October 17, 2025 • 23 mins
Jack Buser, Google Cloud's director of game industry solutions, breaks down tech giant’s far reaching plans for future of live service gaming. He also weighs in on how AI is poised to change everything for the gaming sector.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Pers Welcome to strictly business varieties, weekly podcast feature and
conversations about the business of media and entertainment. I'm senior
business writer, TV and Video Games Jennifer Moss as AI
fears run rampant in the entertainment industry. Google Cloud's Director
(00:25):
of Game Industry Solutions, Jackbuser, is at the forefront of
calling those concerns for the gaming sector by demystifying the
plans for the role of AI in game production. User,
who was a leader on the team that built up
Google's cloud gaming service Stadia, which shut down in January
twenty twenty three, is now overseeing developments in gameplay on
the Horizon and the evolution of live service games. Jack,
(00:48):
thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Hello, my pleasure. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'd just like to start at high level here with
what is your current role.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I lead games for Google Cloud. So if you're familiar
with Google Cloud, essentially we provide cloud services to a
variety of different industries. You can imagine financial services and
retail and healthcare, and games is one of our big industries.
So I've been doing that for a number of years now,
and we help game companies transform their business to meet
(01:19):
the needs.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Of today's players.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
If you think about the games industry ten fifteen years ago,
and I'm sure many people seeing this now remember games
from back then. You would go to retail, you'd buy
a game on optical disc, you'd take it home, and
you'd play it, and that was essentially the end of
the relationship between you and that game company, unless, of course,
you went back to retail and bought another game from
them in the future. In those days, the game's industry
(01:45):
is largely a consumer packaged goods industry or a CpG industry.
But today the industry is completely transformed and is largely
an industry of live services. So the most popular games
today are these giant, never ending online live services serving
millions of players, and they never stop. The idea is
(02:09):
to keep those players playing in that game, keep them retained,
and have that sort of long term relationship with the player.
And so in order to make that transformation, you need
an incredible amount of horsepower in the background to run
what are called game servers, which track what all the
players are doing in the game, and analytics stack so
that you understand your business, you understand your players, databases,
(02:33):
so they can store all the things your players are doing.
And then today, of course AI and I know we'll
be talking about AI to make sure that you're revolutionizing
your development platform, making sure that your game development is
as modern as possible, as well as providing entirely new
gameplay experiences. So all of these things fit inside the
context of what I do on a daily basis is
(02:53):
really just help these game companies transform to meet the
needs of today's business in today's players.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
You're in that role. Now, how did you start it out?
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Oh my gosh, Well, I started out playing video games
at age four when I got an Atari twenty six
hundred and a copy of Space Invaders for my grandmother,
and I never stopped. I spent my entire life playing
video games. It's always been a huge part of who
I am, and so when I graduated from college as
an engineer, it didn't take me long to find the
(03:21):
games industry. Now, back in these days, in the late nineties,
almost thirty years ago, when I got my start, the
idea of somebody actually becoming part of the games industry
was like science fiction almost.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I mean, some.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
People understood that you could do it, but largely as
a kid growing up, graduating from school, I didn't even
realize that was an option. But very luckily, you know,
luckily for me, I actually found my way to the
industry through a company, and I'm sure many of your
viewers will know this company, Dolby Laboratories, the same people
that bring surround sound into movies and TV shows and
those days were looking to provide that technology to games
(03:56):
because games were becoming, you know, high definition media, becoming
more and more high fidelity.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
More and more immersive.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
And so I spent my early careers career helping game
companies provide these like increasingly immersive experiences. From there, I
went to PlayStation spent nearly a decade at PlayStation running
many of their biggest online platforms. So I started out
operating a virtual world. If you remember those today we
call them Metaverse. Back then we called virtual world called
(04:23):
PlayStation Home. I ran PlayStation Plus, which was their premium subscription,
and even PlayStation Now, which was their game streaming subscription.
And it was a very very popular service that you know,
these services at least Plus and PlayStation Now to some extender.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Still continuing to this day.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
So I then joined Google about ten years ago and
was a founding member of an online platform called Stadia,
which allowed you to stream games from the cloud to
just about any connected devices. And this was an extension
of my experience with PlayStation Now, which was a very
sim service over at PlayStation and so I spent about
five years working on that platform. We built it from
(05:05):
the ground up. It was the adventure of a lifetime.
I remember showing up at Google. There's about ten of us,
and they wouldn't tell me what I was going to
work on before I joined Google. And I showed up
and they said.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
We're going to build a game platform.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I said, okay, well, where's everybody else? Six ten of
us here, But you know, a testament to Google, we
did it. We you know, started with just an idea
and a presentation and a spreadsheet and built it up
into a global platform released in countries all over the world.
