AIGC has become a new track for game companies. Which listed game companies have implemented AI layout?

Text｜Lei Bao Duan Qing

Editor｜Nurhahachi

At the end of 2022, OpenAI’s generative AI tool ChatGPT was officially launched. In the past two months alone, the official announced that the number of monthly active users exceeded 100 million. AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technology has become a key layout direction for technology companies because of its representativeness.

Subsequently, large AI models such as Baidu Wenxinyiyan and Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen emerged one after another. During this period, many companies also announced their own research or access to third-party AI large models, including many leading game companies. In addition to Tencent and NetEase, which have been deploying AIGC for a long time, there are also Kunlun Wanwei, Giant Network, etc. many listed companies. With its massive user base, rich research and development experience, and suitable application scenarios, the game industry has advantages in integrating AI technology. The art, text, interaction and other content of game products can be well assisted by AI.

At present, major game companies have invested in AIGC. Which listed companies are specifically deploying AI? How about the layout and related AI products?

Which listed game companies have implemented AI layout? What is the specific situation?

Leibao has compiled the AI ​​layout of some domestic listed game companies.

Tencent disclosed its complete AI strategy for the first time in 2017. At the 2017 Tencent Global Partner Conference, Tencent proposed an overall AI strategy with a three-layer structure of "Basic Research - Scenario Co-construction - AI Openness", which will be implemented in social, content, games, medical, retail, finance, security, Translate eight major scenes.

By 2019, Tencent has established two major laboratory matrices. One is the artificial intelligence laboratory matrix, including four major laboratories such as Tencent AI Lab-Shenzhen and Seattle, which are dedicated to comprehensive basic research and applications. The second is the artificial intelligence laboratory matrix. A laboratory matrix based on cutting-edge technology, covering robotics, quantum computing, 5G, edge computing, IoT, audio and video technology, etc.

In April 2022, Tencent disclosed the development progress of the Hunyuan large model for the first time. In December of the same year, it launched the country's first low-cost, implementable NLP trillion large model, and topped the CLUE list of natural language understanding tasks.

This year, Tencent AI Lab released a self-developed 3D game scene automatic generation solution at the 2023 Game Developers Conference. According to reports, this solution uses AIGC technology to help developers create highly realistic and diverse virtual city scenes in a very short time, greatly improving the efficiency of game development. In the past, it often required multiple artists to spend years on Large-scale city modeling that takes time to complete only takes a few weeks when combined with AI.

Tencent management stated in a conference call in March that for Tencent, AI and large models are an accelerator for growth and will help improve existing business and accelerate commercialization. In the future, Tencent will further invest to establish Tencent's basic model, deeply integrate AI technology with areas such as games, social networking, and education that already have a strong business foundation, and will also promote new businesses through continuous investment.

Tencent Hunyuan AI large model industry chain

NetEase is one of the first major Internet companies in China to deploy AIGC. In September 2018, at NetEase’s media exchange meeting, the general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Division explained in detail NetEase’s three major AI product matrices at the time. First, the AR business line, including NetEase Insights, NetEase Shadows, etc.; second, dialogue The AI ​​business line includes hardware products such as "NetEase Sanyin Cloud Speaker"; third, the AI ​​platform business line includes NetEase AI platform, NetEase Jianwai, etc.

In February this year, NetEase released its 2022 financial report, stating that it had launched GPT (generative pre-training) model research in 2018 and has now self-developed dozens of ultra-large-scale pre-training models, covering natural language, text and graphics cross-modality , cross-modal text and speech, intelligent capture, emotion perception and other model fields. It has accumulated rich experience in pre-training model training and engineering optimization. In the future, related technologies can be applied to digital industries such as intelligent manufacturing, intelligent learning, digital cultural tourism, digital entertainment, and digital music.

Recently, NetEase released its financial report for the first quarter of 2023. Data shows that NetEase continued to invest in self-developed key technologies such as AI large models this quarter. It invested 3.7 billion yuan in R&D in Q1, and R&D investment accounted for 15% of revenue.

NetEase said that its self-developed AI technology has been applied to the entire process of game industrialization, and AI technology has improved the work efficiency of key links by up to 90%. Specifically, NetEase Interactive Entertainment AILAB has self-developed dozens of AI efficiency improvement tools, covering many aspects such as AI voice generation, AI original painting generation, AI video motion capture, and AI model generation.

