Interview: Glen Schofield’s plan to save the games industry

Few developers working today can talk with authority about triple-A games like Glen Schofield.

The American artist and designer has worked on big, blockbuster games like Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, 007: From Russia With Love, Dead Space and three Call of Duty titles (Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, and WWII).

Most recently, Schofield helmed The Callisto Protocol at his studio Striking Distance, before leaving his position in 2023.

I’ve interviewed Schofield twice before: once at EA, and then during his Activision era. So this week’s Gamescom Asia in Bangkok, Thailand, offered the first chance at an unfiltered conversation – and he didn’t hold back.

The game designer opened his Gamescom keynote by proclaiming he’s approval of generative AI for game development, which he said was one of his three ideas for how to “save” the games industry.

VGC caught up with Schofield in Bangkok to discuss his ideas, and hear what’s next in his blockbuster career.

During your Gamescom Asia keynote, you pitched your three ideas to ‘fix’ the games industry. Could you recap your thoughts for me?

The game industry is sickly right now. Right? But we haven’t lost our creativity. We haven’t lost our ability to make games. But there’s people who may say… I have even heard executives from video games, putting down AAA games.

This one guy said: “Everybody who works on AAA games, you should just retire, because nobody’s gonna make AAA games again. You overspent, you did this, you did that”.

And I just wrote to him and said: “Hey, if you’re still an executive in the gaming industry, how do you think your new hires are gonna feel about you trashing your last hires?

The industry needs to be healed. And so, with my three things I was trying to distill it down to what I thought could bring back some of that lustre.

First, let’s train everybody [with AI]. We know this new wave is coming. And people will say “well, the software isn’t ready yet”. If you’re telling me about it, it’s ready. I mean, ready to play with at least. You play with it. You learn it. You grow with it. Right?

“First, let’s train everybody [with AI]. We know this new wave is coming. And people will say “well, the software isn’t ready yet”. If you’re telling me about it, it’s ready. I mean, ready to play with at least. You play with it. You learn it. You grow with it. Right?”

So please, companies, if everybody would just train their people… it’s not a huge investment, it’s the right investment. Training. Now people are starting to get excited, “I’m going to be learning it.” Now you can really talk about, hey, maybe this will save money in the long run.

The second thing was, I take it as like, “we’re not going to make AAA games anymore”. But then they ask me to make a AAA game for like $25 million. They still want them. They believe that AI will fix it.

But what I’m saying to the executives is you know games are going to make a lot of money, if you make the right ones. And so, I didn’t see the investment in games being the problem. I saw who you picked to run those games as the problem.

I bet every single one of those that you see that failed wildly, and I can name five, six – look at Bungie. How much did they spend? Billions? What did they turn up? 31st Union. What did they turn up? $300 million. Six and a half years. Nothing.

You picked the wrong people. Right? You ask a couple of these people that I’m talking about, how many games have you shipped as director? “Well, none, but I was a creative director. Same thing.” Yeah, you probably had no reports.

Well, I’ve had upwards of 350 people on Call of Duty, and then there were 500 around the world. And I had done a lot of the directing, but that was one in which you’re still learning.

So, ask: “How many games have you shipped as director?” And you could say, hey, everybody starts somewhere. But I don’t even think those questions were asked, or they saw past them, because everyone’s going to say: “Yeah, you’re going to give me a studio and my own game? I’ll do it.”

And I’ll be damned if the people that we discussed were like, “did this get $200 million for so-and-so?” Oh man.

So they need to find directors and let those directors train. My creative director worked for me for 20 years. And after Call of Duty, he finally went out on his own to be a director. Bret Robbins. And now he’s working for Houser, right?

I’ve known a guy, Chris Stone, he’s been working 27 years. And now he’s running Void Interactive. So they need to be trained to run a game.

Part of your keynote today that got a lot of traction online was that a lot of people were afraid to talk about the benefits of using AI as a tool. There’s a lot of comments that I was seeing from people who are not happy about the idea of it scraping people’s work, and questioning whether the actual output of generative AI just now is useful. What do you say to some people who are sceptical about that?

Then make your own rules on how you want to deal with it. So, if I… I don’t do this too much. I do a lot of prompts. But if I’m going to mash pictures together to try and make something, I’m going to use my paintings and drawings. And that’s what I do. And then I’m going to just make, you know, big prompts.

So, you know, use your own rules. If you have rules like that, that make you feel comfortable, then do that.

The other thing is, use it. Let the lawyers figure it out. It’s going to be figured out someday. Because the work that I will show you, thousands and thousands and thousands of files, you will not find that online anymore.