So then about four or five years ago, I joined
Google Cloud. So I realized that, you know the future
(05:38):
of this industry was that of live services. AI was
really starting to gain momentum in the game's industry, especially
on like the business analytics player analytics side, and just
seems so exciting to me. So I just I couldn't
wait to join this new frontier and help these game
companies transform, and I've been doing it ever since.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
As we reached the end of twenty twenty five going
into twenty twenty six, what are some highlights for you
from the past year and what are you looking forward
to next year?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Oh my gosh, Well, I mean this will come as
no surprise to any of your listeners, but this has.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Been the year of AI.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
You know, obviously Google we were there at the very
forefront of AI, specifically AI and games. If you look
at a lot of the foundational research coming out of
Deep Mind, a lot of that stuff is related to games,
believe it or not. And so we've always been on
the forefront of AI for games now for many years.
But this was the year when it became real. Right,
so rewind two years ago sitting at the Game Developed
(06:30):
Developers Conference. It was a lot of vision. It was
a lot of like these are some early examples of
some proofs of concepts that we've seen at some of
our customers. These are some early examples where we think
the industry might be going. But this year it became concrete.
In fact, we just performed a survey with the Harris Pole.
You know, I probably heard of them before, a large
polling agency, and they came back with data that showed
(06:52):
that about ninety percent of game developers have now put
AI into production. That was not true a couple of
years ago. So this has been really a year of
watching all of this vision, all of this prediction that
we have from a couple of years ago actually become real.
It's been just tremendous to watch. You know, every so
often in the games industry you get this sort of
(07:15):
wave of technological breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
We're in the middle of one right now with AI.
But you know, we've seen this kind of thing before.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
You know, those of your listeners that have played games
for a long time will remember when games went three D,
when they went from cartridge to CD ROM, right you
had this huge transformation in the industry.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
You know.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
After CD ROM, games just looked and played differently. Development
tank teams looked and you know, developed differently, Like the
industry went through this radical shift in those days. We're
in the middle of one right now with AI. Now,
a lot of technology comes to the games industry and
I've been in it for nearly thirty years, so you know,
I've seen technology that hasn't quite made it in the industry,
(07:51):
but this was the year where AI, you know, really
tipped the scale and it has arrived. So it's been
it's been just an incredible year to be with you.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
What are some of those ways that you've seen so
far and that you are looking to expand upon. I
know people get very nervous about AAR for many reasons,
but in particular regenaive AI. It's concerns that it will
take away creative's jobs. And you and I have previously
spoken about different ways where one of the options is
actually less about that and more about making a game
ship faster like these other forms. So what is kind
(08:22):
of the argument here for and against? What is the
positive of AI here in speeding up the process?
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Yeah, to properly answer that question, I got to offer
a little bit of context. So you know, since I
joined the games industry in the late nineties, this industry
has seen year over year increase. Every single year, the
games industry got bigger and bigger, the releases got more
and more important, there were more and more players, and
this was NonStop for my entire career. Now, we would
(08:52):
hear about a time back in nineteen eighty three when
the games industry actually contracted in the United States, when
we had this transition from atariles to Nintendo consoles.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
But this is the stuff of legend, right.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
This is stuff that like people my age like, we
heard about it, We read about it academically. We understood
that it was a possibility, but it wasn't anything that
we had experienced in our career. Enter the pandemic. So
during the pandemic, you had everybody they stuck at home.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
What are you gonna do? Well, You're gonna play video.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Games, right, and so we saw this huge increase in
the number of players in spending all kinds of stuff.
But fortunately for the world, the pandemic largely ended and
people started to go outside again, people started to play
sports again, returned to work, etcetera, and so forth. And
so we saw actually a decline in the games industry
for the very first time in my professional career, and
it caught a lot of us off guard. We're like,
(09:39):
what is this.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
This is something completely new.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
And so you saw this contraction in the industry that
has resulted in quite a lot of layoffs in the
games industry. These are layoffs that are happening because the
business of games is challenged in very fundamental ways that
we haven't seen before. Let me give you a couple
statistics the games of these sort of online live services well.
(10:04):
As a result of that shift, over half of all
global playtime is in games that are over six years old.
Think about that for a minute. If you're creating a
new game, now, you're competing for less than half of
global playtime, like we've never seen that before in this industry.
To be, everybody hit the reset button in the minute
you took your optical disc home from retail. But nowadays
(10:25):
people are playing the same game year after year after year.
So if you're going to try to create something new,
you have to create something that has just a breakthrough experience,
because you're not just attracting a player to your game,
you're probably pulling them out of some other experience and
into a new experience. And we know from other forums
of media that's some serious friction, right. The second thing
that happened that resulted in quite a lot of tumult
(10:49):
in the games industry was the cost of game development.
It has increased ninety percent over the last few years
and has outpaced consumer spending by one point six acts.
The business model of games is just upside down right now.
So combined with this challenge that you have to try
to attract new players, you have this rising cost of
(11:09):
game development, and this is why we see so many
games getting canceled. We unfortunately see layoffs in the industry.
It's kind of a brutal time.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Now.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
We are very fortunate as an industry right now in
that there are bright spots, and one of the primary
bright spots is AI. And remember the development of AI
has been largely independent of the trends in the games industry.