In the conference call after the financial report, NetEase CEO Ding Lei said that the development of large AI models can be called "a hundred flowers blooming and a hundred schools of thought contending," but the most critical thing is the implementation scenario. Nowadays, the products of major manufacturers have similar functions, but there are differences in user experience. The real AI winner must choose appropriate scenarios and create AI products that meet the user experience.

Intercepted from NetEase Q1 financial report

Kunlun Wanwei has also continued to deploy AI in recent years. One of the more well-known is StarX, an overseas social entertainment platform. Its product StarMaker focuses on the "karaoke social" model and uses AI technology to help users produce high-quality music content. In February 2021, Kunlun Wanwei officially acquired StarMaker. In the same year, it established the StarX MusicX Lab music laboratory, taking AI music generation as its main research direction, and using this to enter the AIGC field.

In December 2022, Kunlun Wanwei will hold an AIGC technology conference and announce the launch of a full range of "Kunlun Tiangong" AIGC algorithms and models. Models include SkyPaint, SkyMusic, SkyText, and SkyCode, covering multi-modal content generation capabilities such as images, music, text, and programming. Kunlun Worldwide has also become the layout of the domestic AIGC field. One of the most comprehensive companies. At the same time, Kunlun Wanwei announced that the model is open source, becoming the first domestic company to fully devote itself to the AIGC open source community for global users.

Kunlun Wanwei CEO Fang Han once said that they firmly believe that open source is the soil and important force to promote the ecological development of AIGC, so they are committed to technological innovation and development in AIGC model algorithms, and are committed to promoting the open source AIGC algorithm and model community. Development, committed to lowering the threshold for using and learning AIGC technology in all walks of life.

The large-scale language model "Tiangong" 3.5 jointly developed by Kunlun Wanwei and Singularity Intelligence was released in April this year, further expanding its influence in the AI ​​field. "Tiangong" 3.5 is the first dual-hundred-billion-level large-scale language model in China that benchmarks the intelligence level of OpenAI ChatGPT, and can meet diversified needs such as copywriting creation, knowledge Q&A, code programming, logical deduction, and mathematical calculation.

According to Kunlun Wanwei, the company will successively launch music AI and game AI products in 2023. As the technology of "Tiangong" large-scale products matures, Kunlun Wanwei will gradually begin to open source, and "Tiangong" 4 and "Tiangong" 5 are also being planned.

Tianyu Digital, as a digital technology company whose main business is e-sports games and data traffic, in 2021, which is called the "Year of the Metaverse" by many media, Tianyu Digital also launched the Metaverse Layout, focusing on the virtual digital human track.

In 2022, Tianyu Digital’s “Virtual Human AIGC” technical solution achieved a breakthrough. The virtual digital human technology jumped from the static stage and the dynamic interaction stage to the AIGC intelligent stage. Through “MetaSurfing-Yuanxiang Intelligence "Cloud Platform" has created the first Chinese-style virtual digital person "Tianyu" whose culture has gone overseas. She has nearly 5.5 million fans across the entire network, over 400 million video views across the entire network, and nearly 30 million likes on Douyin.

This year, Tianyu Digital continues to deploy games and digital marketing in terms of AI. Tianyu Digits said that the company is conducting research on application scenarios, configuration costs, compliance, efficiency changes, etc., trying to combine AIGC with the company’s game business, integrating multi-modal AIGC technology into the digital competitive platform, and increasing the activity of game products. Spend. The AI ​​middle platform it created has achieved a leap-forward improvement in product functions and service capabilities, and quickly created "MetaSurfing-Yuanxiang Intelligent Cloud Platform" and "Mobile Application Distribution Intelligent Recommendation System" for scenarios such as Metaverse marketing, mobile application distribution, and short video marketing. ”, “Mix-AIGC Short Video Intelligent Marketing Assistant”, “AI Content Marketing System” AI productivity tools. Relying on "data algorithm scenarios" to promote the transformation of digital marketing into intelligent marketing.

The Chinese-style virtual digital human "Tianyu" created by Tianyu Digits

Starting in 2016, Giant Network launched a major asset restructuring plan for Playtika, a game transformation company with artificial intelligence. After going through twists and turns and changing the plan several times, it finally completed the indirect acquisition of part of Playtika’s equity in 2019. It indicates that Giant Network will launch a "game AI" business layout.

