Something that may help with download sizes is Machine Learning which James Gwertzman, head of Microsoft Game Stack (previously known as Playfab before MS bought them), recently talked about -
Gwertzman: You were talking about machine learning and content generation. I think that’s going to be interesting. One of the studios inside Microsoft has been experimenting with using ML models for asset generation. It’s working scarily well. To the point where we’re looking at shipping really low-res textures and having ML models uprez the textures in real time. You can’t tell the difference between the hand-authored high-res texture and the machine-scaled-up low-res texture, to the point that you may as well ship the low-res texture and let the machine do it.
Journalist: Can you do that on the hardware without install time?
Gwertzman: Not even install time. Run time.
Journalist: To clarify, you’re talking about real time, moving around the 3D space, level of detail style?
Gwertzman: Like literally not having to ship massive 2K by 2K textures. You can ship tiny textures.
Journalist: Are you saying they’re generated on the fly as you move around the scene, or they’re generated ahead of time?
Gwertzman: The textures are being uprezzed in real time.
Journalist: So you can fit on one blu-ray.
Gwertzman: The download is way smaller, but there’s no appreciable difference in game quality. Think of it more like a magical compression technology. That’s really magical. It takes a huge R&D budget. I look at things like that and say — either this is the next hard thing to compete on, hiring data scientists for a game studio, or it’s a product opportunity. We could be providing technologies like this to everyone to level the playing field again.
Journalist: Where does the source data set for that come from? Do you take every texture from every game that ships under Microsoft Game Studios?
Gwertzman: In this case, it only works by training the models on very specific sets. One genre of game. There’s no universal texture map. That would be kind of magical. It’s more like, if you train it on specific textures and then you — it works with those, but it wouldn’t work with a whole different set.
Journalist: So you still need an artist to create the original set.
Journalist: Are there any legal considerations around what you feed into the model?
Gwertzman: It’s especially good for photorealism, because that adds tons of data. It may not work so well for a fantasy art style. But my point is that I think the fact that that’s a technology now — game development has always been hard in terms of the sheer number of disciplines you have to master. Art, physics, geography, UI, psychology, operant conditioning. All these things we have to master. Then we add backend services and latency and multiplayer, and that’s hard enough. Then we added microtransactions and economy management and running your own retail store inside your game. Now we’re adding data science and machine learning. The barrier seems to be getting higher and higher.
That’s where I come in. At heart, Microsoft is a productivity company. Our employee badge says on the back, the company mission is to help people achieve more. How do we help developers achieve more? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.