Microsoft's AI Quake Demo Is A Slap In The Face To Game Developers

We all knew it was going to lead here. Microsoft just revealed a new Copilot feature that recreates Quake 2 in real time using AI as it's being played. The game is browser-based and can be played for free. It’s the flagship project for Microsoft’s newly launched Copilot Gaming Experiences initiative.

To be blunt, this sucks.

A Threat Of What’s To Come

It’s hard to know where to begin when it comes to unpacking why the Quake 2 AI demo is so upsetting. After playing it (which you can do right here), many people were quick to point out how broken the game is. I gave it a shot myself, and yeah, it’s not a particularly good game. It looks bad, it plays terribly, and, because it’s generated frame by frame, it’s very easy for the AI model to totally freak out and generate an entirely new area while you’re in the middle of exploring another one.

If you want to see the limitations of developing a game frame by frame, try out the demo and look down, then back up again. The game renders a completely different room each time you do it.

The Quake AI demo is a bad game. Point blank, it’s not something anyone would think is a quality experience. While it’s important to point that out, I think solely focusing on the poor quality of the demo is missing the point a little bit. Microsoft is not claiming that the demo is a good game, it’s showing off the idea that this kind of generative technology is possible and suggests what’s to come in the future.

The demo is a promise that Microsoft is going to continue developing this technology to create games. Xbox’s Gaming AI general manager, Haiyan Zhang, said in a tweet that the demo explores “how AI might enable the next generation of interactive storytelling” and that “this AI opens new ways of engaging with experiences and perhaps hints at how future tools could empower dev teams.”

A Slap In The Face To Xbox Teams

Microsoft laid off over 2,800 game developers in 2024. That is a staggering number of people who have been laid off. After cutting hundreds of artists, animators, and technical workers, Microsoft is now promising to use generative AI to make its games. Regardless of what Zhang said about “empowering dev teams,” that’s not how the technology is being presented. Microsoft isn’t using it as a tool developers can use to speed up their processes, it’s using it as a replacement for artists, level designers, and many more traditional game dev roles.

With those layoffs in mind, Microsoft is making it clear what the company values. Xbox isn’t meant to be about exploring unique stories crafted by artists and visionaries, it’s about making literally anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s good as long as it’s cheaper than keeping people employed.

The company is pitching the Quake demo as a tool, but there’s no clear example of what its utility is. How can something like this be used as a development tool? It took a game that already existed and made it much worse. It doesn’t show new ideas for level design (remember, there is no level design since it's randomly generated, meaning there’s no intentionality behind its design), and it doesn’t introduce any new combat ideas. There’s nothing to this demo – there’s nothing to be learned from it.

I can’t imagine how it must feel to be one of the affected developers laid off by Microsoft in 2024, seeing the company pretend like it’s struck gold on something that replaced you to create a version of Quake 2 that’s worse in every conceivable way. I know it’s not actually about Quake 2, there’s something much more bland and uninteresting that’ll be made by Copilot coming down the line at some point, but it just feels so bleak to know that this is the direction Microsoft wants to go.

Who knows, maybe I’ll look at my feet and look back up again and have been transported to a dimension where this sort of thing isn’t happening. There, I just did it. Let’s see what Sony has been up to. Oh, no.

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