Resident Evil and Street Fighter series developer Capcom is experimenting with introducing new technology, including generative AI, to tackle the ballooning costs and man-hours required for game development. In a recent interview with Google Cloud Japan, Kazuki Abe, a technical director at Capcom, gave some specific examples of what this involves. Based on his explanation, it doesn’t seem like Capcom is trying to use AI to generate anything directly related to gameplay, stories or character designs.
According to Abe, one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive parts of game development is coming up with the “hundreds of thousands of unique ideas” needed to create the in-game environment. For example, if you want to put a TV inside of your game, you can’t just use an existing product as is – you need to think of a fictional TV design from scratch, including the manufacturer’s logo and everything else about the object.
This is such a bullshit problem. No other media has this issue. This wasn’t a problem before and never should’ve been allowed to become a problem. Real objects have populated the scenes of movies for decades, artists have painted scenes rendering real clothes and weapons and carriages and all with accurate shapes for centuries, before the 2000’s video games seemed to have no issue doing the same. Something changed and now we’re left with absurd assets.
Rendering real objects without any limitations or requirement for legal agreements should be a right of any artist in any field.
That’s sadly not how the capitalist implementations of fair use and copyright in general work.