CEOs and politicians around the world are concerned about the havoc that next-generation artificial intelligence could bring to industries ranging from finance to healthcare. But the most noticeable and radical changes are now taking place in the gaming industry. For this sector cost The $300 billion revolution has already begun. Many have even managed to play some games Vaudeville or free DetectiveGPT, where people decide who committed the crime by interacting with AI characters. The result is often obtained quite funny.

The standard price for AAA games has been $60 for over thirty years (since the SNES). And the cost of their development during this time has increased several dozen times. So far, the industry has survived with the help of a constantly growing audience. But it is already becoming clear that this is not sustainable growth. And in recent years, even it is observed only on mobile devices. On the PC, their number is almost does not growand new PCs are bought less and less. On consoles too there is no growth. Under such conditions, increasing the cost of games does not seem like the best idea. Instead, you have to cut the bones. And for this, the perfect tool appeared!

From San Francisco to Tokyo to Hong Kong, a host of digital entertainment companies are responding to decades of rising costs and stagnant prices by feverishly developing and implementing new AI tools. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake. But company executives say the new technology could empower smaller studios, boost creativity in the industry and ultimately benefit gamers around the world.

The country of the rising II

When the game industry is mentioned, America is most often mentioned. With her Blizzard, Bethesda, EA, Epic Games and so on. But in fact, almost from the USA not far behind Japan due to the fact that as many as 61% of the population there consider themselves “players”. In terms of using II, the country has advanced much further than the US: they do not have such ethical barriers, and they are happy to use new technologies. While in Europe and the States companies are deciding whether it is possible to voice characters with AI voices or to fire illustrators and replace them with the Stable Diffusion model, in Japan the process is already in full swing.

The head of the largest Japanese game studio is preparing for the fact that in five years half of the programmers and designers in his company will become redundant. Gala Sports executives shelved all non-AI research projects, forced department heads to study machine learning, and offered rewards of up to $7,000 for new ideas to implement AI. And even they worry that they might be late.

“Practically every week we feel that we will be destroyed,” writes the 36-year-old CEO of Gala Sports. Jia Xiaodong. He himself is Chinese, his company is registered in Hong Kong, and the main market for his football and basketball games is Japan. According to him, the industry there is being shaken so quickly that none of the companies can feel at ease. “The impact of AI in the last three or four months has been as significant as the changes in the last thirty or forty years.”

Jia himself now believes that companies that do not use generative AI will simply not survive any time soon. They will be bypassed by competitors whose game production will be much cheaper. Voice acting, music, illustrations, writing dialogues, character design, high-quality videos – all this can already be done with the help of AI, and the risk of going bankrupt in the company will be much lower.

The video game industry was one of the first to experience the full power of AI because it is primarily digital – that is, coded in a language that AI can understand and created by software engineers well-trained to use and adapt these new computing tools. Long before OpenAI conquered the world with ChatGPT in November, it was using Dota 2 as a testing ground for its bots. And DeepMind in 2018-2019. developed his models by training them win the best players in Starcraft II.

AI understands video games very well, there is a lot of information about them online to train it, and this technology is very easy to tie into existing processes. Its appearance gives the industry a rare chance to review its business model, which in some cases has become bloated and formulaic. Game production costs are growing faster than their sales. The recent releases The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West reportedly cost Sony more than $200 million each, and demanded 5-6 years of work from three hundred employees (+ another 2100 people helped with small things). Analysts believe that due to II investments of money and time in such projects can be halved.

For example, Japan’s largest AI startup Preferred Networks recently announced a partnership with an anime character creation platform called Crypko. Good character designs, which normally cost more than ¥100,000 ($720) each when outsourced, can be obtained from Crypko for a flat monthly fee of ¥4,980 ($35) plus a commercial license of ¥980 (7 per style. If required to create a lot of heroes, the savings are not multiplied, but by an order of magnitude. For those who want to taste, by the way, there is a free 7-day trial.

