In October, Korean publisher Krafton, which is behind games like PUBG: Battlegrounds and Inzoi and whose studio portfolio includes Tango Gameworks, Unknown Worlds Entertainment and Neon Giant, announced that it would position itself as…AI-first companyThe firm said it will “prioritize artificial intelligence as a central and core problem-solving solution,” and the move will require a “complete” reorganization and an investment of KRW 100 billion ($69.7 million) in a new GPU cluster.
At Gamescom back in August, on the eve of Crafton's announcement, GamesIndustry.biz interviewed the directors of PUBG and Inzoi, who shared more about Krafton's take on AI and how they use it in their games.
PUBG: Battlegrounds director Taehyung Kim said (through a translator) that Krafton offers PUBG Studios a range of artificial intelligence tools. “But they don’t force us to use them,” he said. “They just recommend and suggest and we watch and then test them. And when we find something useful, we put it into our pipeline. So we do a review and then decide whether to use it or not. If we don't find it effective, then we don't use it. But if we find it effective, then we use it.”
Kim said that PUBG Studios uses AI to review the code. “So we write code and feed it to the AI, and it tells us what the problem is, like spelling errors,” he said. “And sometimes it’s wrong, it doesn’t give the right answers. So we double check with people.” Kim, however, stressed that the studio does not use AI to generate code.
But the studio is using AI to create concept art. “We don’t use it in the final product,” Kim said. “But we use it initially because it's much faster. [final artwork by hand]concept-based, AI-generated material.”
Looking beyond Crafton, Kim is positive about the potential of artificial intelligence to empower small teams—and more generally, he sees a bright future for small indie studios that can innovate and create games quickly. “When you think about big companies, there are so many people and it's a slow process because you have to go through a lot of approvals. But if it's a one- or two-person company… with AI, I think they'll make games very quickly, and they'll make different games.”
Virtual dollhouse
While PUBG Studios only uses AI for small parts of the development process, the developers of the Sims-like life simulation game Inzoi are fully behind the technology.
Inzoy's director, Hyunjoong “Kjun” Kim, said through a translator that the AI ”has really helped a lot,” especially in terms of allowing players to modify the game using their own resources. “They can simply input an image and then our 3D printer converts that image into a 3D object and allows players to place that object in the world,” he said. “If you input video, it becomes poses and motion animations that you can use in the game. And if you enter text, it gives you an image that you use on your wallpaper, for example.”
Kjun doesn't think using AI will necessarily make Inzoi faster, and he doesn't think AI will ever replace humans in making games. “But it actually gives us new tools to find new types of entertainment,” he said. “I think our genre really benefits from the use of AI, so it was a natural decision to lean towards AI when creating some features. Other genres at Krafton have tried to implement AI into their games and their processes, but have found it to be less useful than it was for the Inzoi development team.”
Kjun's team is also experimenting with adding AI-generated dialogue to Inzoi. GamesIndustry.biz a demo was shown of a young man talking to his mother, where the dialogue choices and speech were entirely AI generated. The system also generates actions in the game: the conversation we observed ended with an agreement that the couple should watch TV, prompting the characters to do just that.
It was far from perfect—the voices had a distinctly robotic intonation, and the generated dialogue contained some odd turns of phrase (“Perhaps your ears are just lazy”). But it's also possible to understand why an emergent system like this might work in Inzoya's dollhouse world – where players use and abuse it to create absurd scenarios – whereas in a more serious game, stilted conversations would seem out of place.
It all depends, of course, on how much players are willing to accept AI in games. While AI assets are already becoming commonplace in mobile gamesthe players seem there are far fewer people willing to endure them in premium games. Inzoi, which is currently in Steam Early Access, has encountered reaction of some players when it was revealed that generative AI was used in its development.
One of the biggest concerns consumers face when using AI is the ethics of using training data, especially when the AI is trained on text or images that were used without the creators' explicit permission. But Kjun insists that all Inzoi models are trained on internal data. “We actually tried using other… data, but we found that our own internal data worked best,” he said.
Regarding the question of whether AI will replace jobs, Kjun admitted that he sometimes has that concern. “Maybe someday I will be replaced by AI. But I don't think so, at least in the near future, because I think AI tools really make your job easier and help you come up with more creative ideas that will actually help you. So it’s more like a tool that you can use.”
As for the negative reaction in some circles to Inzoi's use of GenAI, he said he expected it. “But I believed that AI would make the game more fun and really help us in the long run. And so going forward we'll try to continue to communicate with our players and make sure their concerns are addressed and just try to understand where things are coming from so that everyone has a common understanding of where we are.”
“I think AI tools really make your job easier and help you generate more creative ideas.”
Hyunjun 'Kjun' Kim
Rather than replacing what humans can do, Inzoi's use of AI is thought to add something that wasn't possible before. But for some, GenAI is a red line they won't cross, and some negative reviews of Inzoi on Steam cite Krafton's AI-focused approach as the reason they opposed the game.
Full release of Inzoi is still a long way off, likely well beyond the end of 2026, according to Kjun. By the time it finally arrives, it will be interesting to see whether audience sentiment toward AI has softened or hardened—and whether Crafton's bet on the future of AI has paid off.
