Artificial Intelligence is very much on the news agenda right now. The unstoppable rise of ChatGPT and the seemingly imminent prospect of generalised AI able to re-create broad human thinking processes has seen concerns raised by everyone from major business CEOs to Geoffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI research. AI has been an element of video game design and production for at least two decades, but now with AI art programs and the rise of procedurally generated game dialogue, there are growing questions over how AI is going to effect not just the content of games, but the teams that make them. Talking at the Xbox games showcase in Los Angeles recently, Xbox chief Phil Spencer played down concerns that AI could be used to streamline the game production process and therefore lead to smaller teams. "Actually, that isn't an area we're thinking about a ton with AI," he said.

It has revolutionised the way we watch TV shows and movies. But could a Netflix-style service have the same impact on the world of video gaming? One expert believes so and has argued that it could be vital to the future diversity of the industry. Traditionally vast amounts of money was spent on headline grabbing franchise games, as well as some smaller standalone titles, which would then be recuperated through sales. The focus was on engaging single-player story lines, akin to movies, with classics like Assassin's Creed, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider.

Something big has happened to the video game industry over the last five years – you may have noticed. All the old rules about consoles – the fact that they enjoyed five-to-eight-year life cycles, the fact that games "just worked" out of the box – they're all gone. An accelerating consumer electronics sector and the mass penetration of broadband internet have led us into a new era of chaotic innovation and fraught business model evolution. And somewhere in the middle of all this, people are making and playing games. How do those people keep up?

Earlier this month, Microsoft did something console manufacturers haven't done for many years. It announced key details of its forthcoming Project Scorpio console – an update to the Xbox One – via a set of exclusive features on the video game news site, Eurogamer. In the modern games industry the strict control of information, especially regarding hardware, has become something of a corporate obsession. To cede control of a major revelation – in this case the technical specifications of a forthcoming machine – was a fascinating, but intelligent move. It added a sense of impartiality and validity to all the specs and stats that came out of the reveal, lending the information some real authority that would have been missing from an official press release. It let gamers start processing the meaning of the machine for themselves.