In the 2022 annual report, Giant Network mentioned that the self-developed new game "Primal Journey" performed well in the first month of public beta, with first-month revenue exceeding 300 million yuan. The company will fully invest its efforts to actively embrace cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, and help improve its R&D and operational capabilities, focusing on the layout of "game AI".

In February this year, Giant Network confirmed that it would access Baidu’s artificial intelligence product “Wen Xin Yi Yan”, becoming the first domestic gaming company to access this AI platform.

In a recent investor exchange, Liu Wei, general manager of Giant Network, said that the company’s first goal is to promote all developers to learn to use AI tools and increase the output of game content; the second goal is to achieve specific results in On the ground, some of the company’s explorations into combining AI with gameplay will be reflected in the third quarter of this year. The company's CFO and Board Secretary Meng Wei gave a detailed introduction to the layout of the business level. He said that the business level is "two legs" in parallel. The first is to accelerate the application of various AI tools in the industry to achieve cost reduction and efficiency; the second is AI and The company has actively tried to implement the combination of game play on the product side, and further gave examples of Giant Network's combined application of AI in games such as "Ball Battle" and "Original Journey". Meng Wei also proposed that the company's goals are very clear. In existing games, it will use AI technology to upgrade and innovate to bring the user experience to a higher level; in new directions, it will actively explore based on its expertise in the track and its understanding of users. “For us, AI is more of a tool to achieve and satisfy user experience.”

Intercepted from Giant Network’s 2022 financial report

Tom Cat, like the aforementioned Tianyu Digits, launched its layout in 2021. Its game product "Tom Cat Parkour" teamed up with Huawei to become the first AI somatosensory game embedded in Huawei's new generation smart screen. Soon after, a strategic cooperation agreement was signed with Niu Nuoxiao Cloud, a technology company with artificial intelligence technology.

Since this year, Tom Cat stated that it has begun to apply the ChatGPT model for preliminary testing of AI interactive product development. It also mentioned that Tom’s AI layout is still in the early stages and will not have a significant impact on the company’s performance.

In the 2023 Q1 financial report, Tom Cat mentioned the details of AI layout. Mainly based on the advantages of the "Talking Tom Cat Family" IP, we will continue to deepen its interactive and companionship attributes, and plan to iterate "Talking Tom Cat" into "Chat Talking Tom Cat" in the future.

Currently, the R&D team has implanted the “Tom Cat” IP image into the AI ​​interactive product prototype, preliminarily verifying the feasibility of technical implementation. At the same time, with the help of pre-trained language models, on the one hand, it actively promotes the innovation of AI-based content gameplay and interactive experience of mobile applications under the "Talking Tom Family" IP, creating a smarter, more realistic, and more humane product experience for users. On the other hand, try to use related models to create art materials to improve the efficiency of content production.

Official promotional image of "Tom Parkour"

In the development, production and operation of game content, China Mobile Games mainly focuses on the application of AIGC technology. In February 2023, the day after Giant Network confirmed its access to Baidu’s “Wen Xin Yi Yan” large model, China Mobile Games also announced that it would become an ecological partner of “Wen Xin Yi Yan” and stated that it would apply its technology to achieve Interact with NPCs in the game and assist users in UGC creation.

In May, China Mobile Games announced that it had signed a cloud service framework agreement with Microsoft. The two parties will carry out more extensive cooperation in the fields of information technology such as cloud computing, big data, and Azure OpenAI. In the future, China Mobile Games' main game products will be connected to the Azure OpenAI service, and its large model capabilities will be applied to product development and operations to enrich player experience and achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

In addition, the open world game "World of Sword and Fairy" focused on China Mobile Games will locally deploy Microsoft GPT technology to conduct customized training on the large language model dedicated to "World of Sword and Fairy" to achieve a more immersive game experience. Currently, "World of Sword and Fairy" has opened test reservations.

"World of Sword" test appointment promotion picture

Perfect World has also begun to integrate AI technology into games in recent years. In April, Perfect World mentioned in its latest 2022 financial report that at present, the company has applied AI-related technologies to intelligent NPCs, scene modeling, AI plots, AI drawing, etc. in games, and listed the results in "Fantasy". The application of AI technology in games such as "New Zhuxian" and "Zhuxian World".

