Nexon, parent company behind it Getting Started Studio and massive PvPvE extraction shooter attacks ARC raider has been a long-time supporter A.I And Generative AI (GenAI) enter the game development workflow. That’s the CEO of Nexon, Jung Hun Leewhich last year said that players should assume that all game makers use GenAI, which was met with rousing pushback from some game developers at the time.
So it’s no surprise that in the company’s latest Capital Markets Briefing, Lee and the company’s newly appointed executive chairman (and head of Embark Studios), Patrick Soderlundboth boast about how Nexon’s approach to AI and GenAI in their workflows is “different” than anyone else and allegedly better.
“Every company has a plan; most will misunderstand,Söderlund said.They make huge investments in tools – but the tools won’t help because they misread the challenge. AI may be a race, but the winners are not the first to move – the winners are those who understand the challenge. Think of game development as automated mechanics. These tools are available to everyone, but not everyone has the knowledge and experience to use them. That’s where the Nexon is different.“
As Lee said, “Our methodology No replacing creative people, it’s liberating them to create, with context.” The ‘with context’ part refers to the Nexon Mono Lake Initiativewhich is a mass collection of data that the company has collected over the years of its existence.
“Mono Lake provides intelligence across everything we build and operate – every developer, every live operations team, every product decision has access to the information base we’ve accumulated over decades,” Lee said. That’s Lee’s way of claiming that his company avoids the core problem with AI, which is “AI without context is just speed. Faster output than general results. A tool that knows nothing about design history, player behavior, or innovation. Without context, AI is a race to the arithmetic center where everyone’s game looks the same. That’s not a competitive advantage. That’s noise, on a large scale.“
Lee later compared the rise of AI and GenAI technology to ARC Raiders, and called it an extraction shooter “Trojan Horse – a gift that includes a mindset shift about how technology frees up developers and live services teams to spend more time thinking and less time typing. More time to innovate; less time writing code.”
“It changes the way people work. The tools they use, how fast they move, what they can accomplish. But what goes into our games – the creative content that our players actually experience – is still the work of our developers. Our methodology does not replace creative people, but frees them to create, given context. Today, our best people spend more time making creative decisions – decisions guided by context…context based on billions of player decisions…context that precious few companies can match.“
Putting aside the fact that the Trojan Horse comparison doesn’t quite work when you consider that the ‘gift’ contained in the horse is a horde of soldiers burning down and destroying the city whose leaders received the ‘gift’, it’s once again not surprising to hear Nexon double down on its AI bet.
The company has long focused on AI, so seeing more support is as surprising as seeing the sun in the morning. That said, it’s also worth noting that these comments come after Söderlund recently admitted that Embark had replaced the GenAI voices for NPCs in ARC Raiders with human voices because “Real professional actors are better than AI; that’s how it is.”
Still, Söderlund, Lee, and the rest of Nexon should not be swayed from their AI-led path. Whether this proves to be the best course for the company in the long term remains to be determined.
Especially when Lee said that Nexon doesn’t want to replace humans with AI, while at other times, Söderlund boasted about Embark’s approach to building successful games like ARC Raiders and Finals includes processes that, with AI, produce “Two games, made with far fewer people, for less money than you’d expect for a AAA game.”
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