This is very relevant for the anime-style game industry, such as Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail or Fate/Grand Order. The creators of such games have to create hundreds of characters with unique designs. Moreover, the profit from the game depends on the quality of the design, since players spend money on trying to get the heroine they particularly liked for their collection. With the new AI generators, all the work of the “illustrator” now comes down to understanding the audience. Only one of hundreds of AI-created characters is added to the game – the one whose design seems to be the most profitable.

The scale of demand for such content has grown dramatically over the years: mobile games that cost around 40 million yen (up to $300,000) to produce 15 years ago now require at least 500 million yen ($3.5 million) of investment, mainly due to expensive graphics.

A company has also recently been established in Japan to help with this AI Works – which sells illustrations for games. In this case, they are much more realistic, and not necessarily made in anime style. And at the final stage, as in Crypko, they are retouched by a person. It is much faster and cheaper than hiring an artist. The company already provides works for several game projects – for half the usual price ($350 for three illustrations with a character instead of $720).

AI Works say that “AI is a game-changer, freeing developers from the burden of mass-producing graphics. It will revitalize the entire industry.” On their website, they write that “Publishers will be able to take more risks, creators will be able to create again, and as a result, users will be able to choose from a greater variety of games.”

AI is also becoming a powerful internal tool for some companies. Thus, Gala Sports used publicly available artificial intelligence services – Stable Diffusion and Midjourney image generators – to create their own applications for rendering realistic 3D models of athletes’ heads. A task that used to take two weeks and cost up to $28,000 now costs pennies. It is enough to load inside a hundred photos of a popular athlete downloaded from Google, and the model will do the rest in a few hours.

Since in their sports games there are hundreds of such athletes who are sometimes viewed nearby, the savings are very significant. Gala Sports now has an entire team dedicated to building additional tools to help with code, design, and even customer service. Part of their support requests are already being processed by AI.

The downside of all this automation, of course, is the loss of jobs. Industry leaders refuse to speak publicly on this matter, and their interviews cannot be found. But many workers are expected to lose their jobs or be forced to change their field of activity. “AI could eventually wipe out entire categories of player professions – such as quality control, debugging, customer support, or translating games into other languages,” – says on Twitter (sorry, in “X”) industry analyst Serkan Toto. Illustrators and programmers will probably also need to learn new tools, and their profession will become much less about drawing and writing code. It is more important to learn to carefully check the work of AI.

Last month, Tokyo-based Morikatron released its first AI-powered game. This is also a detective simulator, a graphic novel Red Ram. Her story, character profiles, all texts and all situations in it were generated by ChatGPT. He also generated proofs and hints (though, later people selected them). The AI ​​also generates text in real-time, answering the player’s questions on behalf of various characters. The result is almost infinite replayability: you can replay such a game hundreds of times, since new hints are generated for you every time, and the characters give new answers. However, as far as I understand, the number of options for attackers in the game is still limited.

All images – character designs, landscapes, locations – were generated using Stable Diffusion. Moreover, the company says that in its next games it wants to do this in real time, so the player will be able to explore such locations that they did not even think about.

Company founder Yukihito Morikawa says the game was put together by four developers in just three months.

Those who will be hit hardest by the new technology, and who will definitely not be able to stay in their profession, are voice actors. As a maximum, if someone is lucky, he will be able to receive royalties for his votes. But most likely, this profession will simply disappear soon.

Jiro Isiya, known for creating the novel 428: Shibuya Scramble and a number of other popular visual novels, expects that in a decade everyone will be able to create their own games. This is a threat to the modelfreemium” imposed on us by games like Dota 2 and Fortnite, which are free to play but require payment for in-game cosmetic items. If an ordinary user can create cosmetics at the same level and in unlimited quantities, the cost of such skins is leveled.

Most see the opportunity that new technologies open. Yosuke Shiokawathe former producer of the popular smartphone game Fate/Grand Order, as well as the founder of a small firm Fahrenheit 213, now uses AI to create in-game objects and backgrounds, as well as implement additions that his team of four previously wouldn’t have dared to even attempt due to limited resources. Now, creating a new location in their game takes only a few days: it is enough to kill a database with your style, and a second database with ideas or sketches for a new area.

It looks like the value of games will soon be determined only by your creativity, not your budget.