Square Enix President: 'We Intend to be Aggressive in Applying AI' to Development and Publishing - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 January 2024 / 2,793 Views
Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu in the "New Year's Letter from the President" posted this week said the company will be "aggressive in applying AI" and other technologies to its development and publishing efforts.
"Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential implications had for some time largely been subjects of academic debate," said Kiryu. "However, the introduction of ChatGPT, which allows anyone to easily produce writing or translations or to engage in text-based dialogue, sparked the rapid spread of generative AIs.
"Its release made it apparent that the applicability of generative AI was by no means limited to text, and the subsequent months saw a quick succession of launches of new services and content that expanded generative AI into a variety of domains with close ties to digital entertainment, including images, video, and music. I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming."
He added, "We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions.
"In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts. In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities."
Kiryu did not go into any details on how Square Enix would use AI for its game development.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Funny, on the same day I see the head of Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. Animation speak out against using AI, saying he wants to protect the jobs of animators, I then later that same day see Square Enix saying they will use AI aggressively, which basically means that jobs will be lost at Square Enix, everything from translators for localization to artist and writer and programmer jobs most likely.
Applying AI in games is for a large part the same as advanced robots in factories. It's more efficient and cheaper than manual labour. I can't fault companies for doing that. After all we live in a capitalist society.
Yeah, I absolutely understand why Square Enix wants to do it, they want to cut costs and get out games faster to please their shareholders.
My concern is the lost jobs. For instance why hire 10 people per language to translate the script for a game during localization when you can have an AI do translation and then have a single human translator cleanup any errors the AI makes? Why have a team of 20 concept artists on a game when an AI can replace most of them? Why have a team of 10 writers on a game when an AI can write most of the dialogue and a single human writer can clean up the work and give it that human touch?
Square Enix is obviously going to choose an AI that costs practically nothing over multiple salaried humans because it protects their bottom line and gets games out faster. But what about those lost jobs? If most other publishers follow Square Enix they will have nowhere to work. Less job options for college students hoping to get into game design which will make those degrees less valuable.
The governments of the world are going to have to each decide how to tackle this AI automation issue and soon. Within the next several decades it is going to grow as an issue as AI creates huge unemployment issues as more and more companies in various fields implement AI automation to cut their costs, leaving humans out of jobs across many different fields and industries. The way I see it is governments have 3 options, 1. enact laws to limit AI usage and protect jobs, 2. Enact laws to pay to retrain those who lose their jobs to AI automation in other fields, or 3. Basically go the route of the Earth government in The Expanse and have a lazy society ran by AI where only a select few humans work and everybody else lives off of Universal Basic Income.
Considering most developed nations and China already has to deal with a massive demographics problem, I don't think we will face any massive layoffs yet, if anything there is a massive shortage in many fields, especially the energy field. There is a lot of work that cannot be done by AI.
As for the translator issue advancement unfortunately always comes with sacrifice. Although translators are already underpaid in a lot of branches. Though I am in favor of paid retraining. Still plenty of things to do in many companies AI can't do.
Are we back to the ludics? Also MS have talked extensively on using AI to develop games.
Ethics and economics aside, the problem here is that Square Enix just looks for whatever buzzword is around and applies it randomly in their statements (NFTs, blockchain, AI, etc.) with no thought given to it whatsoever.
So this can't even be taken seriously, it's just shameless trend-chasing.
Perhaps this AI tech will be what pushes out faster Xbox ports xD
I feel like SquareEnix management is struggling. Weren't they the ones that wanted to double down on NFTs, just before everyone else got burned enough they stopped their NFT projects? Recently SquareEnix wanted to reduce smaller production of smaller games in favor of big AAA productions, at a time the industry struggles with the cost of AAA and Square itself has success with smaller games (like Octopath 2 for instance) while their big AAA projects like Babylon's Fall and Forspoken crash and burn. And now this.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe a company not using AI in such fields as gaming in five years will be behind the competition. As a programmer I am excited for the possibilities opened by AI. I just recently read this article:
https://blog.boot.dev/computer-science/ai-taking-programming-jobs/
The author comes to the conclusion, if AI makes their programmers more effective, they will hire more instead of less, because they can more profit with them. I assume it is similar for artists that can get supported by AI. But the wording is definitely off, the usage of aggressive feels more like Square wants to replace jobs. This is failed to be doomed, because while AI is an amazing tool that can help support artists, it is not at a place to replace them.
AI is here. There's no closing Pandora's box once it's opened...
They sold Eidos for 300 million to focus on NFTs, NFTs dried up and Eidos sold the Tomb Raider IP to Amazon for 600 million. SE thought Avengers and Bab Fall were good ideas. SE is steering itself to acquisition and it's sad.
there goes quality out the window... whats the point of a handcrafted experiance, of storytelling, with A.I use?
A.i can have a place in massive open world experiances, where the avg. quest or such, is borderline meaningless. However for a single player game, with limited scope, and a focus on quality and storytelling.... I dont see how A.I benefits them.
I for one hope SE first tests this with new dev groups like Tokyo RPG Factory. Let them test the tech and see what sticks with the audience.
Would also be nice to see them utilize this for riskier projects or ones with a lower ROI. If they can make a game they wouldn't make because it is too expensive to use a team for it or it would push other deadlines and they can make it with some help of AI then I don't see why anyone is complaining
I don't inherently have a bad reaction to this, although I don't doubt Square could easily abuse it. I'm currently playing through FFXVI and although the key story moments are amazing, I'm seeing how in all the b-tier quests they're really struggling to push beyond PS2 level NPC interactions, especially the animations & lip syncing.
For AAA development there is definitely a problem with ballooning costs, lengthy development times so I'm not going to shoot down AI implementation in all capacity. Development teams in their existing sizes are struggling as is, so I'd like to see AI used as a tool to assist & increase output versus a replacement of staff.
I feel shortening the length of the overall game wouldn't hurt either. A lot of FFXVI side content has come off as pure filler. I would've rather they just kept in the side content that added a LOT of meaningful impact to the game. A lot of AAA games these days are just 10-20 hours too long. Not everything has to be 50-100 hours.
Depending on how it is used it can give a good improvement on game development, but of course it can also be a big detriment.
