For one of these games, a typical budget for an individual card illustration of sufficient quality is, as I understand it, in the realm of $200-1000 USD. A single “set” of cards might require 100+ such illustrations. That means that you’re looking at paying $20k in art costs on the low end, and that this is a recurring cost every time you want to make a new set that isn’t just reprinting old cards—and even then, sometimes new art is used for reprints!
Except, well, that was then and this is now. Now, if I were in the business of making a card game set, my art budget wouldn’t be $20k-100k. It would be… a $30/month Midjourney subscription with $20/month private visibility enabled, and quite frankly high quality Midjourney images look better than many of the images already being used for art in these games. [1]
This doesn’t undermine your overall point, but this is getting the numbers pretty wrong IMO.
You’re either hiring an artist to do your work, or your doing the art yourself (which also costs you time, which you presumably value at some rate)
Making Midjourney art isn’t instant – I’ve sometimes actually spent hours chasing a particular look. A $200 - $1000 card art probably takes an artist 5-20 hours to make, charging somewhere between $20 - $200/hour. Midjourney is still an art tool that still requires someone with good aesthetic sense. It replaces one set of technical skills with a different set, and the overall process is much faster. I’m guessing the average midjourney art ends up taking ~30 minutes to make, when you factor in trying a bunch of prompts that didn’t quite work, as well as context-switching costs.
The cost is higher if you want your art to not only be good, but to be unique among other games or products. i.e. I’d Oliver and I have spent somewhere between 20-30 hours on a combination of figuring out the LessWrong art direction. The first phase of that project involved looking at possible aesthetics to pursue (this started before the rise of ML art), The second phase involved figuring out how to get Dall-E et al to output something that hit the right target. (i.e. having classy watercolor images that fade into a white paper background in a particular way)
So I think it’s more accurate to say that the state-of-the-art is for Dall-E/Midjourney/etc to cut art costs by a factor of 10-20. This is enough to be industry-changing, but not quite as extremely as you imply here.
I’m not sure I agree. The normal art project also requires a bunch of “art director time”—there can be multiple rounds of back and forth between author and artist, different sketches or concepts to evaluate, and so on. If anything, I think there’s more context-switching cost required for a traditional project because of the inherent major delay in creating traditional art.
In other words, if I have an AI art prompt that doesn’t come out quite right, I know that very quickly and can then run another prompt to refine what I’m going for. If I have a traditional art prompt and a professional artist comes back a while later with sketches that aren’t right, I can send them art direction to refine the project—but doing so will impose more context-switching because of the delay on communications between us, the fact that these sketches/drafts will be arriving substantially after I’ve sent my initial piece, etc.
Hmm, yeah that does seem reasonable. I do think a big chunk of the process here is more like “doing art” than “doing art direction”, but not sure where I’d draw the line.
This doesn’t undermine your overall point, but this is getting the numbers pretty wrong IMO.
You’re either hiring an artist to do your work, or your doing the art yourself (which also costs you time, which you presumably value at some rate)
Making Midjourney art isn’t instant – I’ve sometimes actually spent hours chasing a particular look. A $200 - $1000 card art probably takes an artist 5-20 hours to make, charging somewhere between $20 - $200/hour. Midjourney is still an art tool that still requires someone with good aesthetic sense. It replaces one set of technical skills with a different set, and the overall process is much faster. I’m guessing the average midjourney art ends up taking ~30 minutes to make, when you factor in trying a bunch of prompts that didn’t quite work, as well as context-switching costs.
The cost is higher if you want your art to not only be good, but to be unique among other games or products. i.e. I’d Oliver and I have spent somewhere between 20-30 hours on a combination of figuring out the LessWrong art direction. The first phase of that project involved looking at possible aesthetics to pursue (this started before the rise of ML art), The second phase involved figuring out how to get Dall-E et al to output something that hit the right target. (i.e. having classy watercolor images that fade into a white paper background in a particular way)
So I think it’s more accurate to say that the state-of-the-art is for Dall-E/Midjourney/etc to cut art costs by a factor of 10-20. This is enough to be industry-changing, but not quite as extremely as you imply here.
I’m not sure I agree. The normal art project also requires a bunch of “art director time”—there can be multiple rounds of back and forth between author and artist, different sketches or concepts to evaluate, and so on. If anything, I think there’s more context-switching cost required for a traditional project because of the inherent major delay in creating traditional art.
In other words, if I have an AI art prompt that doesn’t come out quite right, I know that very quickly and can then run another prompt to refine what I’m going for. If I have a traditional art prompt and a professional artist comes back a while later with sketches that aren’t right, I can send them art direction to refine the project—but doing so will impose more context-switching because of the delay on communications between us, the fact that these sketches/drafts will be arriving substantially after I’ve sent my initial piece, etc.
Hmm, yeah that does seem reasonable. I do think a big chunk of the process here is more like “doing art” than “doing art direction”, but not sure where I’d draw the line.