SEGA Plans to Use AI for “More Efficient” Game Development

SEGA has followed up their latest financial report with a Q&A where the company details some of their plans regarding future strategy and game releases.

Most of it is things that you always see in these reports. Promises to put out more product, do it faster, make more money, and generate better value for investors.

However, one of the responses stood out from the rest. Here is the full question that SEGA was replying to:

"Game development scales are trending larger. Will you follow this trend toward larger projects, or pursue efficiency?"

And their response:

"Rather than fully following the trend toward the large-scale development, we will also pursue efficiency improvements, such as leveraging AI. However, as AI adoption can face strong resistance in creative areas such as character creation, we will proceed by carefully assess appropriate use cases, such as streamlining development processes."

On one hand, it's refreshing to at least have the company acknowledge that using AI is not some silver bullet that will magically lead to pumping out games in record time while raking in more sales than ever. What's more likely to happen is that paying for an AI license will lead to extra spending. After that, you'll either get terrible results that will get called out, like it happened with Call of Duty, Anno, and Fortnite, or you will end up wasting more time after humans have to come in and fix things up to make them not terrible or obviously AI generated.

On the other hand, there's yet to be an "appropriate use case" for AI in game development. Even something like scheduling and organizational tasks are better left to people who actually know what they're doing. From management to design, coding, and art, AI has never improved on what people were already doing just fine.

Quite consistently, the only people pushing for adding AI into the process are executives who do not understand that they're not running a factory, or simply want to look good in front of clueless investors.

Here's hoping that their plans will not have any impact on the future of the Virtua Fighter series.