We're just very, very fortunate that AI has arrived on
the scene at a time when the games industry really
needs it more than ever before. So to get to
(11:41):
your question, now that I've laid that context, there really
are three different areas that we see AI being used.
The first I mentioned, especially in the early days, we
saw AI being leveraged for game companies to understand their players,
to understand their business. These are things that we call
this analytics, right, so I need to understand what my
players are doing. I'm going to add ask questions I
want answers, and what they just what game companies started
(12:03):
to discover and this happened years ago. They started to
discover that AI could provide answers to questions they didn't
even think to ask. So now they were getting these
insights that they wouldn't even have come across with traditional
analytics to them. Because AI was built into platforms that
we have for analytics here at Google Cloud, it's just
sort of came along for the ride, and you got
game developers became very very savvy with how to use
(12:24):
AI in those type of workloads. So that's sort of
what I call like modernizing your business, if you will.
So that's everything from using AI from your business operations
to analytics, a lot of agentic workflow over there. The
second area is related to game development, and I mentioned
the cost of game development has just skyrocketed recently, and
(12:45):
so game companies are looking for ways to actually accelerate
their game development timeline so that they can get games
to market faster. It is not unusual to find video
games that take years and years and years and years
to develop. Some take a decade to develop, right. It's
wild how long it can take to develop a video game,
and oftentimes that's because in development, the time it takes
(13:06):
for you to get an idea to reality in a game.
That's what they call iteration time can be quite lengthy.
But with AI, you're able to actually get your ideas
into the game much more quickly.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
You're able to accelerate that iteration loop. Right, even if it's.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Just for concept generation, it is a These are huge
accelerants to game development pipelines. We've actually seen some game
studios accelerate their game development pipeline by ninety percent. Now,
not every development pipeline is going to accelerate that that much, right,
This particular developer basically looked at every single use case
in the game development pipeline and said, how can I
(13:43):
accelerate it with AI? But it gives you a good exam,
a good example of you know, how far you could
push it if you want to. So, as I mentioned,
the vast majority of game developers now have put AI
into production to help them get that iteration time down
and help them start to right size the business model games.
So this is actually a very good thing for gaming
companies and helps them become much more healthy than they
(14:05):
would be without those tools.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
And then there's the third area.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
This is the area that I find most exciting because
at the end of the day, I'm a game player,
even though I also do it professionally, and this is
where AI can be used to create entirely new gameplay experiences. Right, So,
we've actually seen AI land first in development and analytics,
but where it's ultimately going to go is this idea
(14:29):
of providing experiences for players that simply would have been
impossible before.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Probably the most.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Famous example of this is what we call a smart NPC.
And for those of you watching this that don't know
what an MPC is, it's just a fancy term we
have in the games industry for a computer controlled character.
It's a character in the game that the computer controls.
It's not another live player. And oftentimes, the way games
are designed today and in the past, you would go
up to one of these characters and they would say
(14:56):
something to you, and then you get to choose like
two or three four different things to say back, and
then in response to whichever one of those things.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
You pick, then they would talk to you.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And basically it was like a choose your own adventure
book sort of. When you were talking to a character
is what we call a dialogue tree, and games have
been made this way for decades and decades and decades
Like this idea of how you interact with a computer
control character hasn't changed much since even the early days
of video games. However, with AI, you can actually make
these conversations natural language. You can talk to a player
(15:28):
in the game, they stay within character and you're actually
having an ongoing dialogue with them as if it's another
human being, but it's not. It's a character in the game.
So that's the most famous example of these sort of
new player experiences. But there are so many other ways
to use AI while you're playing the game. A player
safety is a big one, so watching out for toxic
behavior and using AI to detect that stuff and stop
(15:49):
it before the players in the game see it. Another
good example is user generated content, so there's many games
where the players themselves actually create worlds.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Well.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
In order to do that, oftentimes they have to learn scripting,
computer coding, right, they have to learn these complex tools.
But with games leveraging AI, you can just tell the
game what you want it to make and it'll just
make it natural language. Imagine going into a shop in
a game and you see a bunch of items to
dress your avatar. What if you could just tell the shopkeeper, Hey,
I want a nice dress blue shirt for you know,
(16:22):
later on today, and the game just makes it for
you there on the fly, even though the developers hadn't
thought to pre make that. You could actually just make
it yourself as the player in the game using AI.
