The CEO and president of Sony Interactive Entertainment has outlined the company’s plans for its use of AI in game development, believing the technology can help bolster the creativity of its studios.
Speaking during a presentation following the company’s latest financial results, Hideaki Nishino described AI as a “powerful tool” to help PlayStation achieve its goal of being the “best place to play and the best place to publish.”
For our players, this will mean a gaming experience like never before. More immersion, more adventures, and fresh ways to enjoy their favorite characters. For our publishers, this will mean an even more efficient production environment and a better discovery to ensure their games reach the right audiences.
The application of AI will “lower the barrier to creation,” the executive added, as well accelerate development cycles “enabling more creators to enter the market.” As such, the hardware manufacturer anticipates “a meaningful increase in the volume and diversity of the content available to the players.”
Within our studios, game developers are automating repetitive workloads, improving software engineering productivity, and accelerating areas like quality assurance, 3D modeling, and animations through new AI power tools. For example, our teams created a tool we call Mockingbird that quickly animates 3D facial models based on the performance capture. Importantly, we’re not replacing human performers, but rather optimizing how we process the data from these live captures. With Mockingbird, animation work that would have taken hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second.
We’ve already seen the teams at Naughty Dog, San Diego Studio, and others adapt our tools, including in released titles like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Another example is the tool we built for animating hair. This is often a labor-intensive process, given the volume of strands that must be created. Our teams have accelerated this process by taking videos of real hairstyles and having an AI tool output a 3D model, with hundreds of strand models.
These practical applications allow our teams to spend less time on manual, high effort tasks, and to instead reinvest their time into building richer worlds and gameplay for our players.
Elsewhere, Nishino-san revealed that Sony is expanding its use of AI to areas beyond gaming, as it’s already use it for areas such as the PlayStation Store.
AI is also already a part of our platform business. To take one example, over the last few years, AI-powered tools ensure that transactions are routed efficiently over payment networks, generating over $700 million of incremental revenue. We are building on this success with ongoing projects that will use machine learning to provide the best value possible to our customers. As AI brings more choices to players than ever, the value of our platform will lie in its ability to recommend and personalize at scale.
We’ve already seen how AI models contribute to manual operation, and this will continue to improve. Our AI capabilities will evolve into a consumer-centric experience that not only suggests the next game a player might enjoy, but also the next gameplay moment, subscription, accessory, or merchandise that best reflects their passion.
As previously reported, Sony announced during its latest fiscal year report that the PS5 has now shipped 93.7 million units worldwide. In addition, the format holder confirmed that it hasn’t yet decided on the release date and price for the PS6, which still has yet to receive a formal reveal from the company.
[Source – VGC]