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Newly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production.
As noted in Embracer’s annual report, the company has adopted a new AI policy package it claims has the capability to “massively enhance” its production process by “increasing resource efficiency, adding intelligent behaviors, personalization, and optimization to gameplay experiences.”
Embracer says that, by leveraging AI, it will be able to create more engaging and immersive experiences that provide each player with a “unique, dynamic, and personalised experience.”
“We also see great opportunities for AI in game development speed, logistics and planning. Embracer Group also understands the potential risks associated with the use of AI,” adds the company, noting that “AI can also be used within areas such as logistics or HR to improve planning, decision-making, support talent acquisition and enhance employee experiences or retention.”
Embracer, which laid off over 1,500 employees and cancelled 80 projects during the past year, suggests that not using AI for “relevant tasks” will lead to it being “outrun by our competitors.”
The company concedes that adopting AI models isn’t without risk, but claims the policy will “empower” workers to help the create “more powerful experiences in the same amount of time.”
“Companies within Embracer Group that utilize AI within their operations are subject to general as well as specific laws and requirements that impact the development and use of AI. These requirements are, due to the nature of AI applications, comprehensive and require, among others, documentation, risk assessments as well as continuous updates,” reads the company’s risk assessment.
“AI may also produce unethical, biased, discriminatory or completely wrong results if it has not been properly trained, instructed or used for purposes it was not designed. Additionally, AI generated material is not patentable or copyrightable meaning we must understand how material is produced, especially by third parties, since such material may produce serious copyright or intellectual property issues with the final product.” Embracer says AI models won’t supplant human workers
Embracer states it doesn’t want to replace people with AI and is taking a “human-centric approach” to the technology–going so far as to claim it could open the door for new hires.
“It’s not just that AI enables our developers to do even more, and to become more efficient on certain tasks, it will also open up coding to a broader group of developers. Entry into the industry might be easier for individuals with disabilities who, for instance, cannot use a keyboard as easily as others,” said Embracer’s head of privacy and AI governance, Tomas Hedman.
Hedman says the company’s “risk-aware approach” means being cognizant of the pitfalls associated with AI models. That’s why, he says, Embracer must “act consciously.”
“AI is trained on historical data, which tilts in a certain direction. As a result, you can end up with imbalanced automated decision-making. Let’s say you’re building a village. If you use AI for this, depending on how it’s trained and the decisions it takes, you may end up with a village with a demography that displays some sort of imbalance,” says Hedman.
“As AI models become more powerful, we can leverage their capacity also in the creative process, for example, by identifying inconsistencies in scripts and storytelling. There will be tremendous benefits for our creative teams regarding scriptwriting, image creation, idea generation, quality control, and more. And, as models become more human-like, the interaction between players and AI-supported functions will be much more dynamic. If in a game scenario you bargain, AI can remember this the next time. That makes the whole gaming experience much more interesting and lifelike.”
Embracer isn’t the first company to espouse the potential of AI. Earlier this year, EA boss Andrew Wilson claimed 60 percent of the publisher’s development processes could soon be impacted by generative AI. Others including Sony, Square Enix, Ubisoft, and more have also begun tinkering with the tech.
The executives that say this shit have such a lack of understanding of AI and the kind of work people do daily.
They drank the AI Kool aid are trying to make it sound like they’re boosting productivity and thus their profitability. But we all know it’s bullshit.
I get the sense from how they operate that Embracer Group generally likes the taste of cool aid.
Embracer, functionally speaking, have zero understanding of how game dev works. The whole thing is just a massive investment fund. Basically a bunch of rich assholes who bought up every small developer they could get their hands on and then tried to MBA all the numbers up by cutting headcounts and doing other useless metrics driven bullshit. Then when this failed to produce meteoric returns on investment they all went surprised pikachu face.
They have a lack of understanding for AI, games and running a company. All they know is how to write themselves bonuses.
But why pay all those programmers when all they had to do from the beginning was a simple
#include “ai.h”
They mention using it in HR to enhance employee retention, which is… pretty damn dystopian
Embracer is a sickness, a malignant fucking growth on gaming.
I’ve got so many companies higher up on my shit list.
Name and shame them
The worst:
- Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don’t forget it. They’ll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
- Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn’t. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
- EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
- From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.
These companies piss me off, but…:
- Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
- Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
- Epic: Exclusivity that’s actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
- Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they’re also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.
Embracer’s pretty low on the “piss me off, but…” list. They made a horrible gambler’s bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.
Riot was/is also a cesspit of sexual harrassment and discrimination, but nobody seems to remember.
Good point. I don’t know how ongoing that is or if steps have been taken to improve things.
That was a really excellent write up, thank you for elaborating. It’s helpful to know the truth of how these companies are acting, and important for consumers to try not to forget. They will continue to take advantage, if we allow it.
And yet Tencent and whoever made Roblox are arguably even worse than those.
What a sober fucking write-up. Bravo and thanks for the information.
Fun game! Swap “AI” with “blockchain” and put it into a search engine. You win if you can find the same headline from an article a few years ago!
Square Enix says Embracer sales will help it invest in blockchain (2022)
Initially I had some hope when Embracer bought a bunch of studios from Square Enix, because Square Enix sucks and it could only get better, but once their funding dried up it turned out Emberacer sucks just as much as them.
/thread
Such a gem!
They’ve gotten drunk on the hype of AI (LLM in disguise); I can’t wait for them to make a costly mistake that wakes them the fuck up. Or dissolve into a formless mass of corporate sludge.
In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn’t know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that’s been over hyped. A few choice hits like:
- Crypto
- Blockchain
- Quantum
- Cloud
- WS-I
- LAMP
- XML
- P2P
- WORA
- OOP
Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There’s just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.
I mean, at least it’s been this way since I’ve been in the industry.
Yeah, there is always new Kool-Aid for executives to consume. I just wish more research, discourse, and testing were done before these concepts became either a scam or a true innovation. Of all the things that you’ve mentioned, there are only a few things of which I have no knowledge of; as a lay person, my familiarity with some of these tech developments is due to the major media coverage some got. I’ll have to look into the unfamiliar tech innovations.
Quantum
Seriously? We’ve barely passed the stage of them working at room temperatures yet
I think at this point maybe Embracer should try replacing Lars Wingefors with ChatGPT instead
Ignore the thousands of employees we’ve laid off, we have AI that is going to QUADRUPLE our productivity. I’m talking AAAA-AAAA games here, folks. The best is yet to come, it’s going to be fantastic.
Well, if I sell my Embracer shares I’ll at least be able to use the losses to avoid taxes next year. Christ, what a shitshow this company has been.
Basically the Jim Cramer of vidya games
It’s not from a high bar, so not improbable AI will do a better job than Embracer already do.
What the fuck are you on about? They’re talking about using AI to replace the incredibly talented human labour at studios they own. Y’know, like the people who made Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, the new Tomb Raider titles, Metro Exodus…
Embracer are shit, but what makes them shit is that they’re fucking murdering a lot of genuinely talented studios that produce great work.
I’m mostly joking about that Embracer is more effective at shutting down studios and cancelling games rather than making them.
Listen, if AI was replacing executives instead of hardworking creative types, I’d be all for it.
Christ, with how limited the brainpower of your average c-suite is, you wouldn’t need “AI”. I could probably replace most of them with an excel spreadsheet.
Only if they replace their C-suite with ChatGPT
Like their changes to Campfire Cabal, Volition, and Radical Designs have massively enhanced game development?
