Development costs are expected to drop sharply, and creativity will usher in a big explosion! AI is reshaping the game industry

Author: Rousseau

**Source: **Zhitong Finance

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool, style model (childhood memories)

As AI takes over jobs, the entire gaming industry is being reconfigured; change is seen as painful, but necessary and inevitable.

Executives and politicians around the world are concerned that a new generation of artificial intelligence technology will wreak havoc on industries that society depends on, from finance to healthcare. Yet for the $200 billion gaming industry, the big changes are in full swing.

Gaming industry revenue has nearly doubled since 2017

From San Francisco to Tokyo and Hong Kong, the companies driving digital entertainment are frantically adopting and developing new artificial intelligence tools in response to decades of rising game development costs and stagnant game prices. Thousands of jobs are at risk. However, some industry leaders and game studio heads say that these changes, while inevitable and painful, could empower smaller game studios to execute more powerfully, increase creativity across the industry, and ultimately empower gamers around the world. benefit.

The head of a major studio in Japan is planning for the future when half of his company's programmers and designers will be eliminated within five years. The video game industry can be said to be one of the first to feel the full impact of artificial intelligence, because the industry is basically a digital form of the main body - coded in the language readable by artificial intelligence and created by software engineers, some of the industry's technical personnel Fully prepared to use, adapt and improve new computing tools. Before taking the world by storm with ChatGPT last November, OpenAI used Valve Corp.'s Dota 2 as a testing ground for its AI bots.

Transformative AI technologies - The emergence of Generative AI presents a rare opportunity for the industry to overhaul business models that have become bloated and formulaic in some Criticism from risk-averse Hollywood is no different. The cost of making games is rising faster than sales, with Sony Group Corp.'s recent mega-game blockbusters "The Last of Us Part II" and "Horizon Forbidden West" reportedly on the rise. Both cost more than $200 million to produce and required years of hard work by hundreds of employees. AI could halve the money and time spent on such projects, said Kenji Fukuyama, an analyst at UBS Securities.

"Nothing can reverse, stop or slow down the current AI trend," said Masaaki Fukuda, who helped develop the PlayStation Network at Sony. Fukuda, 48, now a vice president at Preferred Networks Inc., Japan's largest artificial intelligence startup, sees a wave of change in the way digital content is created, and his company has established a partnership with an anime creator named Crypko. connect.

Crypko的角色创建界面(来源：Crypko)

Character artwork usually costs 100,000 yen (roughly $720) to outsource, but is now available from Crypko for a flat fee of 4,980 yen per month and a commercial license of 980 yen per image. Human artists are still needed to do some work that AI can't, Fukuda said, but the company is improving the tool every day and expects to fix the vast majority of flaws within a few years.

According to former Toukn Ranbu producer Yuta Hanazawa, the scale of demand for such content has continued to expand over the past few years. The cost of making a mobile game 15 years ago was about 40 million yen, and now it needs at least 500 million yen, mainly because image cost.

For the 25-year industry veteran, the new technology was appealing enough to start a new company, AI Works Inc., that sells game illustrations drawn by machines powered by artificial intelligence. Like Crypko, it requires human hands to complete the product, but it is much faster and cheaper than hiring professional artists. He said the company has provided artwork for several unannounced projects for half the usual industry rate.

AI-generated images, and human-modified versions (Source: AI Works Inc.)

"AI is the game changer I've been waiting for," said Hanazawa, 48. "By freeing developers from the burden of producing graphics at scale, it promises to reinvigorate the industry. Publishers will be able to take bigger risks, game creators will be able to once again be creatively brilliant, and users will be able to Choose from a wider variety of games."

However, the downside of all this automation is the corresponding unemployment rate. One industry executive, who declined to speak publicly about it, predicted a mass loss of jobs for workers as they knew them. "AI could eventually wipe out some job categories in the games industry, such as quality control, debugging, customer support or translation," said industry analyst Serkan Toto.

This month, Tokyo-based Morikatron Inc. showed off a complete game made by artificial intelligence. Murder mystery simulator Red Ram uses Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT to generate content based on player prompts. “Without the power of AI, the game would not have been possible to develop because you need a lot of art and text assets,” said company founder Yukihito Morikawa. It took four engineers three months to assemble it.

Jiro Ishii, best known for his live-action novel 428: Shibuya Scramble, predicts that within 10 or 20 years, everyone will be able to create their own games. This poses a threat to the "freemium" model employed by games like Dota 2 and Epic's Fortnite, which are free but require payment for in-game cosmetics and extra services.

Most also see great opportunity. Yosuke Shiokawa has dabbled in both, the former producer of Sony's hit smartphone game Fate/Grand Order and the founder of two-year-old Fahrenheit 213 Inc. He started experimenting with AI creation in video trailers, then used it as an aid in creating in-game objects and backgrounds, and added extra content that his four-person team hadn't been able to try before due to limited resources. "Soon, it won't be the budget that will determine the value of a game, but your creativity," Shiokawa said.

At the end of May, Huang Renxun, CEO of AI chip leader Nvidia, announced at the 2023 Taipei International Computer Show that Nvidia returned to the gaming field with its blockbuster "Nvidia ACE for Games" service. The service will address issues and improve gaming experiences related to NPCs (non-player characters), the background characters in video games. NPCs often give repetitive responses with scripted dialogue, and this limited range has made them the subject of some memes and even the mockery of Ryan Reynolds' movie "Free Guy."

Nvidia's new Nvidia ACE will listen to what players say to a character, convert it to text, and then dump it into a generative AI application to create more natural, impromptu replies and responses, which will be extremely helpful. Greatly enhance the player experience. The tech giant is currently testing the service and will add some "guardrails" to ensure responses don't become inappropriate or offensive to players. Nvidia's new game service will use artificial intelligence to activate some background characters or special characters, giving them more personality.