Game Revolution 2023: AIGC saves game makers

The history of civilization is the history of tools. Throughout the evolution of human society, every accelerated iteration depends on key technological breakthroughs.

In the past, there was a great explosion of productivity from the steam engine to the popularization of electricity, and the birth of computers and the Internet opened up a new world. Now AIGC will once again promote the transformation of advanced technological tools.

With the explosion of ChatGPT, AIGC has become the biggest outlet in the field of content creation.

Judging from the current results, thanks to the gradual enrichment of AIGC output types and quality, the versatility of technology is becoming more and more mature, the rapid progress of technology, and the emergence of various applications have greatly enhanced the imagination of the content industry. space.

**In many application fields, games have stronger technological attributes than other content forms, which means that the game industry is expected to become one of the industries with the highest participation and the most benefit from AIGC. **

As Jen-Hsun Huang, the founder of Nvidia, said in his speech, AI has brought us great opportunities. Companies that respond quickly will use AI technology to enhance their competitiveness, while companies that fail to make good use of AI will face decline.

**The game industry is in a period of shock and adjustment. For game manufacturers who are walking on thin ice, is joining AIGC a new round of sinking, or a rebirth after bottoming out? Can the use of AI-related technical tools become an important boost to the re-growth of enterprises and industries? **

It can be seen that although AIGC is in the initial stage of development, its impact on the game industry has already appeared.

AIGC: An Opportunity for Change in the Game Industry

**With the emergence of more and more cross-border applications of various game technologies, the game is expected to break through the existing industry category and usher in a new third expansion. **

This view from Ma Xiaoyi, Senior Vice President of Tencent, is revealing the imaginative space that AIGC has brought to the game industry today.

Throughout the development of the game industry, from stand-alone to network, PC to smart phone, the iterative upgrade of hardware carriers has always been the strongest driving force for the increase in the scale of the game industry, which has allowed the number of game users to grow from tens of millions to billions.

The current round of AIGC technological change is different from the previous rounds of hardware upgrades, and is regarded by Ma Xiaoyi as a qualitative change after a quantitative change. Game technology will be more and more widely integrated into more fields besides games, becoming a more general technical system.

In the development of cutting-edge technology, games can always embrace and apply the latest achievements in a timely manner. Now standing at the node of AIGC technology explosion, the industry is extremely looking forward to what kind of changes it can bring.

**To figure out one thing, the best way is to get involved in it first. Riding on the momentum of AIGC, various game manufacturers have laid out plans one after another, intending to seize the first wave of dividends. **

**Capable major manufacturers have released their own AIGC tools one after another. **Tencent AI Lab released a 3D scene automatic generation solution to help developers create highly realistic and diverse virtual city scenes in a short period of time; Kunlun Wanwei also released a large model of Kunlun Tiangong; Perfect World will be based on external AI technology, Develop AI production tools that are compatible with its game products. AI will participate in smart NPCs, scene modeling, painting, plots, dubbing, etc. in games.

Other manufacturers cooperate with external AI technology according to their own needs. Youzu Networks and Yuncong Technology jointly research the large language model (LLM) in the vertical field of games, and optimize the general AI technology for game scenarios.

The talent grabbing war has already been put on the agenda. The salary of relevant positions is generally around 30K, and for AIGC positions involving core projects, the head company can generously offer a basic salary of 60K.

Such a grand occasion is not difficult to understand. Everyone is using AIGC. If you want to lay out the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain and seize the technological peak, you must ensure that you run fast enough. The entry of various manufacturers also shows that game + AI is an industry trend with high certainty.

The logic is that, as a content industry, mobile games have a large and long-term desire for content. The game emphasizes real-time experience. During the game, users consume content continuously and in real time, which puts high demands on the efficiency of content production. **

Technology is always the primary productive force. Today, the more advanced production tools represented by AIGC are placed in front of all game manufacturers. Actively introduce AI technology and continue to explore the application of AI technology in game development, distribution and operation, and it is expected to gain a larger market space.