These are just early examples of what we're seeing. I
think if you were to fast forward, you know, if
we have our crystal Ball now and we fast forward
three to five years in the games industry, games are
(16:42):
going to be fundamentally different than what we've seen in
the past. As I mentioned, this is one of these
big transformational moments like the CD ROM right where games
are just gonna look and behave and play fundamentally differently
than they did in the past. Studio teams, the development teams,
they're just going to look differently than they did in
the past.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Now a lot of this is due to AI.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So yeah, it's a really really exciting time to be
in the games industry. AI has been a very very
healthy part of how game companies are preparing themselves for
the future, and I feel that we're just really really
fortunate that this technology has reached this level of maturity
at a time when the industry just really really needs it.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Where do you see Google Cloud positioning itself in the
games industry moving forward? Is there any chance that you
might revisit a situation like a stadia or are you
staying the course on where you are right now?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
So we've positioned ourself as what we call the ecosystem
for living games, and this is a term that we
coin that represents the fusion of these live service modalities
or techniques that we've been talking about with the rise
of AI.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
We believe that.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
These two things coming together actually form something that's greater
than the sum of the parts. We believe the introduction
of AI into what makes these live service games tick
actually will create an entirely new type of game we
haven't seen before, and these new types of games will
actually represent the future of this industry.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
It starts in development and it.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Goes all the way to the player experience. So we
felt that that was such a fundamental shift in this
industry that it deserved its own word, living games, right,
so we didn't have to explain it every time we
use the word. It's actually caught on quite a bit,
So it's this idea of having these games that can
(18:28):
go on and on for years and years and years,
and under the hood are underpinned by the best of Google,
and whether that be the infrastructure that powers your online services,
the keep your live service game up and running for
millions of players day in, day out, or whether that
be AI that helps provide those players new experiences they
haven't seen before, or helps you right size your business
(18:48):
so you can get your development pipeline accelerated so you
can get content out there more.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Quickly to your players.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
This is really how we've positioned ourselves because we strongly
believe this is the future of this industry. As I
mentioned earlier in our discussion, this has kind of been
a very validating year for us because we're seeing this
happen right now actually with our customers in production workloads,
and you know, as we're having this conversation, it's been
a great year for us to really validate that positioning
and understand yeah, this is yeah, we saw this coming and.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
We were right and making that choice and deciding where
to position yourself. Did certain of those come from learnings
from Stadia?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Oh, of course, you know, I was a founding member
of that team. We learned a lot about how game
development works, how to operate a game platform that actually,
you know, in the case of Stadia, actually acted as
a distribution platform for games not just from us, but
from other third parties. We learned a ton because it's
one thing to understand this stuff in the abstract, it's
(19:45):
a whole other thing to actually just do it and
make all the mistakes and learn from those mistakes. And
so that was an experience not just for me, but
I would say for our company that was invaluable and
it really positioned us to understand and where this industry
was going. You know, when we started that project, it
was you know, we're talking nearly ten years ago now, right,
(20:08):
so it's quite a long time ago, and we had
to build a platform and start thinking deeply about where.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
The industry was going.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And it was a lot of that sort of deep
thought that you see reflected in the offerings that we
have at Google Cloud today. It was obvious even back
then that the industry was going to go through a transformation,
that AI would be at the center of that transformation,
that live service technology would be at the center of
that transformation. And here we are ten years later, and
it has arrived.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Well, Jack, before we wrap up, I would like to
get some advice from you on what to play. What
are you playing right now?
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Oh my gosh, well, I got my hands on the
switch to nice Okay, a lot of Donkey Kong Bonanza.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Oh good ones.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Silk Song actually is an independent game that a lot
of people have been playing. I did not finish Hollow
Night many years ago, which is the original, so I
forced myself to play Hot right now, having a lot
of fun and doom dark ages. And then I also
play a lot of retro games. I'm a collector of
games and stuff, and they actually are making new games
(21:10):
for old Atari consoles these days. I picked up a
game called Tiger Helly for my Atari seventy eight hundred.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I was having fun with that last night.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
So yeah, I'm usually playing five or six games at
any given time. I try to play just about everything
I can.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
And what is coming up within the next room that
you're looking forward.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
To, Oh my gosh, Well, this is a little bit
sort of the culmination of my personal interests as well
as my professional interest. But there's a life simulator coming
out from a relatively small, albeit growing games company called
Clang Games and it's a life simulation called Seed and
at the center of Seed is AI. So imagine playing
(21:52):
a life simulator and we've all played some of these before,
but imagine everyone in the game is actually powered by
AI and you're able to like watch them behave like
real humans, right, like provide a proper simulation of what
a society actually is like and can do. So I'm
(22:12):
very close to this game because we've been helping that
game developer out quite a bit. I couldn't be more
excited for that to come out. Of course, there's a
number of games coming out a PlayStation for Switch. My
wish list is full, to say the least. I'll just
keep playing every night and try to keep up as
best as I can. The number one thing I tell
people is play because at the end of the day,
if you're not playing, it's very hard to understand.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
What's actually going on in the industry.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
And so oftentimes I'll get responses from folks, oh, I
don't play games, and I say, well, what do you
have on your phone and they're like, well, I'm playing this,
I'm playing that. I'm like, well, you are a player,
you are a game player. Play those games right. For
people that want to get involved in consoles or you know,
Triple A, they want more like that core game experience,
I say, get yourself a switch, get yourself a PlayStation.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Just do it right.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
You won't be sorry, because all of those things, at
the end of the day, are all about the player
and the experience that they have. And until you understand
the player by becoming one yourself, it's really really hard
to understand the rest of the stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Thank you so much for your time, Jack, of course,
thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us
for this week's episode of Variety Strictly Business. You can
find new episodes weekly on Apple Podcasts.
