One of the hottest keywords in the gaming industry in recent years is AI. From art generation, character dialogue to program development, almost every month we can see companies claiming that AI will change the game industry. However, Pocketpair, the developer that became famous with “Palworld”, recently publicly stated that they still deliberately avoid using AI extensively in game development. The reason is simple, because players don’t pay the bill at all!
AI is very popular, but players will deduct points first when they see it
In an interview with the media, John Buckley, director of Pocketpair’s distribution department, admitted that although AI has become a hot topic in the industry, the team has not actively introduced related technologies. He said that players generally have a negative perception of AI-generated content. As long as a work is labeled as AI, the community will often be the first to express doubts. Therefore, from a business perspective, investing in a large amount of AI content may not be a good choice at this stage.
The developers themselves are not interested
What’s more interesting is that Buckley believes that the problem is not just players, but many developers actually don’t want to hand over creative work to AI. He said that the reason why artists invest in this industry is because they like to create. If in the end you just enter a few lines of instructions and let AI help complete it, the sense of accomplishment is actually completely different. To put it simply, many creators enter the game industry not because they want to be AI administrators, but because they really like drawing, designing, and creating worlds. This statement has also been recognized by many players.
Recently, AI has become more and more prone to missteps in the gaming industry.
In fact, Pocketpair is not the first company to keep its distance from AI. In recent months, a number of games have been criticized by players for their suspected use of AI art, AI promotional images and even AI dubbing. A few days ago, the development team of “1666 Amsterdam” publicly apologized for the presence of AI-generated materials in the trial version and promised to remove relevant content from the official version. The former art designer of the “Halo” series has also said that developers who rely too much on AI may pay a price in the future. Obviously in the gaming industry, AI is still a highly sensitive issue.
The problem has never been the AI, but whether the players will pay or not!
To a certain extent, Pocketpair’s attitude is actually quite pragmatic, because for companies, whether the technology is advanced or not is one thing, and whether players are willing to pay is another. If players just start complaining when they see AI, and the creators themselves don’t want to hand over their work, then no matter how powerful the AI is, it will be difficult to become a mainstream development model. At least judging from the current market response, rather than letting AI draw a poster, players would rather see the one drawn by a real artist who stayed up late and worked hard.