It's probably gotten harder and harder to dedicate dev resources to building a robust bot player for your game, given that the top tier of players are just going to play online anyway.
It's not only dedicating the time, it's also hiring/maintaining a strong game-AI team able to consistently pump out effective models at the same pace as games are released. You can't just take a regular ol game developer and expect them to make a really competitive game AI without cheating.
Even though the work is interesting I doubt you're going to be able to build a full team of reinforcement learning experts for cheap. I would guess that maintaining a 5 person team would cost about $2-3m/year.
It might be easier "tomorrow", something like universal AI, where you plug your game objects with some kind API, provide some hardware to simulate games and it learns automatically. Something like Google does now, but more universal and easier to use. Might be a good idea for startup :)
Depends on the game. Quick-paced, short-lived games like arena fps and rts games naturally develop large enough communities (or die trying) that AI-development can be brushed off in favor of letting the players deal with it.
But for games like grand strategies (eg civ), the player population doesn't typically run high enough to support only humans each match (at least partially because the games run too long), and so its more important to develop a decently sane AI.
>It's probably gotten harder and harder to dedicate dev resources to building a robust bot player for your game
I don't think so. Years ago gaming programming books were all about how many CPU cycles can you spare for AI. Literally omg the graphics are too slow we have to make the AI stupider.
These days you can throw spades of power at it (comparatively).
He was talking about justifying the business expense and time required for a dedicated team to handle AI and only AI. And then add that this generation's consoles are the lowest common denominator and their CPUs simply don't have any spare cycles for intricate AI.
