Anyone who follows the modern games industry knows that easy to use game engines and The accelerated shift towards digital distribution. have helped enable a massive increase in the number of commercial games released each year, both in console showcases and especially on Steam. Now, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino says we should expect the pace of new game releases to accelerate even further as new AI development tools make it easier for developers large and small to pursue new projects efficiently.
In a presentation to investors on FridayNishino noted that Sony “expects to see a significant increase in the volume and diversity of content available to gamers” in the near future. That increase is the inevitable result of AI development tools that are “reducing barriers to creation, accelerating development cycles and allowing more creators to enter the market,” he said.
As evidence, Nishino cited Sony’s own game development efforts. Game creators within Sony are already using AI tools to “automate repetitive workflows” in areas such as quality control, 3D modeling and animation, he said.
That includes a 3D animation tool called Mockingbird that Nishino says allows Sony artists to convert raw motion capture data into game animation much faster. While this tool can’t replace the motion capture actors themselves, it means that “animation work that would have taken hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second,” Nishino said.
Machine learning tools have also been able to capture “videos of real hairstyles” and apply them to automated animation models that can realistically model “hundreds of strands,” replacing the “laborious process” of animators positioning those strands individually, Nishino said.
Elsewhere in the presentation, Sony Group Chairman and CEO Hiroki Totoki praised the increased “efficiencies” enabled by AI tools, saying it would, in turn, lead to “more innovative and ambitious projects, projects that were previously difficult to carry out due to cost and time constraints.”
Totoki also highlighted a pilot partnership with publisher Bandai Namco that “identified massive gains in speed and productivity per person” in video production. While the team has needed to fine-tune generic AI models to avoid “consistency and controllability” issues, Totoki added that these models can, in some cases, help enable “highly sophisticated and realistic results that were not previously feasible due to production time constraints.”