After experiencing the industry situation in the past few years, the development opportunities brought by AIGC are particularly precious. Under the competitive rhythm of all parties to seize the opportunity, it is only a matter of time before the industry changes.

Change the mode of production: find more interesting ways to play

The earliest attempts to combine AI and games were scripts and NPCs. The simple Pac-Man game set up behavior modes such as following, intercepting, and predicting.

Now AIGC helps to achieve more complex effects and greatly improve the interactive experience. What kind of more interesting gameplay can be discovered in the end is worth looking forward to.

If NetEase were to answer this question, the casual mobile game "Egg Boy Party" would definitely be regarded as a typical case. This small hit, which is frequently highlighted in NetEase's financial reports, topped China's iOS download list in the first quarter of this year, with more than 30 million daily active players, making it the game product with the highest daily active users in NetEase's history.

What is special about it is that **AIGC empowers the production of UGC content in the game, just like the free creation of the sandbox game "Minecraft", users can easily create through AIGC technology in "Egg Party" map, and have the opportunity to be officially included.

Guarding the treasure, escaping from the hunt, saving the princess, the missions that open your mind are presented in turn on millions of player maps in a week. This kind of high customization breaks the shackles of the single gameplay of the party game, and the volume of the game content doubles. The player's sense of participation and interaction is far beyond the past.

Such great progress can be made because AIGC has greatly lowered the threshold for users to produce content and improved production efficiency.

In the past, even if players had the enthusiasm for personalized creation, they would be dissuaded by factors such as the cumbersome creation process and the difficulty of using tools. AIGC replaces players to complete more complicated processes, and can produce a large amount of output with only creativity.

**The UGC user creation model is constantly iteratively upgraded. The richness of the game content and the openness of the ecology are far beyond the past. With the increase in user participation, users can also experience unprecedented interactivity and playability. **

Of course, this bonanza cannot be dug by the Netease family. Games such as China Mobile Games' "World of Sword and Sword" and Kunlun Wanwei's "Code Name D" all regard player creation as a key operation strategy, intending to get a share of the pie. MiHoYo has always been a pioneer in exploring new elements. Its new work "Honkai: Interstellar Railway" has a built-in self-developed AIGC tool meme resonance machine, which can transform the pictures uploaded by players into one of the protagonists of the game March 7 .

**The changes brought by AIGC in terms of gameplay and experience are not limited to this, and smart NPCs have also improved the immersion of the game far beyond the previous level. **

Two years ago, the Juewu team of Tencent AI Lab began to try to apply AI capabilities to the entire link of game production, operation and surrounding ecology. In the popular competitive mobile game "Glory of the King", players can conduct confrontation exercises with the ever-evolving Jue Wu AI, and the cooperation and reaction between the AI is no less than that of real players.

Netease's new mobile game "Naishuihan" is under the banner of the first game version of ChatGPT in China, and it advertises that everything can interact, and intelligent NPC is the key to it.

Different from the artificially set and process-based NPC content in the past, intelligent NPCs and players can freely generate dialogues and give logical behavioral feedback based on the dialogue content, just as game characters also have their own personalities and emotions.

Therefore, **Under the AIGC production model, facing the same game, different players are expected to enjoy the content experience of thousands of people. **Fang Han, CEO of Kunlun Wanwei, explained this: plots, maps, and levels can be dynamically generated through AIGC, players can enjoy their own exclusive plots and characters, and NPCs are no longer dolls bound by simple rules. You can make your own response to the player's actions, and the playability of the game product will be greatly improved.

The above AIGC’s changes to the game are only the tip of the iceberg. Sequoia Capital pointed out in the report that by 2030, the text, code, image, video, and 3D in the game can be generated by AIGC and reach the level of professional developers and designers. .

