Last updated: October 9th, 2024
Depending on who you speak to, video gaming has been the unofficial American pastime for quite some time. Ever since home consoles went nuclear in the 1980s, the love affair for video games has only grown stronger. With the rise and still continued growth of the broadband internet, the ability to play your favorite games with friends around the world continues to propel the industry to new heights. Now, with AI involved in the online gaming and iGaming industries, hardcore gamers, and perhaps new ones like you, are discovering the growing trend of customized games and personalized marketing.
A New Era in Game Development
For traditional video games and iGaming players, while many of our beloved games are enjoyable, they are very formulaic and inflexible. Due to the early development of the time, the game levels and non-playable characters were fixed. Sometimes, the graphical detail in the games was so great that home consoles or, in the case of online casinos, using Flash technology would experience freezes and glitches at the most inopportune times.
However, massive technological leaps and a switch to more improved technology with Internet bandwidth came the chance to develop a new age of online games, ones that continue to stimulate and challenge players based on their individual gameplay.
AI in Developing Game Environments
Today’s game developers use AI to develop variable and customizable game levels to help with glitching and freezing. For example, using behavioral AI tools, online gaming sites, and developers can catalog the actual games their members prefer to play. Also, through behavioral AI, the game developers and online gaming sites know how long the players play the games and their strengths and weaknesses. With this critical data, they can assist developers in customizing and developing smoother and more efficient games.
And to prevent those pesky glitching issues, AI involves itself by dynamically revealing the different parts of the game level and environment based on the player’s moves and decisions. This dynamic loading makes all the difference in maintaining the smoothness of the gameplay and the player’s excitement.
To enhance the environment further, AI now allows players to interact with the gaming environments. For example, today’s AI-driven online games can dynamically change environments to meet the player’s tendencies. If a player likes swapping down fruit, the environment can replace the other pieces to match that player’s tendencies. Overall, AI makes today’s online games more interactive, with the player actually manipulating it.
AI Tools to Make the Game More Challenging
If you grew up in the glory days of video games and arcades, the 80s and the 90s, you already know about all the hacking that went on to find advanced cheat codes to unlock hidden players or to make your character invincible to easily win the game. While iGaming operators and developers use a random number generator or a provably fair system to determine honest results playing real money and sweepstakes casino games that are audited, online gaming developers and operators turn to AI to prevent cheating.
With AI tools, in real time, it can monitor if cheating is going on or if online gamers have found a loophole in the gaming system that needs to be addressed. In the case of social gaming, AI bots can monitor the chatting and discussion to see if the gaming and goodwill are kosher. If there are threats or hate speech, AI can quickly spring into action and ban those players altogether.
How AI Assists on Dialogue and Character Choices
Many of today’s games give players different choices to make and in different languages. Based on what the character chooses, the resulting game and gameplay need to adjust and play out accordingly. In the case of dialog, based on what the player chooses the character to say, AI tools can properly and smoothly lead to the proper responses to keep the game on track without a hitch.
Taking communication one step further, the power of AI now extends to giving players multiple choices for dialog with custom characters and other non-playable characters. With the advent of voice commands, online gamers can even influence and control the whole game flow and the actions of the non-playable characters.
How AI Creates More Challenging Opponents
Gone are the days of choosing which difficulty level you wish to play on. AI takes care of all that for you. The beauty is it makes the gameplay as difficult as you are good. The better you are, the more difficult the game characters, and especially the bosses, become. Speaking about the bosses, gone also are the days of playing them a few times to figure out their moves so you can counter-move.
Once you think you’ve developed the winning strategy, thanks to AI technology, the NPC, and bosses can adjust on the fly to force you to advance your tactics. The adaptation is so good and precise that should you reset the level or have to start over, the bosses and NPC still remember the adjustments to make things much more difficult the next time you pick the game up.
AI for Online Gaming Analytics
Even with so much love and passion going into developing an online game, it still might not be a hit among the players. Thanks to AI tools, online gaming developers can better gauge through advanced analytics what went right and what went wrong with a game. It can even offer surveys to get player’s feedback about the game can become better.
How AI Helps to Develop Games Faster
With behavioral AI, video games, and iGaming, developers know the types of games that members really want to play. As a result, right at the cutting board, it gives developers the suggestions they need and the general direction to begin developing the games. In the past, one of the reasons delays happened or some games flopped was bugs and the lack of testing.
However, thanks to AI tools, it can scan for bugs in real time so developers can address them during game development. It can also offer suggestions for fixing them to keep things on schedule. Looking ahead to the future, AI tools can give developers tips about potential bugs that might come up and suggestions on how to address them.
How AI Is Revolutionizing the Marketing
Online gaming operators and iGaming sites rely heavily on behavioral AI to better market to the players. Because of the sheer cost of doing general advertising as well as the effectiveness, behavioral AI allows for more dynamic advertising to reach players. For example, if a player prefers sports games, instead of doing general advertising on, let’s say, fantasy games, AI can market its sports games down to the sport to reach those members and vice versa.
Conclusion: The Future of AI Tools in Online Gaming Development
AI is an evolving technology, which means it is constantly updating its data while gathering new information. Because today’s online and casino games focus on personalized gaming, AI is now being used to create custom strategy guides. If a player prefers a certain type of game, AI can customize suggestions and tips on how to play based on each player’s strengths and weaknesses.