politicians across the world worry about the havoc that next-generation artificial intelligence will wreak on industries from finance to healthcare. For the US$200-billion games sector, the revolution has already begun.
The videogame industry is among the first to feel the full brunt of AI because it’s largely digital — encoded in an AI-readable language and created by software engineers well prepared to use, adapt and improve new computing tools. Before OpenAI took the world by storm with ChatGPT in November, it used Valve’s Dota 2 as a proving ground for its bots.
The scale of demand for such content has ballooned over the years, with mobile games that used to cost around ¥40-million to produce 15 years ago now requiring a minimum of ¥500-million, mostly because of graphics, according to former Touken Ranbu producer Yuta Hanazawa. AI is also becoming a powerful in-house tool. Gala Sports used publicly available AI services — image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney — to build internal toolkits for rendering realistic 3D head models, slashing the cost of a task that previously would take two weeks and as much as C¥200 000 when outsourced. Now it takes only half a day’s labour. The company has a team dedicated to building further tools to help with coding, design and even customer service.
This is a game that would be impossible to develop without AI’s power, because you’d need an infinite amount of art and text assets