Elon Musk says he will start an xAI games studio to “make games great again”

Elon Musk has recently become embroiled in the gaming culture war, lamenting what he and others consider to be “woke” parts of the market. Now Elon, a gamer himself, says he’s starting his own AI-based games studio, xAI, to “make games great again,” in a quote tweet from a follower who says developers and games journalists have been “ideologically trapped.” .

Of course, this raises many questions about the viability of such a project, even given Musk’s vast resources. Despite his successes, many of his predictions and ideas do not quite come true. For example, I’m reminded of his earlier claim that everyone would soon be using X as a banking app.

Exactly what an “AI games studio” consists of is unclear, as AI is certainly on the rise in many areas, but its widespread use in gaming has been rejected, and even references to it in game art or storytelling have been strongly rejected by both players as well as the developers themselves. A central question would also be how many game developers would switch to an AI-centered game studio run by Elon.

The central premise here is strange, as he complains that too many game studios are owned by large corporations. Musk himself is the richest man in the world. xAI has raised $6 billion in Series B funding and could be valued at $40 billion. For comparison, Electronic Arts’ market capitalization is $43 billion. By definition, an xAI game studio would be run by… a huge corporation.

What kind of game would Elon’s studio make? His favorites have been Cyberpunk 2077 and most recently Diablo 4, where his error-free times in that game’s high-end content are among the best in the world. These are both hugely expensive AAA games that took years to make and have gone through their own trials and tribulations. Creating something of this magnitude for an AI games studio backed by someone with no experience developing games would be… challenging.

Who knows what a “non-woke, non-ideologically grasped” game might look like, who knows what standards there are. This year, games like Stellar Blade, The First Descendant and Black Myth: Wukong are considered to meet these criteria, although these were predominantly played by players with different ideological positions or a lack thereof.

It is unclear whether this actually achieves anything. It’s hard to tell when Elon is just saying things or whether one of his random musings (“How much is Twitter?”) leads to an earth-shattering development. In this case, creating an AI-driven games studio that comes together and produces something of value seems like a particularly tall order.

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