In a recent press release, the Google Cloud Japan team announced Capcom‘s intention to use generative AI during game development. Capcom’s technical director, Kazuki Abe, stated that using generative AI could help cut costs, which have steadily increased. The company plans to use Gemini Pro and Imagen to generate images for environmental ideas. “One of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive aspects of game development is coming up with ideas for creating the game’s worldview,” Abe said.
Abe said that each game would require a massive amount of ideas that would be given to art directors and artists. The man believed that using generative AI would increase efficiency. Capcom plans to use various AI technologies to generate images and prompts. The company also intends to work with Google Cloud so it can operate these technologies within the Vertex AI framework. “With other companies’ services, it took several minutes for the generative AI to analyze the configuration data and then output the results after giving them to the prompt, but with Gemini, it only took a few seconds, which was overwhelmingly faster,” Abe said.
Abe stated that they are still in the trial phase, but they are satisfied with the large output of diverse ideas generated using AI. He also mentioned that the number of people required to brainstorm these ideas could be reduced to just one. Capcom is now hiring more engineers to develop a user-friendly interface for team members. “In the future, we plan to allow users to make partial edits to the ideas and images generated,” Abe said, “and we are also considering updating the system to make it easier for external partners who do not have direct access to the company’s network to use.”
Although Capcom is optimistic about the use of AI in game development, many fans have expressed dissatisfaction and wariness. “Capcom has a vast library of historic games and franchises,” one Redditor wrote. “They don’t need to do this.” Some fans pointed out a major issue: current generative AI often uses stolen artwork based on existing ideas. “We might end up playing Mega Mouse, the robot mouse that runs fast and jumps on turtles to save the world from the heartless,” another fan commented.