Pers Welcome to strictly business varieties, weekly podcast feature and
conversations about the business of media and entertainment. I'm senior
business writer, TV and Video Games Jennifer Moss as AI
fears run rampant in the entertainment industry. Google Cloud's Director
(00:25):
of Game Industry Solutions, Jackbuser, is at the forefront of
calling those concerns for the gaming sector by demystifying the
plans for the role of AI in game production. User,
who was a leader on the team that built up
Google's cloud gaming service Stadia, which shut down in January
twenty twenty three, is now overseeing developments in gameplay on
the Horizon and the evolution of live service games. Jack,
(00:48):
thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Hello, my pleasure. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'd just like to start at high level here with
what is your current role.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I lead games for Google Cloud. So if you're familiar
with Google Cloud, essentially we provide cloud services to a
variety of different industries. You can imagine financial services and
retail and healthcare, and games is one of our big industries.
So I've been doing that for a number of years now,
and we help game companies transform their business to meet
(01:19):
the needs.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Of today's players.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
If you think about the games industry ten fifteen years ago,
and I'm sure many people seeing this now remember games
from back then. You would go to retail, you'd buy
a game on optical disc, you'd take it home, and
you'd play it, and that was essentially the end of
the relationship between you and that game company, unless, of course,
you went back to retail and bought another game from
them in the future. In those days, the game's industry
(01:45):
is largely a consumer packaged goods industry or a CpG industry.
But today the industry is completely transformed and is largely
an industry of live services. So the most popular games
today are these giant, never ending online live services serving
millions of players, and they never stop. The idea is
(02:09):
to keep those players playing in that game, keep them retained,
and have that sort of long term relationship with the player.
And so in order to make that transformation, you need
an incredible amount of horsepower in the background to run
what are called game servers, which track what all the
players are doing in the game, and analytics stack so
that you understand your business, you understand your players, databases,
(02:33):
so they can store all the things your players are doing.
And then today, of course AI and I know we'll
be talking about AI to make sure that you're revolutionizing
your development platform, making sure that your game development is
as modern as possible, as well as providing entirely new
gameplay experiences. So all of these things fit inside the
context of what I do on a daily basis is
(02:53):
really just help these game companies transform to meet the
needs of today's business in today's players.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
You're in that role. Now, how did you start it out?
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Oh my gosh, Well, I started out playing video games
at age four when I got an Atari twenty six
hundred and a copy of Space Invaders for my grandmother,
and I never stopped. I spent my entire life playing
video games. It's always been a huge part of who
I am, and so when I graduated from college as
an engineer, it didn't take me long to find the
(03:21):
games industry. Now, back in these days, in the late nineties,
almost thirty years ago, when I got my start, the
idea of somebody actually becoming part of the games industry
was like science fiction almost.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I mean, some.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
People understood that you could do it, but largely as
a kid growing up, graduating from school, I didn't even
realize that was an option. But very luckily, you know,
luckily for me, I actually found my way to the
industry through a company, and I'm sure many of your
viewers will know this company, Dolby Laboratories, the same people
that bring surround sound into movies and TV shows and
those days were looking to provide that technology to games
(03:56):
because games were becoming, you know, high definition media, becoming
more and more high fidelity.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
More and more immersive.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
And so I spent my early careers career helping game
companies provide these like increasingly immersive experiences. From there, I
went to PlayStation spent nearly a decade at PlayStation running
many of their biggest online platforms. So I started out
operating a virtual world. If you remember those today we
call them Metaverse. Back then we called virtual world called
(04:23):
PlayStation Home. I ran PlayStation Plus, which was their premium subscription,
and even PlayStation Now, which was their game streaming subscription.
And it was a very very popular service that you know,
these services at least Plus and PlayStation Now to some extender.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Still continuing to this day.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
So I then joined Google about ten years ago and
was a founding member of an online platform called Stadia,
which allowed you to stream games from the cloud to
just about any connected devices. And this was an extension
of my experience with PlayStation Now, which was a very
sim service over at PlayStation and so I spent about
five years working on that platform. We built it from
(05:05):
the ground up. It was the adventure of a lifetime.
I remember showing up at Google. There's about ten of us,
and they wouldn't tell me what I was going to
work on before I joined Google. And I showed up
and they said.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
We're going to build a game platform.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I said, okay, well, where's everybody else? Six ten of
us here, But you know, a testament to Google, we
did it. We you know, started with just an idea
and a presentation and a spreadsheet and built it up
into a global platform released in countries all over the world.
