Hello and welcome to another edition of The Game Business Micro. Lots of video game news this week, with major titles coming to market, and a whole bunch of financial results.
Plus, a bit of interesting data news, as Sensor Tower acquires AppMagic.
Let’s dive in.
P.S. Don’t forget to register for The Game Business Live in Los Angeles. Details below.
Is PlayStation’s AI vision a shareholder pleaser, or something more?
In Brief: Sony went into detail on how it’s using AI in game creation during a corporate strategy presentation last week. PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino believes AI will lead to fresh experiences, better discovery and will lower the barriers to entry for making games. In terms of how the company uses AI, Nishino-san said AI is automating repetitive workloads, and accelerating areas like QA, 3D-modelling and animations. Studios such as Naughty Dog and San Diego Studio are already utilizing AI tools.
What You Need To Know:
Sony CEO and president Hiroki Totoki said that AI will allow the company to “take on more innovative and ambitious projects”. He insists that ‘human creativity’ must remain at the center of its AI plans.
PlayStation’s Nishino-san said that first-party developers including Naughty Dog are using Mockingbird, which is a tool that generates facial models from performance capture. It’s used to ‘optimize’ how the developers process data from live capture. It doesn’t replace the human performers, Sony said.
The firm is also animating things like hair via AI tools. Hair animation was previously a labor-intensive job.
Nishino-san also highlighted the AI-powered racing agent, Sophy, which is used in Gran Turismo 7, and how PSSR used machine learning to enhance visual quality and framerates on PlayStation 5 Pro.
My Take:
It’s hard to talk about AI. It’s an emotive suject.
On one hand, AI is the technology that is flooding our social feeds with tedious videos and images designed to mislead. It’s the tech that is threatening jobs and livelihoods. And it’s using huge amounts of power, impacting the price of computers and consoles, and causing untold harm to the environment.
But AI is also these tools that mean graphic designers aren’t spending three hours painstakingly cutting out images on Photoshop, and can now just do that at a press of a button. It’s allowing us to more quickly put together presentations. It’s summarizing our emails when we need reminding of what’s going on.
The AI PlayStation is talking about is mostly the latter variety. Let’s get our animators doing more interesting things, and not spending half their time on Aloy’s hair. But this isn’t a new thing. The world has been developing tools and shortcuts and automation so that laborious tasks can be done more easily for centuries. In my field, there are AI tools that will transcribe interviews for you (albeit, not very well), which has existed for decades.
But boy, do shareholders like it. In an age where console prices are going up, growth is modest and costs are rising, it’s useful to have a buzz word to fall back on to reassure anxious investors. In case of emergency, break out the AI.
