home and on mobile phones combined.

Geek Park：Unity also mentioned some digital twin projects in industry and architecture. What does Unity want to achieve? Or is it because the previous BIM industrial software was too complicated?

Zhang Junbo: It doesn’t necessarily mean that it is difficult to use, but that its uses are somewhat different. Now, when making digital twins, many times the goal is not to use it for viewing, but for operation and maintenance. For a factory or a building, the equipment and CAD data in it come from a variety of sources, because it has to implement a logic on it. In a production line or a factory building, the structure is made according to BIM, the pipeline may be made by another software, and the robot, production line, and assembly line are made by another provider. You have to piece the machines together for a delivery.

Machine B takes it from here to there, and then lifts it up there. This may be done by two different things. The software it transmits is CAD software, which has its own simulation capabilities, but it simulates the capabilities of that single device very accurately. But if you want to put this bottle from here to there, can the robot arm there pick it up? This really requires simulation. Although the logic is not complicated, you have to string it together.

So the advantage of Unity is that I can string things together, from different industrial software and CAD software, I put it in a visible place to string it together, and I can also put this screen down. It is actually a rope here, with a sensor. I can put the content of this sensor. At this time, I have to program. I have a business logic and a state transition. I have to program. Unity has a script that is very suitable for these business logic conversions. So this is what is used to make digital twins.

This is what we think will happen in the future. Of course, we have gotten rid of the need to just look. How will factories be operated and maintained? In the future, some digital twins of factories may have a central control, or multiple central control rooms. But the central control room will see a bird's-eye view of the entire factory area. If everything is green, there is nothing wrong, because everyone can monitor where something went wrong or an alarm went off. If I have an alarm from a bird's-eye view, a 3D product will pop up very intuitively. Traditionally, one would say the fifth aisle of the seventh workshop, and where it is, but if you have a bird's-eye view, you will know it right away.

After knowing this, you have an inspector or a robot to check what is going on there. The robot wears glasses, and when it goes there, the local information it sees on the Pad is linked to the information in the central control. So we see a 3D twin system that allows everyone to see things through a unified system.

If it is patrolling in the city, the screen that the police see in the police car should be the same as the one seen in the command center, but each person has a different perspective, and then everyone can collaborate through 3D. This is what we see in the future industry, which may be industry or construction, and its twin visualization has this application scenario.

Geek Park：Do you think Unity Engine has achieved our initial expectations in non-game business?

Zhang Junbo: We have achieved some results, but I always feel that we are slower than expected. Many things sound good, but there are various challenges in implementation. We believe that we are still moving steadily in the right direction, especially in the Unity Engine. We have also experienced the Metaverse bubble from 2022 to now. When the Metaverse came about, everyone talked a lot, but in the end many things did not come to fruition.

The current application scenarios we see, 3D, have not been reduced. Instead, they are just a swarm of people in the past. Everyone is eager to grab the Metaverse City in various places. Many have been built, and everything has to rely on the Metaverse, creating some very virtual things that have not happened.

Under the previous assumptions, we may have set some unrealistic goals, but now we see that we can actually reduce costs and increase efficiency, and help you with generation and operation and maintenance. Everyone is investing real money steadily there, which is also very consistent with the R&D route and technical route of our Unity Engine.

Game Engine Unity Unity Engine Game Production Smart Cockpit