A Comparison of production cost for implementation of AI in Digital Games

Abstract

A selection of AI technologies in digital games depends on mainly cost to implement each AI technology. In 80's, it was a typical way that game developers made their programs by themselves to control missions and characters, but it has changed to a new way to generate program and data automatically. The method to estimate production cost of implementing AI in a digital game by using a cost unit which is equal to describing a program by a developer is supposed to understand how much cost are reduced by auto-generation. The method make it possible to know a rate of cost of AI auto-generating to a whole development process in manual. The method is applied to estimate how much cost is reduced for various scale games such as AAA, middle-class, small, and very small games. As a result, for an AAA games, its cost can be reduced to one to a hundred, and for a middle-class game, its cost can be reduced one to ten. But for a small game and smallest game, a cost can’t be reduced.