When will AI-rendered video games have 1 million paid users?
💎
Premium
12
Ṁ4491
2031
54%
2030
46%
2029
40%
2028
40%
2027
39%
2026
28%
2025

Definition of "AI-rendered video game"

To qualify, a video game must have its graphics rendered by AI in real time. An AI should be rendering graphics at least 50% of the time in an average playthrough. When the AI is rendering graphics, it should generate at least one image per second. The images should generally depend on the very recent actions of the player - for instance, the player character immediately starts moving left when you press the left button.

It's okay if certain parts of the game are not AI-rendered, like UI elements. However, it doesn't count if the AI is just starting with e.g. a 3D mesh rendering and postprocessing it to make it prettier or fill in frames. It has to generate the video more-or-less from scratch. Specifically, I'd look for a system that generates visual elements like characters and scenery during gameplay and simulates their motion, doing this entirely through ML rather than programmatically, similar to Oasis. It's okay if the AI starts with a premade textual or visual prompt, but has to be able to generate and animate new visual elements.

Definition of "1 million paid users"

This market resolves based on 1 million people having paid a subscription or one-time payment for an AI-rendered video game. The number of paying users at any one time is not important - rather, I will be using the number of distinct users who have ever paid for a game. If it's unclear how many paid users a game has, I will lean towards waiting to resolve the market until more information is available. I might try to contact the company selling the game to ask them whether the market should be resolved. It may eventually be obvious that at least 1 million people have paid for an AI-rendered game, even if there are no official numbers from the company; in this case, I will resolve the market.

There may be multiple AI-rendered video games. If this is the case, I will use the number of users who have paid for any of these games, while trying not to double-count any users who have paid for multiple games. This may require some common-sense judgement of how many duplicate users there are, but I will only resolve the market if the answer is pretty obvious.

Other details

A year resolves to YES if at any time during that year, or any time before that year, there are 1 million total paid users of AI-rendered video games. If the year ends before this happens, it resolves to NO.

I will not bet in this market.

Get
Ṁ1,000
and
S3.00
Sort by:

The answer is never.

Not because it cannot be done, but because it is a stupid idea.

@DavidBolin Many stupid ideas have millions of paid users.

@ProjectVictory IMO this seems unnecessarily wasteful from a technical perspective. What's the benefit over having AI generate the 3D object on a as-needed basis and coordinate them but have everything rendered by a regular engine?

@Enlil This doesn't generalize very well. As just one example, suppose you generate a 3D asset of a building. If the player tries to destroy the building with a rocket launcher, you'll near-instantly have to load in new 3D assets for a destroyed version of that building, as well as the shrapnel flying through the air, the explosion itself, etc. With a full-AI solution, the AI can just render all that stuff, with no more technical complication than if the player took a few steps to the left to view the building from a different angle.

Also, any assumptions you build into the code will be there forever - if you code up an Animal Crossing clone where the town layout and each new villager is AI-generated, the gameplay will still only be as complex as the code you wrote. But if AI creates the whole game on-the-fly, the player can decide that they want to do a cooking minigame, and the AI will just make something up (as long as the model was trained on enough content from games like that).

You could try to come up with a system for the AI to write the game's code on-the-fly as well, but that system will still be limited by your assumptions, the player will have to wait for code to be written every time the AI adds a new mechanic, and in all likelihood the result will be bad-looking and glitchy absent thorough playtesting and adjustments. Granted, pure-AI video games will also have all kinds of glitches in the form of hallucinations, but AI can at least attempt pretty much anything the player could ask for.

This is basically just the Bitter Lesson: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Probably a better response to this objection is that AI-rendered games already exist - there was a previous version of this market that already resolved because of http://oasis.decart.ai. The only difference is that Oasis has 1 million free users instead of paid users

© Manifold Markets, Inc.Terms + Mana-only TermsPrivacyRules