Parent company of Cygames to delve into research and development of game generation AI

Japanese digital advertising company CyberAgent announced the establishment of a “Game AI Lab” and “Animation AI Lab” on October 4 (JST). Through these new offices, the company will delve into research and development of generative AI technology for use in the process of game development and animation production respectively.

CyberAgent is the parent company of video game development studio Cygames, known for IPs such as Granblue Fantasy and Rage of Bahamut. The company is also active in the anime industry, and was involved in the production of titles such as Oshi no Ko and Zombie Land Saga.

According to the announcement by CyberAgent, the company has had an “AI Lab” since 2016, which worked on utilizing AI technology in advertising and developing a Japanese language LLM (Large-scale Language Model). From May 2023, they had formed an AI Strategy department within their Game and Entertainment division, striving to improve game quality and development efficiency by developing AI-based scenario creation and level design support tools and similar.

“The use of generative AI in the game industry is expected to accelerate beyond graphics generation and scenario creation,” says the announcement, which is why the Game AI Lab was established with the aim of “working on the development of higher quality games, creation of new user experiences, researching and developing game generation AI technology, social implementation and creating a next-generation workflow in game development.”

The scope of the research of the Game AI Lab will include: Graphic/character generation, natural language processing, reinforcement learning,sound processing and synthesis, level design, video generation, 3D/animation, song/BGM/SE generation, etc.

On the other hand, the Animation AI Lab is described as having been established with the purpose of “researching the latest animation production processes, including the production of backgrounds and characters, character movement, voices and background music, as well as developing a new animation production process that utilizes generative AI.” The scope of the research of the Animation AI Lab will include image and video generation, animation and motion generation, rendering, lip-syncing, voice synthesis, background music, etc.

For both the Game AI Lab and the Animation AI Lab, CyberAgent stresses that they will put effort towards the research of unauthorized use and similarity detection with the purpose of protecting copyrights and maintaining a healthy market.

The news has been met with mostly positive reactions, with online users expressing curiosity as to what kind of projects the company has in mind with the use of generative AI, though some expressed apprehension as well, especially in regards to the tendency of media that uses generative AI being received negatively.