I suspect the main impact will be on cutscenes, trailers for games in very early development, etc rather than on the gameplay itself. It's all well and good creating videos in this way, but creating environments that both look good and run well enough to keep a mostly consistent 60fps framerate are very different things, and I don't think Sora AI has even remotely been optimised for the latter.
It can't. Not with realistic hardware. Have they shared how much computing power it takes to generate even a 1min video with SORA?
Regardless, I can't see it generating instant frames in response to player input like that. It's just not effective. We have way better ways to do it already.
If SORA can be used to design 3D worlds that later get used in traditional game engines, that might accelerate development.
I think you could do style transfer on a framebuffer before pushing it out and that might be quite interesting, especially if you can have it look correct over time.
The larger possibility is that video has shown the AI has some capacity to preserve structure overtime. The objects in the video maintain their dimensions and appearance as we would expect. This suggests there's some representation of objects or an equivalent to it. If that could be controlled more then potentially you have the ability to hold something like a game in working memory and iterate on parts of it.
I'm still waiting for plain old GPT to impact the gaming industry. There's fertile ground for a lot of new things with the tech. One of the cooler things I saw was a mod that gave Skyrim characters some personality. But so far even the text stuff has been below expectations. DALL-E and Midjourney have the potential to churn out game assets, but we've seen very few hits done this way as well.
I'm confident that rendering in-engine, in realtime, will always be less costly than calling a remote API. You also get the benefit of precise control over scene and content, rather than the generic results of an LLM.
It's not as if the high end of modern generations aren't already capable of photorealism - or has everyone already forgotten the GTA 6 trailer?
The only reason to choose AI is to be able to fire artists, which is what the calculus will actually be. Not whether AI is a superior solution (it isn't) but simply adequate enough that studios can made up for the drop in quality by cutting employment and still make a profit.
I think that at this stage Sora AI is not something that can be used in the game industry at all. On the other hand, I don't rule out that AI is developing so fast that soon we will see Sora AI or other AI working in the game industry, many people will be out of a job.
