Anyone who follows the modern games industry knows that easy-to-use game engines and the rapid shift to digital distribution have helped to drastically increase the amount of commercial games released each year on both console storefronts and especially Steam. Now, Hideki Nishino, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, says we should expect the rate of new game releases to get even faster as new AI development tools make it easier for developers big and small to move new projects forward efficiently.
In a presentation to investors on Friday, Nishino said Sony “hopes so.”[s] We look to see a meaningful increase in the amount and variety of content available to players in the near future. This growth is the inevitable result of AI development tools that are “reducing barriers to creation, accelerating development cycles, and enabling more creators to enter the market,” he said.
As evidence, Nishino cited Sony’s first-party game development efforts. Game creators inside Sony are already using AI tools to “automate”[e] Repetitive workflows in areas such as quality assurance, 3D modeling and animation, he said.
This includes a 3D animation tool called Mockingbird, which Nishino said allows Sony artists to convert raw motion capture data into in-game animation much faster. Although the equipment itself cannot replace motion-capture actors, it means that “animation work that used to take hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second,” Nishino said.
Machine learning tools are able to take “videos of real hairstyles” and apply them to automated animation models that can realistically model “hundreds of strands,” replacing the “labor-intensive process” of animators placing those strands individually, Nishino said.
Elsewhere in the presentation, Sony Group Chairman and CEO Hiroki Totoki praised the increased “efficiency” enabled by AI tools, saying that this would lead to, “more innovative and ambitious projects – projects that were previously difficult to pursue due to cost and time constraints.”
Totoki also highlighted a pilot partnership with publisher Bandai Namco, which “identified massive gains in speed and productivity per person” in video production. While the team needs to fine-tune general AI models to prevent “stability and controllability” problems, Totoki said that these models can, in some cases, help enable “highly sophisticated and realistic outputs that were not previously possible due to production time constraints.”
<a href