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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories on this weekly newsletter.
Companies all over the world are still attempting to work out find out how to integrate artificial intelligence into their business models. For some industries, like music and comics, the AI boom is already posing a threat to business because of copyright infringement. However, there’s one sector where the advantages of the AI boom seem obvious: gaming.
AI has played a task within the gaming industry long before the hype of recent years. In early 2020, Sony's technology was already used to develop an AI agent that might beat the world's best drivers on the PlayStation game.
But the AI being incorporated into the most recent games today can have a way more direct impact on game firms' profits, drastically reducing the lavish budgets previously required to develop each latest game. Gamers want high-quality, hyper-realistic graphics and an immersive gaming experience. This requires plenty of time and resources, in addition to multi-million dollar budgets for game developers and creators.
That is, until now. Chinese gaming firms are leading the world in using AI tools to make game development much easier. Tencent, China's largest gaming group, uses generative AI technology that permits game developers to quickly generate animations and create realistic three-dimensional backgrounds and scenes for games. Other AI decision-making tools are used for game development testing, simulated gameplay, and to create game missions and scenarios. The country's second-largest group, NetEase, has also begun using generative AI to refine game development within the areas of planning, design, and coding.
This implies that game designers can have more time to give attention to the plot of the video games, developing the characters, dialogues and details of the setting and backstory of the sport universe – all of which AI cannot currently do at knowledgeable level. This also needs to enable faster and cheaper game releases. This in turn means more game releases per 12 months, reducing the danger of losses from a single flop and reducing the necessity to depend on a number of outdated titles for revenue.
China's $40 billion gaming sector has had a very good 12 months to date. Tencent continues to reap the rewards of its game, which has maintained its position as China's top-grossing game. Tencent's Hong Kong-listed shares have risen by greater than 1 / 4 this 12 months, easily outperforming the benchmark Hang Seng index. An AI-fueled boom will likely be welcome news for investors and gaming alike.
