Is Krafton's $69 million AI-first shift a sign of things to come?

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PUBG maker Krafton is plotting a major shift: it wants to become an AI-first company and is investing ₩100 billion ($69 million) to make it happen. The developer also wants to invest around ₩30 billion ($20m) annually to support its staff with the move. That, the firm says, is more than 10-times the scale of its existing AI service support.

So in practical terms, what does that actually mean? Krafton alludes to changing its management structure, as well as the same old promises used by companies of automating tasks and allowing employees to focus on being more creative.

The cynic in me says a driver of this is to excite investors with the magic of AI technology that appears to have created an AI bubble similar to the dot-com boom in the US. Watch this space on that one.

But Krafton has long been serious about AI and is very open about its aims. While other publishers may shy away publicly, the PUBG maker has embraced it. Last year, Krafton CFO Dongkeun Bae said the tech could be used for level design, writing and voice acting.

"We also use our own technology to adopt LLM capabilities in generating unlimited conversations - to enable rich conversations with NPCs. TTS technology generates voice recordings that best fit the characteristics of the game without having voice actors do a voiceover, which helps save development time and costs. And by using our own generative AI tools we can incorporate deliverables unencumbered by copyright directly into game production."

It’s a glimpse into the future of where some publishers want to take the tech and the opportunities they believe it has. An issue at the heart of the 11-month SAG-AFTRA strike. Krafton isn’t alone, of course. Supercell looks to be going all-in, opening an AI Innovation Lab in San Francisco and launching a global AI game hackathon that begins today. 

Check out our panel with Supercell’s Otto Söderlund and Aiba’s Hege Tokerud discussing AI in games from Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki below.

EA, hot off its $55 billion sale, has just formed a strategic partnership with Stability AI to co-develop generative AI tools that can be used in production by artists, designers and developers. Specifically:

“Together with EA we are exploring ways to add the value of generative AI to the creative workflows to open new doors for rapid prototyping and visual storytelling, allowing artists and developers to ideate, visualise, and refine gameplay experiences faster and at greater scale.”

I wrote previously how even just the hype around AI is shaking up the industry. The investment is only ramping up.

Krafton will be amongst a number of key publishers in attendance at Pocket Gamer Connects Summit Korea on October 31st.