Perfect World also mentioned in the financial report that the company has established an AI center internally to research and promote the learning and application of AI technology, and apply AI technology to multiple scenarios in game development, distribution and operation. Effectively improve research and development efficiency and optimize player experience.

Aofei Entertainment stated in February this year that it currently holds 5% of the shares of Lightyear Infinite, and Lightyear Infinite has its own AI dialogue product, the Turing Robot Open Platform, and revealed the artificial intelligence cooperation with Lightyear Infinite Possibility of cooperation in the field of intelligence. In April, Turing Robot, a subsidiary of Lightyear Unlimited, released the ChatGP-like "Smart Baby" for children's scenes. This is also a children's AI strategically invested by Aofei Entertainment. It supports multi-modal AI interaction and plug-in systems. Its main functions are "learning assistant, Growth partner, English private tutor".

In a conference call in May, Aofei Entertainment stated that it will explore the integrated application of relevant technologies in content creation, product development and other aspects, and gradually promote the industrialization of "AI IP". For example, artificial intelligence-related technologies and tools can be used to shorten the production cycle and improve production efficiency; virtual idols or toy products can be combined with online and offline scenarios to realize intelligent interactive functions and improve user experience.

Sanqi Interactive Entertainment began to build the intelligent delivery platform "Quantum" and the intelligent operation analysis platform "Tianji" in 2018. After these two were put into use, the efficiency of the delivery business has been rapidly improved and targeted Sexually differentiated marketing.

In the following years, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment successively independently developed the AI ​​big data research and development center "Zeus", the research and development data analysis system "Athena", "Poseidon", "Ares" and the AI ​​research and development platform "Cupid", etc., have effectively reduced Sanqi Interactive Entertainment's game research and development costs and improved research and development efficiency and effectiveness. In this regard, Wang Chuanpeng, senior technical director of Sanqi Interactive Entertainment Group, said: "For the generation of 2D original paintings, we used to count them on a weekly basis, but now we produce original paintings on a daily basis."

Yoozu Network has also followed the trend in the past two years and explored the application of AI technology in game production in order to reduce development costs and improve output efficiency. At the end of April this year, Youzu.com released its 2022 annual report and 2023 Q1 financial report. Later, it stated in a conference call that as a game company focusing on "card strategy", art costs such as 2D concept setting are covered by art research costs. accounts for more than half of the structure. Because AI technology is relatively mature in 2D art applications, YOOZOO's 2D art outsourcing costs dropped by about 25% in April, and it is expected to achieve a greater degree of cost reduction by the end of the year.

On the same day, Yozu CEO Chen Fang stated in an open letter that the company will continue to invest in the AI ​​field and plans to upgrade the existing Innovation Institute to the "AI Innovation Institute", which will include the "Sophon Laboratory" and "Red Coast". Laboratory", respectively focusing on breakthroughs in the two directions of "AIGC" and "AI empowered game globalization".

In addition, some game companies this year also mentioned AIGC-related layouts when answering investor questions on interactive platforms.

Zheshu Culture stated that it has laid out businesses in the data field such as data centers and big data trading centers. Since 2023, as generative AI technology has made breakthrough progress, the company's digital technology experience in the application field will be continuously optimized. For example, the company's subsidiary Hangzhou City Brain Company is actively exploring technologies such as machine learning, NLP (natural language processing), LSTM (long short-term memory model), and knowledge graphs. So far, Zhejiang Digital Culture is still exploring related AI technologies and has not had any impact on the company's performance.

Dianhun Network mentioned on the interactive platform that the company has been paying attention to and applying various new technologies to use technology to promote the improvement of research and development efficiency and game experience. Currently, the company has applied AI images in the development process of some games under development. AI technologies such as generation and AI battle games.

Century Huatong also said in the question and answer session of the exchange meeting that the company has always paid attention to the improvement of production efficiency and productivity brought by technology and actively practiced it. It has begun to use AI tools, such as Midjourney, in the game production process to speed up production efficiency. At the same time, we are also actively collaborating on universal AI models to explore new game production paths.

Huang Yimeng, CEO of Xindong Company, mentioned at the 2022 performance meeting held in March this year that TapTap has recently been trying to use AI technology for targeted training. AIGC is very beneficial to the platform. “All interactions in the future will It will definitely be AI, and the same is true for TapTap. Our investment and determination in this area are very strong, and there will definitely be products. Xindong Company said that it tried to integrate AIGC into the workflow of the art platform a few months ago, and the expected results are It will be good.