Perhaps in the end, game creators only need to be creative, and with the help of AIGC's production capacity, it will pave the way for the expansion of the game industry's production methods.

It can also be seen that **AIGC is the engine of innovation in the game industry, providing more personalized content for games, and a large amount of game data also provides sufficient nutrients for the iterative evolution of AIGC. **

Liberate Productivity: Explosive Potential under Cost Reduction and Efficiency Increase

**For game manufacturers, AIGC's help in reducing costs and increasing efficiency is even more fatally attractive. **

As a production tool, AIGC will greatly release productivity, help manufacturers conduct more creative explorations, and bring possibilities for game development to enter a golden age.

When it comes to the entertainment and media industry, games are the most complex form, with complex and diverse components, including text, images, animations, sound effects, music, 3D models, codes and other types of resources.

There is an impossible triangle of cost, efficiency, and quality in many industries, that is, it is difficult to balance R&D cost, R&D efficiency, and product quality at the same time, and the same is true for the game industry. Faced with a huge workload and tight deadlines, the team will inevitably be stretched.

**After the AIGC appears, it can improve the productivity of game planning, audio, art programs and other links, greatly improve the creative efficiency, help to compress the development cycle and personnel scale of the overall game project, and reduce the cost of game production. **

For example, on the development side, AIGC can assist developers to quickly complete the basic code and automatically complete some time-consuming and repetitive tasks. For the art side, AIGC can achieve fast drawing and modeling, and the staff only need to correct and tune the finished product, thus saving a lot of time.

This is undoubtedly an opportunity for game manufacturers to take advantage of the opportunity to take off. The minutes of Jiuqian Zhongtai experts show that AI can help categories increase the retention rate of next-day users by 3%-5% and daily activities by 5%-10%. On the R&D side, AI The introduction of the system can save 40%-70% of manpower and 60%-70% of time.

With such a terrifying improvement, no manufacturer is not tempted. In March this year, Tencent launched a self-developed 3D virtual scene automatic generation solution, which can help game developers create virtual cities with diverse styles and close to reality at a lower cost. The production time of a single 3D model building now only takes 17.5 minutes.

Youzu Network said that in April this year, the company's 2D art outsourcing cost has been reduced by about 25%, and it is expected to achieve a greater degree of cost reduction by the end of the year. The AI tool MidJourney used by Yingying Network in research and development can generate scenes and characters in large quantities, which can reduce the creation time from two months to half an hour.

From the perspective of the entire industry, another positive result is that small companies and teams can try to produce larger projects to compete with large companies through the proficient use of AI tools.

On May 28, Nvidia, known as the king of AI, announced that it will provide customized AI model foundry services for games, through which developers can build and deploy customized AI models for speech, dialogue and animation.

Now, game companies with limited strength don’t have to worry about not being able to find suitable AI tools.

The "2023 Game Development Report" released by Unity shows that in 2022, 62% of independent games and 58% of medium-sized studios will be developed and released within one year. For small studios with limited staff size and production capacity, the days of five years of development and hard work are a thing of the past.

In the era of AIGC explosion, this time will only be further compressed, and the combination of AIGC and games will undoubtedly explode with unprecedented potential. Perhaps in the near future, there will be amazing products, and the whole industry will usher in a grand occasion of a hundred flowers blooming.

Conclusion

Emerging technologies with technological prospects are the first to shine in the pure entertainment industry. It may sound a little embarrassing, but it is undeniable that integrating AI into the workflow is no longer empty talk in the game industry.

Game manufacturers are embracing this wave of technology in unison, because technological leaps are often the outposts of industrial transformation and pattern reshaping.

How to make full use of the potential of AIGC will deeply affect game manufacturers' insight into the market and grasp of the industry trend. Whoever can lead the development trend of the new generation of game products will be the first to stand on the wave.

No one wants to be abandoned by the times. What we can do now is to seize every opportunity and strive to be ahead.