So then about four or five years ago, I joined
Google Cloud. So I realized that, you know the future
(05:38):
of this industry was that of live services. AI was
really starting to gain momentum in the game's industry, especially
on like the business analytics player analytics side, and just
seems so exciting to me. So I just I couldn't
wait to join this new frontier and help these game
companies transform, and I've been doing it ever since.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
As we reached the end of twenty twenty five going
into twenty twenty six, what are some highlights for you
from the past year and what are you looking forward
to next year?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Oh my gosh, Well, I mean this will come as
no surprise to any of your listeners, but this has.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Been the year of AI.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
You know, obviously Google we were there at the very
forefront of AI, specifically AI and games. If you look
at a lot of the foundational research coming out of
Deep Mind, a lot of that stuff is related to games,
believe it or not. And so we've always been on
the forefront of AI for games now for many years.
But this was the year when it became real. Right,
so rewind two years ago sitting at the Game Developed
(06:30):
Developers Conference. It was a lot of vision. It was
a lot of like these are some early examples of
some proofs of concepts that we've seen at some of
our customers. These are some early examples where we think
the industry might be going. But this year it became concrete.
In fact, we just performed a survey with the Harris Pole.
You know, I probably heard of them before, a large
polling agency, and they came back with data that showed
(06:52):
that about ninety percent of game developers have now put
AI into production. That was not true a couple of
years ago. So this has been really a year of
watching all of this vision, all of this prediction that
we have from a couple of years ago actually become real.
It's been just tremendous to watch. You know, every so
often in the games industry you get this sort of
(07:15):
wave of technological breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
We're in the middle of one right now with AI.
But you know, we've seen this kind of thing before.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
You know, those of your listeners that have played games
for a long time will remember when games went three D,
when they went from cartridge to CD ROM, right you
had this huge transformation in the industry.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
You know.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
After CD ROM, games just looked and played differently. Development
tank teams looked and you know, developed differently, Like the
industry went through this radical shift in those days. We're
in the middle of one right now with AI. Now,
a lot of technology comes to the games industry and
I've been in it for nearly thirty years, so you know,
I've seen technology that hasn't quite made it in the industry,
(07:51):
but this was the year where AI, you know, really
tipped the scale and it has arrived. So it's been
it's been just an incredible year to be with you.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
What are some of those ways that you've seen so
far and that you are looking to expand upon. I
know people get very nervous about AAR for many reasons,
but in particular regenaive AI. It's concerns that it will
take away creative's jobs. And you and I have previously
spoken about different ways where one of the options is
actually less about that and more about making a game
ship faster like these other forms. So what is kind
(08:22):
of the argument here for and against? What is the
positive of AI here in speeding up the process?
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Yeah, to properly answer that question, I got to offer
a little bit of context. So you know, since I
joined the games industry in the late nineties, this industry
has seen year over year increase. Every single year, the
games industry got bigger and bigger, the releases got more
and more important, there were more and more players, and
this was NonStop for my entire career. Now, we would
(08:52):
hear about a time back in nineteen eighty three when
the games industry actually contracted in the United States, when
we had this transition from atariles to Nintendo consoles.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
But this is the stuff of legend, right.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
This is stuff that like people my age like, we
heard about it, We read about it academically. We understood
that it was a possibility, but it wasn't anything that
we had experienced in our career. Enter the pandemic. So
during the pandemic, you had everybody they stuck at home.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
What are you gonna do? Well, You're gonna play video.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Games, right, and so we saw this huge increase in
the number of players in spending all kinds of stuff.
But fortunately for the world, the pandemic largely ended and
people started to go outside again, people started to play
sports again, returned to work, etcetera, and so forth. And
so we saw actually a decline in the games industry
for the very first time in my professional career, and
it caught a lot of us off guard. We're like,
(09:39):
what is this.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
This is something completely new.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
And so you saw this contraction in the industry that
has resulted in quite a lot of layoffs in the
games industry. These are layoffs that are happening because the
business of games is challenged in very fundamental ways that
we haven't seen before. Let me give you a couple
statistics the games of these sort of online live services well.
(10:04):
As a result of that shift, over half of all
global playtime is in games that are over six years old.
Think about that for a minute. If you're creating a
new game, now, you're competing for less than half of
global playtime, like we've never seen that before in this industry.
To be, everybody hit the reset button in the minute
you took your optical disc home from retail. But nowadays
(10:25):
people are playing the same game year after year after year.
So if you're going to try to create something new,
you have to create something that has just a breakthrough experience,
because you're not just attracting a player to your game,
you're probably pulling them out of some other experience and
into a new experience. And we know from other forums
of media that's some serious friction, right. The second thing
that happened that resulted in quite a lot of tumult
(10:49):
in the games industry was the cost of game development.
It has increased ninety percent over the last few years
and has outpaced consumer spending by one point six acts.
The business model of games is just upside down right now.
So combined with this challenge that you have to try
to attract new players, you have this rising cost of
(11:09):
game development, and this is why we see so many
games getting canceled. We unfortunately see layoffs in the industry.
It's kind of a brutal time.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Now.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
We are very fortunate as an industry right now in
that there are bright spots, and one of the primary
bright spots is AI. And remember the development of AI
has been largely independent of the trends in the games industry.
We're just very, very fortunate that AI has arrived on
the scene at a time when the games industry really
needs it more than ever before. So to get to
(11:41):
your question, now that I've laid that context, there really
are three different areas that we see AI being used.