Caesar Culture responded to the company's AI layout on the interactive platform, saying that the company cooperated with Shanghai Jiaotong University to actively research and develop a plot animation generation system, and quickly produced game plot animation resources through deep learning technology to create a vivid Virtual world and other related AI technologies, and have made some staged progress.

Kaiying Network stated that some of the company’s strategic investment companies have developed their own AIGC capabilities. Strategic investment companies Huanyao Network and Xingyue Interactive have begun to fully apply AI tools in research and development to form high-precision character and scene renderings in batches, reducing art costs in the research and development field.

When Shengtian Network responded to investors’ questions, it mentioned that AI technology is currently mainly used on the belt e-sports platform, such as the sound detection function of belt e-sports. The company has also been paying attention to the application of generative AI in games, virtual humans, e-commerce and other fields. It is in contact with relevant large domestic model companies and jointly researches specific scenarios and methods for integrating relevant technologies with the company's business.

Baotong Technology stated that the company will focus on AI technology innovation, explore opportunities for emerging technologies to promote the development of mobile game business, and explore the in-depth application of AI technology in the company's game development and operations. Try to build an intelligent advertising delivery platform to improve delivery efficiency and advertising optimization capabilities; try to build a translation system based on ChatGPT to improve translation efficiency and save costs; try to build an AIGC painting system to improve the speed of art rendering, increase the number of advertising creative ideas, and improve the company's Customer acquisition quality.

There are also some game companies, although they have no specific AI-related layout or practical application results yet, but they also expressed their continued concern about the development of this field and are optimistic about the help of AI technology in changing the production methods of game content and improving efficiency. For example, Palmqu Technology stated that its R&D team is exploring and trying the application of AI tools in game development and distribution.

Summary and outlook:

It can be seen that many listed game companies have entered the AI ​​industry, but their layout directions and R&D technology reserves are different. They can be roughly divided into two routes. One is to self-develop the underlying algorithm model, and the other is to adopt Integrate third-party large models, such as ChatGPT, Baidu "Wen Xin Yi Yan", etc.

Companies that choose the first route are large companies with diversified and complex business formats like Tencent and NetEase. In addition to the gaming industry, they have deep business foundations in many fields such as social networking, music, and entertainment. These companies had been working in the field of AI for many years before the concept of AIGC really became popular. They had sufficient financial resources and technical experience to develop large AI models by themselves, and had already put AI technology into practical applications in game development and content production.

But this type of company is only a minority, and most game manufacturers still belong to the second category. They are more interested in the auxiliary role of AI technology in R&D and operations, as well as the scalability of product content, so as to reduce costs and increase efficiency, enrich game content and optimize player experience. Under such a premise, establishing its own large model and platform is not a necessary development direction. Therefore, more game companies choose to access third-party large models such as "Wen Xin Yi Yan" and ChatGPT, which can not only quickly enter the game and integrate cutting-edge technologies, but also allow some manufacturers that have no previous AI-related experience to have more experience. Convenient opportunities to explore and test the waters.

At present, the game industry is gradually undergoing job changes brought about by the AIGC wave. The first batch of people who have lost their jobs due to AI have already appeared. In March this year, Huang Yimeng, the founder of Xindong Network, broke the news on social platforms. As far as he knew, a game team had cut off its original painting outsourcing team. "AI has actually begun to affect many people's lives," he said. There are no more jobs." The technical director of a game art outsourcing company also said that his company had laid off half of its original animators in the past month. "Before, our company needed 38 original animators, and now we have laid off 20 people." Correspondingly, many game manufacturers, including NetEase, Tencent, and Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, have released recruitment information for AI-related positions, which mainly include technical research and development positions such as AI algorithm engineers, natural language processing, and deep learning, as well as AI Painter and other art design positions.

There has always been an impossible triangle of "cost, efficiency, quality" in the game industry, that is, it is difficult to take into account the production cost, R&D efficiency and product quality of the game at the same time, and one of them often has to be abandoned. The wide application of AIGC can greatly improve the efficiency of game image, audio, text and other content production, shorten the overall research and development cycle, and reduce production costs. With the support of AIGC, the threshold for game development will be lowered, thereby promoting gameplay innovation in game production. In the future, we can expect more colorful game types and more content tailored to individual needs.

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