AI video game NPCs can be fun to chat with, but there's a big financial catch

It turns out that someone needs to pay for every chat. There are multiple ideas about how to solve that.

A tech demo featuring Bloom, an AI-driven NPC. Screenshot: Ubisoft.

The most surprising thing I recently learned about the growing population of AI-driven video game characters—the kind you can have a conversation with—is that there’s a core money problem around them, since most chats with an AI NPC cost someone money. 

One proposed solution, as I’ll share below, just might involve a paid subscription. Or, perhaps, the games will have to limit how many times you can chat with their characters.

Neither approach is guaranteed, but there’s clearly an economic challenge around this tech, one that ensures that this kind of experience will need to be worth it—really worth it.

So, for starters, let me tell you about the most interesting conversation I had with one of these so-called AI NPCs (NPC = non-player character). The one I’m about to describe, I should note, was just a tech demo and had no player cost active, nor were its makers discussing business plans.

It was a Monday evening in San Francisco and I was sitting in front of a monitor next to Xavier Manzanares, a producer for Ubisoft. His previous company assignment was to make games in partnership with Nintendo. Now, he was a few months deep into figuring out if generative AI could make video games more interesting to play.

On the monitor near us was a “neo NPC” (Ubisoft’s term), a virtual resistance fighter named Bloom. His name was a Watch Dogs joke and possibly a triple entendre, because our conversation soon revealed that Bloom used to work at a flower shop. 

I leaned into a microphone and asked Bloom what he did pre-resistance. 

There was no script for me, and apparently none for him, aside from reams of Ubisoft-written character background that the AI could pull from to craft its reply. Those details included his former profession.  

Bloom asked me what I used to do.

Two hours earlier, I would have frozen out of self-consciousness. When I play a single-player game and chat with an NPC I’m usually just a puppeteer of other characters or an actor following a script. Maybe I choose from a set of dialogue options, but I’m not embodying a role myself.

Ubisoft was the second company showing me an AI NPC demo in as many hours that Monday. By the time I met Bloom, I’d shed some earlier anxiety and was ready to role-play and improvise. 

I had a quick response.