While you may not believe he has time for this, between slashing a large percentage of government spending (and agencies, and jobs) and tweeting a hundred times a day, Elon Musk has once again circled back around to his idea about making an AI-based game studio.
Reminded by a few, let’s say, Musk superfans on Twitter, Musk confirmed that he is still making an xAI game studio, saying “It’s got to be done. Make video games great again!” echoing an adapted Trump phrase as he’s done before.
There’s a lot to unpack here about his motivations and how exactly this would work. All of this spawned from the idea that modern video games are too “woke,” in whatever classification that means, be it women or minority characters leading games, progressive messaging or even how attractive the women are in the games, a frequent complaint among anti-woke messengers.
Elon Musk is a gamer, to some extent, previously extolling the virtues of games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring, but things have recently taken a strange turn when Musk claimed to be both a world-ranked Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 player. This led to an investigation by Path of Exile creators and players to prove Musk was “boosting” by turning his account to skilled players to get high level characters and gear, something he eventually admitted to in published DMs. So, a common reaction to this game studio news is the joke(?) that Musk doesn’t play games, so how could he make them?
As for an AI game studio, the topic of AI has been hotly debated in the video game industry, with some AI processes that don’t involve GenAI being deemed useful enough to be utilized with minimal controversy, but that is not true for GenAI being used in artwork, cinematics, script writing, and so on with most devs and studios. If Musk’s idea is to make an entire game based around xAI tech, that raises a lot of questions about how that would work and what it would produce.
There’s an idea among his fans that since Musk has unlimited resources, of course he could make a good video game. But there is a lot of industry pushback to Musk getting involved, so it’s unclear what quality of team he could attract (I guess he could pay quadruple the industry average or something). However, we’ve also seen giants like Google attempt to make its own games and fail spectacularly even with talented teams, so just having a lot of money is no indication of success, as that’s only part of the way things work. And any game that his studio would produce, no doubt some sort of big blockbuster idea (an ARPG, perhaps), that would be years and years away given development times and again, there’s no guarantee of success just because Musk throws money at it, and the AI idea seems like even more of a risk.
He says he’s doing it, and while he’s certainly bailed on some ideas in the past, recent ones (buying Twitter, starting DOGE) have indeed panned out, however unlikely they sounded. So yes, this may really happen.
