Secrecy is pervasive in the game industry, and used to be much worse. In many cases it goes as far as lawsuits over things that would be relatively minor and no

Secrecy is pervasive in the game industry, and used to be much worse. In many cases it goes as far as lawsuits over things that would be relatively minor and not worth suing over in other industries - like the look and feel of speech bubbles in multiplayer games. Things have gotten better over the last decade or so, with game studios letting developers publish research papers or slide decks or even entire software stacks as open source. Sometimes studios pay to send developers out to give talks and do recruiting. A decade ago, it would have been a hard sell to even get permission to buy your own ticket to a developer conference at most studios. The last AAA studio I worked for had similar policies - only a few people at the studio ever went to conferences, and we all had to pay out-of-pocket. That studio's policies have changed and they now let employees give talks. In comparison, the silicon valley firms I worked for had better wages and encouraged us to both attend and give talks. I think some of the improvements in games industry culture here have probably been triggered as a result of competition from SV startups and open source. When it comes to AI there are specific challenges: It's very hard to repurpose one game's AI for solving another game's challenges. It's very difficult to build truly general AI frameworks. Good game AI depends on knowledge of game systems, content, and mechanics - how each ability works, how the environments are laid out, the structure of level objectives, etc. All of these things can end up changing during development, and in a multiplayer game they may vary from match to match. As a result, even if you have a bunch of knowledge from other titles and you can reuse source code from the best titles in the market, you may still fail to build good AI for your game on your first few tries. It's that difficult. General purpose machine learning frameworks have helped here though, and people using off-the-shelf engines like Unreal can take advantage of all the existing tools there to start building AI quicker. So that's nice.