X owner Elon Musk has taken a brief break from posting racism, transphobia, and conspiracy theory nonsense to say that gaming has become too “woke” because the industry is dominated by massive corporations, and so he is going to use his own massive corporation to start a new game studio powered by AI “to make games great again!”
Musk’s latest outburst came in response to Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, who said he doesn’t understand how game developers and journalists have become “so ideologically captured,” particularly given that gamers—real gamers, one must assume—”have always rejected dumb manipulative BS, and can tell when someone is an outsider poser.”
“Too many game studios that are owned by massive corporations,” said Musk, the owner of X, SpaceX, and Tesla, whose personal net worth is somewhere north of $322 billion. “xAI is going to start an AI game studio to make games great again!”
Lest there be any doubt about his motivations, Musk wrote in another post, “Can’t they just make good games and skip the woke lecture?”
This is all deeply, despairingly stupid, starting from the very premise that a giant corporation is going to save videogames from, uh, giant corporations. xAI is a “startup” but currently has at least 100,000 Nvidia GPUs at its disposal, meaning it’s already a multi-billion-dollar operation. Musk’s concept of an “AI game studio” goes entirely unexplored, but is presumably some sort of holodeck-inspired nonsense that, much like the promise of near-future offworld colonization, lives entirely in the realm of fantasy.
Despite the obvious ridiculousness of the whole thing, Musk’s tweet is getting traction from predictable corners of the platform, who are thrilled with the prospect of game ownership being returned to the people (which is to say the wealthiest man in the world). At least one actual game designer doesn’t appear to be buying it, though.
Say what you will about Battlecruiser 3000 AD, but he’s not wrong.
The likelihood of this going anywhere beyond a stupid idea expressed in a stupid tweet is very slim, but I do harbor some small hope that Musk will talk himself into it, much like he talked himself into having to buy Twitter. If that happens, I would also expect similar results. Amazon and Google, both virtual bottomless money buckets themselves, discovered the hard way that making and releasing videogames is actually really difficult.
I’ve reached out to X for comment on Musk’s latest idea, and will update if I receive a reply.
