Talking to Japanese edition of GameSparkNexon CEO Younghoon Lee said he believes “it's important to assume that every gaming company is now using AI.”
This was in the context of a question about the impact of generative artificial intelligence technology on future Nexon projects, a technology that game developers are still exploring. without warming up, and some of them are increasingly concerned that this will reduce the quality of games.
Translated MachineLee said that “AI has definitely increased the efficiency of both game production and maintenance operations,” leading to his personal opinion that the “average” level of game quality is rising thanks to it.
However, returning to the premise that everyone is on board the AI generation train, the CEO wonders how studios can differentiate themselves from this competition.
“If everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: how to survive? I believe it is important to choose a strategy that will improve your competitiveness,” he said.
For Lee, strategy is “human creativity.”
Nexon has been working on artificial intelligence tools for eight years
While the CEO has spoken about Nexon's future projects, it is unclear how and in what capacity AI will be implemented in the game's development process. In 2017, the company launched Intelligence Labs, an in-house artificial intelligence research and development group that can help paint the picture.
By using Korean HeraldIntelligence Labs used machine learning and deep learning to “create more fun and immersive games,” led by a team of about 700 engineers who are now “focused on generative AI research to create original, personalized content for players.”
In a more practical example, in April 2023, the team publicly launched Gamescale, which offers a game matching algorithm based on user preferences and playstyles, providing an alternative to skill-based matchmaking.
Other tools include Nexon Voice Creator, a text-to-speech system that creates voices with different accents and pitches for non-player characters without a separate recording. The team also tested an “AI NPC” feature that would allow NPCs to “communicate directly with users outside of a single scenario.” As The Korea Herald notes, this opens the door to the creation of “false, biased, discriminatory and offensive statements.” In response, Intelligence Labs said it intends to “work toward establishing ethical guidelines for trustworthy AI in games.”
Lee's comments about the company's use of AI come amid a wave of criticism around Arc Raidersshooter game developed by Embark Studios and published by Nexon. At the game Steam PageThe studio has a disclosure for AI-generated content that states: “During the development process, we may use procedural and AI-based tools to assist in content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and self-expression of our own development team.”
Talking to PCGamesN, Arc Raiders Design director Virgil Watkins said the game “doesn't use generative AI in any way,” adding that “there's something called machine learning or reinforcement learning and it has to do with how our big multi-legged drones move around,” but noted that there's “no generative content here.”
At the same time, the text-to-speech conversion system present in Finalalso from Embark, a speech tool that generates audio cues for in-game commentators, used in Arc Raiders Also.
“How [you] stated [it's] same as Finalwe use this text-to-speech model. So we hire and hire voice actors for this – it's part of their contract that we use it. [AI] for this purpose, and this allows us to do things like our ping system, where it is able to communicate every name of an object, every name of a location and compass direction. This is how we can achieve this without having someone come in every time we create a new item for the game,” Watkins told PCGamesN.
In an interview with eurogamerEmbark CCO Stefan Strandberg said the studio uses “AI as tools to help create certain content, but it's always in the context of creativity, as an expression of the team.”
Elaborating on the text-to-speech model, Strandberg said the tool allows the team to “broaden the scope of the game in some areas” where Embark feels it's needed or where there's “tedious repetition” in situations where voice actors “may not see it as valuable work.”
So the justification for CCO is that these tools allow small teams to scale their operations. “We opened this studio with a huge range of procedural tools when it comes to world-building, and without that investment we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today,” he said.
