Krafton is aiming its focus towards "game development efficiency" empowered by AI, meaning bots becoming level designers, generated text replacing writers, and text-to-speech taking work from expensive, "limited" voice actors.

Krafton CFO Dongkeun Bae discussed the company’s advancements with AI during its Q1 financials conference call, revealing the newly established AI strategy team set up back in March "so as to accelerate the use of AI technology across the company".

Bae noted that deep-learning R&D capabilities "continue to broaden" at Krafton, and that at least four AI games are scheduled to release this year.

Artificial artists arrive

Bots are now actively involved in game design and QA at Krafton, and the PUBG maker has built a system for further bot production taking place automatically. Instead of relying on the "traditional method" of paying authors to write game scripts, AI is also being implemented to create "infinite" dialogue options and create more varied and interactive NPCs.

So too are voice actors old news at Krafton - too costly in time and money, and offering a "limited" scope of voices and emotions. Text-to-speech AI, meanwhile, is believed to offer a path to broader acting capabilities that "best fit the characteristics of the game".

AI treading on human toes may be a disturbing signifier to any writers, voice actors, and level designers out there, but from Krafton’s perspective, the technology offers only unlimited potential.

"In terms of game production, we are experiencing an innovative way of making games powered by AI, moving away from the traditional approach. We’ve built a system whereby we use reinforced learning to design games and measure difficulty levels, and to build bots automatically," said Bae.

"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."

Among the games utilising AI tech is Uncover The Smoking Gun, a futuristic detective game powered by ChatGPT.

Bae added: "We’re also actively exploring new gameplay powered by AI. Our plan is to release more than four AI game titles in 2024, including Uncover The Smoking Gun, which is an AI-based chatting game developed by Relu Games, a studio we spun off last year."

With gaming layoffs so abundant already - over 8,000 employees have lost their jobs in 2024 alone - such AI advancements will only be giving more workers more reasons to worry.