With the use of AI continuing to be a hot-button subject in the gaming industry, Nexon—parent company of ARC Raiders developer Embark Studio—has offered some thoughts on the matter. In its latest Capital Markets Briefing, the executive chairman and Embark Studio head, Patrick Söderlund, along with Nexon CEO Junghun Lee, spoke about how the company is using generative AI on its projects.
Söderlund has noted that the presence of generative AI presents a unique challenge to the gaming industry. While many developers are using it as a tool, he has said that the companies that best understand the challenge will end up being “the winners” in the race to effectively use AI.
“Every company has a plan; most will get it wrong,” Söderlund said. “They’re committing big investments in tools – but tools won’t help because they’ve misread the challenge. AI may be a race, but the winners won’t be the first movers – the winners will be the ones who understood the challenge. Think of game development as auto mechanics. The tools are available to everyone, but not everyone has the knowledge and experience to use them. That’s where Nexon is different.”
Lee, on the other hand, said that Nexon’s methodology in how it employs generative AI won’t lead to replacing the game developers responsible for a project’s creative aspects. Rather, “it frees them to create, with context.” This “context” is a reference to a collection of data used at Nexon that has been created over many years, dubbed the Mono Lake Initiative.
“Mono Lake makes the intelligence available across everything we build and operate – every developer, every live ops team, every product decision has access to the base of information we’ve accumulated over decades,” he said. “AI without context is just speed. Faster output of a generic outcome. Tools that know nothing about design history, player behavior, or innovation. Without context, AI is a race to the arithmetic middle where everyone’s games look the same. That’s not a competitive advantage. That’s noise, at scale.”
Lee also went on to describe the release of ARC Raiders as a “Trojan horse” that could be used to bring about “a shift in the mindset” about the use of AI technologies and how it “frees developers and live service teams to spend more time thinking and less time typing. More time innovating; less time writing code.”
“It changes how people work,” he continued. “The tools they use, how fast they can move, what they can accomplish. But what goes into our games – the creative content our players actually experience – that remains the work of our developers. Our methodology doesn’t replace creative people, it frees them to create, with context. Today, our best people spend more time making creative decisions – decisions guided by context…context based on billions of player decisions…context that precious few companies can match.”
Nexon’s biggest hit in recent times has been ARC Raiders, which is well known for having launched on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S with AI-generation used for some of its voice acting. However, the company has also been taking steps to remove some of it. More recently, the PvPvE extraction shooter got its Flashpoint update.
