🕹️ AI goats

Happy Wednesday. Helldivers 2 has been a massive success for Arrowhead Games, and the team behind Deep Rock Galactic would love to collab. A trio of developers from Ghost Ship Games streamed Helldivers 2 over the weekend, letting Arrowhead know they come in peace and asking the studio to return their emails. Are live streams the new golf course Chili’s?

—Derek Neville, Tim Rhyne

MAIN QUEST: AI takes on the open world

Google’s DeepMind has made significant progress in the development of artificial intelligence capable of playing various open-world games. Dubbed the Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent (SIMA), this AI model has been trained on nine different games, including No Man’s Sky, Teardown, and Goat Simulator 3, solely by observing video feeds from the games. Unlike traditional AI training methods that require knowledge of game rules or APIs, SIMA learns directly from human demonstrations, mimicking human-like actions in gameplay.

SIMA is equipped to perform a diverse range of tasks across different games, totaling around 600 short tasks lasting approximately 10 seconds each. These tasks cover basic actions like navigation, object interaction, and menu-based commands. The AI's ability to generalize its learning from multiple games to perform adequately in unseen environments demonstrates promising advancements in AI generalization. However, SIMA's current capabilities are limited to relatively short-term tasks, lacking the complexity necessary for long-term planning or extensive problem-solving.

While this breakthrough in AI gaming has implications beyond the gaming industry, particularly in robotics and real-world applications, experts note that the current focus lies in enhancing AI perception and action in 3D environments. Ultimately, the goal is to develop more general AI systems capable of understanding and executing a wide range of tasks, both virtual and real-world, through natural-language prompts and human-like interactions. Despite its early-stage nature, this research signifies a significant step toward achieving more versatile and adaptable AI agents.

Step Back: A version of SIMA trained on eight of the nine games performed on average almost as well on the unseen game as a version trained on just that ninth game. This is a promising result as it shows SIMA’s ability to use its training in a new environment.

HUD

• Veterans of the Doom and Quake developer id Software have launched a new independent studio called emptyvessel. The Austin-based studio will focus on AAA games, with the first project being an immersive sci-fi-themed shooter.

• Payday developer Starbreeze is changing leadership, as the board of directors has removed Tobias Sjögren from his role as CEO after just 3 years. The move follows the disastrous release of Payday 3, whose launch was filled with bugs and technical issues, and whose current peak concurrent players is well under 1000.

• Stig Asmussen, who served as Game Director at Respawn for both Star Wars Jedi titles, has formed a new studio called Giant Skull. Asmussen, who also worked on the first 3 God of War games, will stay in his comfort zone, as the studio’s focus will be on producing AAA single-player games that are story-driven.

MAJOR W

• 🍄 Concept art from The Super Mario Bros. movie has made its way onto social media and features some fan-favorite characters that were not in the movie, including Daisy and Yoshi. Nintendo recently announced a new Mario movie was in the works, set to be released in 2026, so we could be seeing these characters on the big screen soon.

• 🎱 Discord will open its activities product to third-party developers on March 18th, offering an opportunity to build and monetize apps and games using their Embedded App SDK.

F IN THE CHAT

• 💢 EA released several old titles on Monday, including their remaining Command and Conquer titles as individual releases. All of these old titles crushed indie devs who had meticulously planned their release date to stay on Steam’s New and Trending list as long as possible. This included one of our favorite Indies of the month: Potions: A Curious Tale who put 9 years into making their game.

• 🤦 Palworld’s modder uses the data-mined unreleased Pals and adds them to the game. The problems: These are the ones previously reported that look more like Pokémon than other pals, opening more potential legal issues against the Nexus Mods website, and it disrupts Pocketpair’s plans on how to release the creatures later.

CAREER CORNER

• Technical Animation Director [Far Cry Project] - Ubisoft (Montreal, BC)

• Recruiting Coordinator - Epic Games (Bellevue, WA)

• Creative Director — Magnopus (Los Angeles, CA)

HIVE MIND

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