Anyone who follows the modern gaming industry knows this easy to use game engines and accelerating the transition to digital distribution has allowed for a massive increase in the number of commercial games released each year in console showcases and especially on Steam. Now, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino says we can expect the pace of new game releases to accelerate even further as new AI development tools make it easier for developers big and small to efficiently implement new projects.
In presentation to investors on FridayNishino noted that Sony “expects to see a meaningful increase in the volume and variety of content available to gamers” in the near future. This growth is an inevitable result of AI development tools that “reduce barriers to creation, accelerate development cycles and enable more creators to enter the market,” he said.
Nishino pointed to Sony’s first-party game development efforts as evidence. Game makers within Sony are already using AI tools to “automate repetitive workflows” in areas such as quality assurance, 3D modeling and animation, he said.
It includes a 3D animation tool called Mockingbird, which Nishino says allows Sony artists to convert raw motion capture data into in-game animation faster. While the tool can’t replace the motion-capture actors themselves, it means that “an animation job that took hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second,” Nishino said.
Machine learning tools were also able to take “videos of real hairstyles” and apply them to automated animation models that could realistically model “hundreds of strands,” replacing the “labor-intensive process” of animators placing those strands individually, Nishino says.
Elsewhere in the presentation, Sony Group President and CEO Hiroki Totoki praised the increased “efficiency” created by AI tools, which he said would in turn lead to “more innovative and ambitious projects – projects that were previously difficult to implement due to cost and time constraints.”
Totoki also highlighted a pilot partnership with publisher Bandai Namco that “identified huge gains in speed and productivity per person” in video production. While the team will have to adjust the overall AI models to avoid “consistency and controllability” issues, Totoki added that these models can in some cases help “achieve highly complex and realistic results that were previously impossible due to production time constraints.”