The first I mentioned, especially in the early days, we
saw AI being leveraged for game companies to understand their players,
to understand their business. These are things that we call
this analytics, right, so I need to understand what my
players are doing. I'm going to add ask questions I
want answers, and what they just what game companies started
(12:03):
to discover and this happened years ago. They started to
discover that AI could provide answers to questions they didn't
even think to ask. So now they were getting these
insights that they wouldn't even have come across with traditional
analytics to them. Because AI was built into platforms that
we have for analytics here at Google Cloud, it's just
sort of came along for the ride, and you got
game developers became very very savvy with how to use
(12:24):
AI in those type of workloads. So that's sort of
what I call like modernizing your business, if you will.
So that's everything from using AI from your business operations
to analytics, a lot of agentic workflow over there. The
second area is related to game development, and I mentioned
the cost of game development has just skyrocketed recently, and
(12:45):
so game companies are looking for ways to actually accelerate
their game development timeline so that they can get games
to market faster. It is not unusual to find video
games that take years and years and years and years
to develop. Some take a decade to develop, right. It's
wild how long it can take to develop a video game,
and oftentimes that's because in development, the time it takes
(13:06):
for you to get an idea to reality in a game.
That's what they call iteration time can be quite lengthy.
But with AI, you're able to actually get your ideas
into the game much more quickly.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
You're able to accelerate that iteration loop. Right, even if it's.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Just for concept generation, it is a These are huge
accelerants to game development pipelines. We've actually seen some game
studios accelerate their game development pipeline by ninety percent. Now,
not every development pipeline is going to accelerate that that much, right,
This particular developer basically looked at every single use case
in the game development pipeline and said, how can I
(13:43):
accelerate it with AI? But it gives you a good exam,
a good example of you know, how far you could
push it if you want to. So, as I mentioned,
the vast majority of game developers now have put AI
into production to help them get that iteration time down
and help them start to right size the business model games.
So this is actually a very good thing for gaming
companies and helps them become much more healthy than they
(14:05):
would be without those tools.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
And then there's the third area.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
This is the area that I find most exciting because
at the end of the day, I'm a game player,
even though I also do it professionally, and this is
where AI can be used to create entirely new gameplay experiences. Right, So,
we've actually seen AI land first in development and analytics,
but where it's ultimately going to go is this idea
(14:29):
of providing experiences for players that simply would have been
impossible before.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Probably the most.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Famous example of this is what we call a smart NPC.
And for those of you watching this that don't know
what an MPC is, it's just a fancy term we
have in the games industry for a computer controlled character.
It's a character in the game that the computer controls.
It's not another live player. And oftentimes, the way games
are designed today and in the past, you would go
up to one of these characters and they would say
(14:56):
something to you, and then you get to choose like
two or three four different things to say back, and
then in response to whichever one of those things.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
You pick, then they would talk to you.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And basically it was like a choose your own adventure
book sort of. When you were talking to a character
is what we call a dialogue tree, and games have
been made this way for decades and decades and decades
Like this idea of how you interact with a computer
control character hasn't changed much since even the early days
of video games. However, with AI, you can actually make
these conversations natural language. You can talk to a player
(15:28):
in the game, they stay within character and you're actually
having an ongoing dialogue with them as if it's another
human being, but it's not. It's a character in the game.
So that's the most famous example of these sort of
new player experiences. But there are so many other ways
to use AI while you're playing the game. A player
safety is a big one, so watching out for toxic
behavior and using AI to detect that stuff and stop
(15:49):
it before the players in the game see it. Another
good example is user generated content, so there's many games
where the players themselves actually create worlds.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Well.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
In order to do that, oftentimes they have to learn scripting,
computer coding, right, they have to learn these complex tools.
But with games leveraging AI, you can just tell the
game what you want it to make and it'll just
make it natural language. Imagine going into a shop in
a game and you see a bunch of items to
dress your avatar. What if you could just tell the shopkeeper, Hey,
I want a nice dress blue shirt for you know,
(16:22):
later on today, and the game just makes it for
you there on the fly, even though the developers hadn't
thought to pre make that. You could actually just make
it yourself as the player in the game using AI.
