It's not only dedicating the time, it's also hiring/maintaining a strong game-AI team able to consistently pump out effective models at the same pace as games a

It's not only dedicating the time, it's also hiring/maintaining a strong game-AI team able to consistently pump out effective models at the same pace as games are released. You can't just take a regular ol game developer and expect them to make a really competitive game AI without cheating. Even though the work is interesting I doubt you're going to be able to build a full team of reinforcement learning experts for cheap. I would guess that maintaining a 5 person team would cost about $2-3m/year.