On the afternoon of July 29, the 21st China International Digital Interactive Entertainment Exhibition (CHINAJOY) in 2024 came to a successful conclusion.

As the vane of China's digital entertainment industry, ChinaJoy has gone through a development process from scratch and from small to large, and has become one of the most well-known and influential annual events in the global digital entertainment field.

At this year's ChinaJoy, the biggest feeling of the editor is that you can see the word AI everywhere you go.

Race to get in

"At last year's forum, everyone was still discussing the experimental results and application prospects of 'game + AI', and in just one year, AI has come out of the laboratory and officially 'started' work, becoming an indispensable new quality productivity." On ChinaJoy, NetEase's vice president Da Da Zhi said.

According to the "AIGC Development Prospect Report of China's Game Industry", among the top 50 game companies in China's game revenue, more than 60% of the leading game companies have clearly laid out the AIGC field and have made substantial moves.

However, unlike many game companies that have only paid attention to the application of AI in the past two years, leading companies such as NetEase, Tencent, and Sanqi Mutual Entertainment have already made layouts and taken the lead.

As early as 2016, Tencent established AI Lab, and in the same year, it launched Game AIR, a one-stop platform. In 2017, NetEase completed the early layout of AI, and established a number of research institutes and laboratories such as NetEase Fuxi and NetEase Interactive Entertainment AI Lab. Sanqi Mutual Entertainment also started the exploration of AI in game industrialization in 2018.

Specifically, NetEase's research on game AI has two obvious main lines, one is in the production process, such as copywriting, art, programs and other scenarios, to enrich game content and reduce costs, and the other is to optimize the interaction between NPCs and players in the game on the user experience side.

Tencent, on the other hand, has been exploring the large-scale production of NPCs, diversifying the creation of virtual city scenes and other related technologies, and investing significantly more in the production process.

Sanqi Mutual Entertainment has taken the path of game research and operation of full-chain AI applications from the very beginning. At present, it has independently developed nine mid-platform products and established a mature game industrialization pipeline——

Sanqi Mutual Entertainment's AI products can participate in multiple subdivision processes such as planning, art, technology, testing, promotion and delivery, operation and maintenance, covering almost all aspects from R&D to distribution.

According to Wang Chuanpeng, vice president of data of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment Technology Center, nowadays, AI's empowerment of games has penetrated into multiple scenarios, which is not only a tool to improve efficiency, but also can improve the consumption willingness and participation of game users from many aspects, and empower the user experience.

The AI+ game track is accelerated

AI can indeed play a pivotal role in improving productivity.

At this forum, NetEase's vice president Da Da Zhi said that the game industry has always been recognized as the best testing ground for AI technology, and it is also the earliest outpost to perceive and adapt to the impact of AI.

"Taking NetEase as an example, we are currently using artificial intelligence technology to improve work efficiency in many key links such as voice generation, original picture generation, motion capture, and model generation. We believe that the next step for the industry is how to fully unleash the potential of AI and share the AI dividend with more industries and even the whole society. "Huge wisdom.

Pangzhi also said that the quality and efficiency improvement brought by AI is expected to become a way for the game industry to get rid of the traditional growth shackles and development paths, and break the "impossible triangle" that has been difficult to meet the cost, quality, and efficiency at the same time for a long time.

Vice President of NetEase

Zhang Wei, vice president of Tencent, said that this year it launched a new self-developed AI engine, which can improve some work efficiency in game scene production, content generation and other fields by more than 40 times. In the Naruto mobile game, the large-scale reinforcement learning solution for fighting games directly reduced the time and resources required for training by more than 90%.

Looking at the self-developed art design center "Turing" of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, it has realized the most commonly used functions of art, such as Wensheng diagram, Tusheng diagram, partial redrawing, and intelligent mapping.

In the original character painting link, if an artist used to draw 10 hours, after the introduction of "Turing", it can save more than 60%-80% of the man-hours, that is, 2-4 hours can be completed!

After Sanqi Mutual Entertainment put into use the "Quantum-Tianji" system, it helped the delivery staff to shorten the time from 6 hours to 30 minutes, and the efficiency was increased by more than 10 times.