You’re not going to find where I borrow other people’s work, where I borrow pictures of tentacles or whatever. But no.

“Let the lawyers figure it out. It’s going to be figured out someday. Because the work that I will show you, thousands and thousands and thousands of files, you will not find that online anymore.”

What I find really interesting about it is that you are a very capable artist. It must have been as an artist that you must have had some concerns at some point and overcome those?

Oh, when I started with it, sure. I was hearing all that stuff and I was hearing “hey, people are ripping off other people” and everything. And I’m like, you know, Picasso said “good artists always borrow, great artists steal.”

Every artist, every concept artist, is already doing photobashing. They’ve been doing it for 5-10 years. That’s not your work, it’s not your photos, you’re photobashing somebody else. And that same person, I’m telling you, was the one who said “I don’t want them taking work”, and all that, and I’m like, you gotta be kidding me.

“Every artist, every concept artist, is already doing photobashing. They’ve been doing it for 5-10 years. That’s not your work, it’s not your photos, you’re photobashing somebody else.”

I get the impression that you are someone who’s being quite methodical about it in the sense of “this is happening, and whatever my own personal opinions about whether I’d like it to be like that, then this is happening so we have to use it”.

Right. There were so many lawsuits in the beginning of the PC… or phones, “you’re making my phone, you’re doing this”. There were fits and starts. So I base a lot of mine on what I’ve gone through as well.

The first PCs were by Radio Shack and IBM. They’re not even in the business anymore. So it took a while for a lot of this stuff to weed out. But exactly what I said, which is, going through all these big technological leaps, man. Yeah, first everybody’s scared.

And yes, the first people are going to lose their jobs. Something. Like, they’re going to lose their job. Part of business is “this was wrong”, exactly what people do. But then it’s going to come rolling back. It really will. And I think the industry should come rolling back too.

Everything in life is cyclical. Fans will come back and go “where are my story games?” And they don’t have them.

Is it more about ideation for you, or do you see it as a practical production thing? Do you see generative AI being used for assets in-game, for production?

Because that’s all it’s good for. I’ve not only checked out some of these, I’ve gone in and looked at animation. They go, like, “greatest animation ever, blah blah blah, you can make your own animation”.

And then I go in, and you get to pick from one of their cartoons. It’s already done, and you just animate. I’m like “I wanted to animate one of my monsters”. I was so excited for this one, and it’s like “you can’t do that”.

The only other thing that people would say to me is “we can make movies, we can make all the movies you need right now”. And I said: “That’s awesome. Except the fans don’t want movies. So you made this for what? Not me.”

But technology has a way, it’s getting better and better and better, and that’s what’s going to happen.

So it’s more like ideation for you, like concept stage, pre-production.

Yes, but that’s not…

Could you give me an example? Say, The Callisto Protocol. If you could have done that all over again with the tools you have now, how would you have been able to have made it quicker, faster, better with those tools?

[pause] I’m not sure. It wouldn’t help me with writing. Because I’m not going to let it do the writing part. Ideas maybe, here and there. As for the concept art? Maybe. But when I’m designing monsters, I’m going and I’m sitting with the artists, and they’re drawing it while I’m talking – “let’s make these eyes bigger,” you know, that sort of thing – and so yeah, that took some time.

Whereas now, I’ve just created this whole line of weird characters for one of my pitches – they’re mummified but they’ve got, like, crab legs coming out – stuff that I’ve been able to picture quickly. And so the one thing I’ve been able to do is go “try fish, try frog, try…” and then go in there. And then I can come up with a conclusion. I can do that faster these days.

So it seems to me it’s more about where you believe the potential of the technology is, rather than where it is now?

There’s a lot of potential. But yeah, I mean, let’s look at it this way. I could go in there – this is how it can speed things up nowadays – and write a couple different prompts and say “Midjourney? I need a devastated brick wall”. And then I can say to it, “alright, make it longer, make it bigger, and now I’ve got a giant thing of bricks.” That’s just one.

I’ll say, “Bricks, give me rocks”. You can use it all over. And you get stuff like, “okay, I’m going to look through bricks” – that’s another thing, people aren’t afraid to go looking at other people’s bricks and use that in games – so it is a little… I don’t know.

The third point you said in your ideas for saving the games industry was E3, and how you miss it. 

Geoff [Keighley] and I talked about it. I’ve said to him: “I wish you would turn the awards show into the Academy Awards show.” But he’s not. He’s kind of keeping it… it feels a little like the Spike TV Awards.

