Are Video Game Studios Terrified of AI?! Prepare to Be Shocked!

From San Francisco to Tokyo and Hong Kong, the many companies powering the digital entertainment space are responding to decades of rising costs and flat prices with feverish adoption and evolution new AI tools. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake. Still, company bosses and studio heads told Bloomberg News that while the changes are inevitable and painful, they could empower smaller studios, boost creativity and ultimately benefit gamers around the world.

The head of a major Japanese studio prepares for a future where, within five years, half of his company’s programmers and designers will be redundant. At Hong Kong-listed Gala Sports, executives have frozen non-AI research projects, forced department heads to look into machine learning, and offered bounties of up to $7,000 for novel AI ideas. They fear that they might already be too late.

“Basically every week we feel like we’re being eliminated,” Gala Technology Holding Ltd. CEO Jia Xiaodong, 36, told Bloomberg News. “The impact of AI on the gaming industry over the last three to four months could be as dramatic as the changes over the last thirty or forty years.”

The video game industry is among the first to feel the full impact of AI, as it is largely digital – coded in an AI-readable language and created by software developers well-prepared to use, adapt, and enhance new computing tools. Before OpenAI took the world by storm with ChatGPT in November, it leveraged the Valve Corp dota 2 As a proving ground for his bots.

The advent of AI offers the industry a rare chance to overhaul a business model that has in some cases become bloated and formulaic – not unlike the criticism leveled at risk-averse Hollywood today. With recent blockbusters, game production costs have risen faster than sales The Last of Us Part II And Horizon Forbidden West allegedly calculation Sony Group Corp. more than $200 million each and requires years of work by hundreds of employees. According to Kenji Fukuyama, an analyst at UBS Securities, the money and time required for such projects can be cut in half by AI.

“Nothing can reverse, stop or slow down the current AI trend,” said Masaaki Fukuda, who helped build PlayStation Network while at Sony. Fukuda, 48, who is now vice president at Japan’s largest AI startup Preferred Networks Inc., sees a tidal wave of change in the way digital content is created, and his company has partnered with an anime creator called Anime Crypko.

Character illustrations, which typically cost more than ¥100,000 ($720) each to outsource, can be sourced from Crypko for a monthly flat fee from ¥4,980 and a commercial license from ¥980 per image. It still takes human artists to complete the AI’s work, but the company is improving the tool daily and should be able to fix most shortcomings within a few years, Fukuda said.

Demand for such content has skyrocketed over the years, with mobile games that cost about 40 million yen to produce 15 years ago now cost at least 500 million yen, largely because of graphics, the former maker says Touken Ranbu Producer Yuta Hanazawa.

For the 25-year-old industry veteran, the new technology was compelling enough to start a new business. AI Works Inc.to sell machine-drawn game illustrations. As with Crypko, it takes a human hand to complete the product, but it’s much quicker and cheaper than hiring an artist. The company has already provided art for several unannounced projects at half the industry rate, he said.

“AI is the game changer I’ve been waiting for,” said 48-year-old Hanazawa. By freeing developers from the burden of mass producing graphics, it promises to revitalize the entire industry. “Publishers can take more risks, developers can get creative again, and users can choose from a much greater variety of games.”

AI is also emerging as a powerful in-house tool. Gala Sports used publicly available AI services — the Stable Diffusion and Midjourney image generators — to create in-house toolkits for rendering realistic 3D head models, reducing the cost of a task that previously would have taken two weeks and up to 200,000 yuan ($28,000) if outsourced. Now only half a day’s work is required. The company has a team dedicated to developing more tools to help with coding, design, and even customer service.

The downside of this automation is a corresponding loss of jobs. Industry executives are reluctant to speak publicly on the issue and anticipate large swathes of workers will lose their jobs as they know them. “AI could eventually wipe out entire job categories in gaming, such as quality control, debugging, customer support or translation,” said industry analyst Serkan Toto.

That future became clear this month when Tokyo-based Morikatron Inc. unveiled a full AI-made game. crime simulator Red Ram uses Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT to generate its content based on a player’s prompts. “This is a game that would be impossible to develop without the power of AI, as it would require infinite art and text resources,” said company founder Yukihito Morikawa. It took four engineers three months to assemble.

Tsubasa Himeno, a voice actress with numerous game credits, said the new technology will make it harder for young people to break into the business. “AI is purely a threat,” she said.

Jiro Ishii, known for creating the live-action novel 428: Shibuya Scramble, expects that in a decade or two everyone will be able to create their own games. It’s a threat to the “freemium” model that’s being adopted by people like everyone else dota 2 and epics Fourteen dayswhich are free to play but incur a fee for in-game cosmetics and extras.

Most see an opportunity. As the former producer of Sony’s hit smartphone game, Yosuke Shiokawa has been on both ends of the spectrum Destiny/Great Command and founder of two-year-old Fahrenheit 213 Inc. He got involved in AI development for a while video trailer Before using it as a tool to create objects and backgrounds in the game, he added extras that his team of four would not have thought of before due to limited resources.

“Soon it will be a question of your creativity, not your budget, that determines the value of games,” Shiokawa said.