In order to integrate these nine middle-end products, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment has also built an internal AI Agent platform to improve the independent decision-making ability and collaborative office efficiency of digital and intelligent products.

In addition, the application of AI technology will also reduce production costs, which has become the consensus of the game industry. Xie Chenghong, chairman of Layabox, a 3D engine company, once predicted that AIGC will greatly reduce the cost and threshold of game development, which has been reduced by about 30% and is expected to reach 90% in the future.

New possibilities

In addition to improving the efficiency of game development and reducing production costs, there is still more room for imagination for the future of AI in the game industry.

One is that the game has found a way to get along with AI, such as a truly open game world, AI NPCs with thinking, and the direction of the plot will be left to the user to decide, so as to enhance the interactivity of the game and achieve a game experience of "thousands of people and thousands of faces".

Take NetEase as an example, on February 15 last year, NetEase's martial arts open-world mobile game "Against the Cold" implemented the first game GPT in China, allowing intelligent NPCs to freely generate dialogues with players, and based on the content of the dialogue, independently give logical behavioral feedback, including voice and body movements.

In the demo video given by NetEase, players join the chat between intelligent NPCs by "interjecting". The two female NPCs are discussing the topic of being thousands of miles away from their husbands, and the player suddenly comes up with the sentence "Long-distance relationships have no future", which immediately makes the NPC break the defense.

Against the cold

Looking at Tencent again, at the recent 2024 Game Developers Conference, it released a self-developed game AI engine GiiNEX.

This engine can cover multiple aspects of the game's life cycle from development to operation, such as generating NPC dialogues, game plots, urban buildings, etc.

At present, GiiNEX has entered Tencent's popular party game "Yuanmeng Star", and its main role is to provide players with a series of UGC level design tools. This made many Yuanmeng players happy, "I can't build a map, AI can handle it directly!" ”

The Star of the Yuan Dream

Another kind of future is that with the great improvement of game productivity in the future, all-factor AI-generated games will be born, that is, all the resources in the game will be generated by AI.

In this regard, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment has taken the lead.

It is understood that at present, in addition to the nine major digital and intelligent products, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment also continues to study more novel gameplay and innovative experiences, including studying the way to recommend and generate players' preferred images, elements, and gameplay through AIGC, so as to lower the threshold for creation, help players participate in creation, and explore the possibility of creating a non-linear game process experience.

Not long ago, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment has launched a plot-driven elimination game "Mingyue Palace Heart", whose materials and plots are produced by artificial intelligence, which is the latest exploration of the ultimate application of AI technology within Sanqi Mutual Entertainment.

The heart of the Bright Moon Palace

At the same time, in addition to independent exploration and internal incubation, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment also explores industry opportunities in the field of AI through technology investment, and invests in many high-quality technology companies such as Zhipu Huazhang, Shenyan Technology, Silicon Heart Technology, Chenjing Technology, Thunderbird Innovation, Yingmu, Suiguang, etc.

epilogue

In the past, with the development of science and technology and the mutual inspiration of games, the international competitiveness of domestic games has also continued to soar.

According to the "2023 China Game Industry Report" released by the Game Publishing Working Committee of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association, in 2023, the actual sales revenue of the domestic game market will be 302.964 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.95%, breaking through the 300 billion mark for the first time.

Specifically, Tencent has become the only Chinese mobile game publisher with overseas revenue exceeding US$1 billion in the overseas revenue ranking of Chinese game manufacturers disclosed by the data.ai.

With the outstanding performance of "Genshin Impact" and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" in the global market, miHoYo's overseas revenue in 2023 will increase by 14%, surpassing Tencent and topping the overseas revenue list.

In the list, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment's overseas revenue is second only to miHoYo and Tencent, ranking third, and ranking firmly in the first echelon of China's overseas manufacturers.

According to the financial report, in 2023, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment will achieve overseas operating income of 5.807 billion yuan, and has formed a product matrix based on MMORPG, SLG, cards, and simulated operation in the global market.

As AI technology penetrates deeper into the game industry, continues to catalyze the transformation of the game industry, and major game manufacturers are also wrestling and working hard to develop, the boundaries of game imagination in the future will also be infinitely broadened.

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