If I won a Game Award, I’d be happy. But I still want the best. You know? And I think somebody needs to step up. I wish the Academy Awards were doing it. Just like the BAFTAs do it, right? The BAFTAs realised 10 years ago – longer than 10 years ago, because I won BAFTAs for Dead Space – that video games are a cultural phenomenon.

“Geoff [Keighley] and I talked about it. I’ve said to him: “I wish you would turn the awards show into the Academy Awards show.””

EA is going private. From your experience, as someone who understands that company deeply, do you think that’s an opportunity for them to be a little less creatively conservative? You talked last year about pitching them a new Dead Space, and they wouldn’t go for it. Are we going to see stuff like that?

You know, the people that bought them… I mean, the Saudis, and there was one more… what do they know about video games? Right?

So they’re bringing them private and they said “we’re going to go down to just four or five games and we’re going to do this and that”. That’s what they said.

But EA’s always been conservative. I mean, to get them to make Dead Space… I love EA, I love what they used to be. They’ve had their heyday. Unfortunately, I think both EA and Activision, they’ve had their heyday.

Battlefield 6 launched this month and seems to be doing well. As someone who’s deeply experienced in what’s required to build a big blockbuster FPS, how do you assess what they’ve done well, versus the last time?

First of all, maybe you don’t know the answer to this, but did they put a new person in charge?

It was Zampella. He took over the franchise from Respawn.

That’s your number one. You’ve got a guy who knows his shit. Really good. You put a director in charge that knows what they’re doing, it makes a lot of difference in the world. Everything trickles down. The director now hires better people because they’ve been doing it a long time, or they have a quality bar that’s a really bit higher.

And so that would be my first thing – yes, the leadership there is probably better and more qualified to make the game. That would be the first thing.

And they took their time. Right? And I bet they still spent a lot of money on it. That’s not going to go away. I mean, I know a bunch of AAA games being made now at high cost. So I think it would be that.

I think that the management at EA has gotten really, really conservative, and so I think that who you put in charge of the game is everything. That is the fundamental problem of what happened with the investors.

On the flip side, as someone who understands deeply the Call of Duty machine, and what’s required to make that successful, what challenges do you foresee now that that’s under a big corporation in Microsoft?

Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all if they go to not every year, they lose a billion dollars every year, so that’s why Call of Duty never did that.

I worry about it immensely, I really do. Because what’s happening here is a war. Where’s Halo, you know what I mean? And you look at EA, you look at these big companies, and I’m like where’s the Strike games? Where’s this game? And there’s so many that just fall by the wayside.

Unfortunately, once you’re assimilated by one of these companies, I think you take on some of their traits. The other thing is, I don’t know, but I would imagine that the Call of Duty bonus system is out, and now you have theirs, and people are going to go “that isn’t that”.

I’ll give you one selfish example, I hate doing this, but since I left Sledgehammer, none of the games have been very good. I mean, the last one [Modern Warfare 3 (2023)] was a 50. They still sell well.

You know, that happens. You move. I always wonder “why did you take that guy out, it’s not going to work later”, and very few times does that work.

They just aren’t as good. They aren’t the same. Treyarch’s still really good but you know… I got lucky. I feel like I was at the heyday of EA during my time there. I mean, it was a who’s who working there. And then when I got to Activision, I made Modern Warfare 3 (2011).

As a matter of fact, Modern Warfare 3 was the last Call of Duty to win Action Game of the Year, and my other two games were nominated for it. But now, you know, you don’t see them.

“I’ll give you one selfish example, I hate doing this, but since I left Sledgehammer, none of the games have been very good. I mean, the last one [Modern Warfare 3 (2023)] was a 50. They still sell well.”

Have you played the Dead Space remake yet?

Just a little bit.

What did you think?

I thought they did a really good job. I thought everything was fantastic, and I went online and said that. They did a good job. If I was to make another horror game… I do have [one], it’s a dark action adventure.

What’s the status with that? You’ve talked a bit this year about the struggle of getting a project funded and whether you’ve directed your last game. Where are you at right now?

The truth is, that that particular one was taken a little bit more negatively. I didn’t mean actually my last game, what I was saying was if they want me to make these $2 million and $5 million games I’m going to walk away…

You’re the big blockbuster guy.

Well, I can make one [with a smaller budget]…

…but it’s going to compromise your vision.

Yeah. Give me $75 million and I’ll make you something. Because you can save more money with a great creative idea, than you can with AI.