These are just early examples of what we're seeing. I
think if you were to fast forward, you know, if
we have our crystal Ball now and we fast forward
three to five years in the games industry, games are
(16:42):
going to be fundamentally different than what we've seen in
the past. As I mentioned, this is one of these
big transformational moments like the CD ROM right where games
are just gonna look and behave and play fundamentally differently
than they did in the past. Studio teams, the development teams,
they're just going to look differently than they did in
the past.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Now a lot of this is due to AI.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So yeah, it's a really really exciting time to be
in the games industry. AI has been a very very
healthy part of how game companies are preparing themselves for
the future, and I feel that we're just really really
fortunate that this technology has reached this level of maturity
at a time when the industry just really really needs it.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Where do you see Google Cloud positioning itself in the
games industry moving forward? Is there any chance that you
might revisit a situation like a stadia or are you
staying the course on where you are right now?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
So we've positioned ourself as what we call the ecosystem
for living games, and this is a term that we
coin that represents the fusion of these live service modalities
or techniques that we've been talking about with the rise
of AI.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
We believe that.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
These two things coming together actually form something that's greater
than the sum of the parts. We believe the introduction
of AI into what makes these live service games tick
actually will create an entirely new type of game we
haven't seen before, and these new types of games will
actually represent the future of this industry.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
It starts in development and it.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Goes all the way to the player experience. So we
felt that that was such a fundamental shift in this
industry that it deserved its own word, living games, right,
so we didn't have to explain it every time we
use the word. It's actually caught on quite a bit,
So it's this idea of having these games that can
(18:28):
go on and on for years and years and years,
and under the hood are underpinned by the best of Google,
and whether that be the infrastructure that powers your online services,
the keep your live service game up and running for
millions of players day in, day out, or whether that
be AI that helps provide those players new experiences they
haven't seen before, or helps you right size your business
(18:48):
so you can get your development pipeline accelerated so you
can get content out there more.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Quickly to your players.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
This is really how we've positioned ourselves because we strongly
believe this is the future of this industry. As I
mentioned earlier in our discussion, this has kind of been
a very validating year for us because we're seeing this
happen right now actually with our customers in production workloads,
and you know, as we're having this conversation, it's been
a great year for us to really validate that positioning
and understand yeah, this is yeah, we saw this coming and.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
We were right and making that choice and deciding where
to position yourself. Did certain of those come from learnings
from Stadia?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Oh, of course, you know, I was a founding member
of that team. We learned a lot about how game
development works, how to operate a game platform that actually,
you know, in the case of Stadia, actually acted as
a distribution platform for games not just from us, but
from other third parties. We learned a ton because it's
one thing to understand this stuff in the abstract, it's
(19:45):
a whole other thing to actually just do it and
make all the mistakes and learn from those mistakes. And
so that was an experience not just for me, but
I would say for our company that was invaluable and
it really positioned us to understand and where this industry
was going. You know, when we started that project, it
was you know, we're talking nearly ten years ago now, right,
(20:08):
so it's quite a long time ago, and we had
to build a platform and start thinking deeply about where.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
The industry was going.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
And it was a lot of that sort of deep
thought that you see reflected in the offerings that we
have at Google Cloud today. It was obvious even back
then that the industry was going to go through a transformation,
that AI would be at the center of that transformation,
that live service technology would be at the center of
that transformation. And here we are ten years later, and
it has arrived.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Well, Jack, before we wrap up, I would like to
get some advice from you on what to play. What
are you playing right now?
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Oh my gosh, well, I got my hands on the
switch to nice Okay, a lot of Donkey Kong Bonanza.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Oh good ones.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Silk Song actually is an independent game that a lot
of people have been playing. I did not finish Hollow
Night many years ago, which is the original, so I
forced myself to play Hot right now, having a lot
of fun and doom dark ages. And then I also
play a lot of retro games. I'm a collector of
games and stuff, and they actually are making new games
(21:10):
for old Atari consoles these days. I picked up a
game called Tiger Helly for my Atari seventy eight hundred.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I was having fun with that last night.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
So yeah, I'm usually playing five or six games at
any given time. I try to play just about everything
I can.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
And what is coming up within the next room that
you're looking forward.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
To, Oh my gosh, Well, this is a little bit
sort of the culmination of my personal interests as well
as my professional interest. But there's a life simulator coming
out from a relatively small, albeit growing games company called
Clang Games and it's a life simulation called Seed and
at the center of Seed is AI. So imagine playing
(21:52):
a life simulator and we've all played some of these before,
but imagine everyone in the game is actually powered by
AI and you're able to like watch them behave like
real humans, right, like provide a proper simulation of what
a society actually is like and can do. So I'm
(22:12):
very close to this game because we've been helping that
game developer out quite a bit. I couldn't be more
excited for that to come out. Of course, there's a
number of games coming out a PlayStation for Switch. My
wish list is full, to say the least. I'll just
keep playing every night and try to keep up as
best as I can. The number one thing I tell
people is play because at the end of the day,
if you're not playing, it's very hard to understand.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
What's actually going on in the industry.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
And so oftentimes I'll get responses from folks, oh, I
don't play games, and I say, well, what do you
have on your phone and they're like, well, I'm playing this,
I'm playing that. I'm like, well, you are a player,
you are a game player. Play those games right. For
people that want to get involved in consoles or you know,
Triple A, they want more like that core game experience,
I say, get yourself a switch, get yourself a PlayStation.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Just do it right.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
You won't be sorry, because all of those things, at
the end of the day, are all about the player
and the experience that they have. And until you understand
the player by becoming one yourself, it's really really hard
to understand the rest of the stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Thank you so much for your time, Jack, of course,
thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us
for this week's episode of Variety Strictly Business. You can
find new episodes weekly on Apple Podcasts.
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