NCSOFT, Nexon, Netmarble expand investment in AI
By Jun Ji-hye
NCSOFT, Nexon, Netmarble and other game companies have expanded investment in artificial intelligence (AI) to gain a competitive advantage in the rapidly changing Fourth Industrial Revolution, company officials said Monday.
They said AI is one of the most versatile technologies that can be utilized in almost the entire process of game development, production and data analytics.
The use of AI can significantly reduce the time and cost required for developing games, while maximizing the use of new technology, for example, allowing gamers to play games with voice commands.
NCSOFT appears to be the most active in AI research and development among game companies here.
The company, which launched an AI taskforce in February 2011, now operates two relevant institutes ― the AI and NLP (natural language processing) centers ― under the direct control of founder and CEO Kim Taek-jin.
The AI Center has three affiliate organizations ― Game AI Lab, Speech Lab and Vision AI Lab ― while the NLP Center has two ― Language AI Lab and Knowledge AI Lab.
About 150 software engineers specializing in AI are working for the two institutes.
“When creating game characters in the past, game developers had to input each facial expression fitting for lines and situations one by one,” Lee Jae-joon, who heads the AI Center at NCSOFT, said during a media conference, Thursday. “AI helps reduce this kind of repetitive work significantly.”
During the media event, the firm also introduced hands-free voice command technology that will be applied to games, saying it plans to apply the technology to its mobile megahit game “Lineage M.”
Nexon set up Intelligence Labs in May 2017, a department dedicated to studying machine learning, deep learning and other advanced technologies.
The game company plans to increase its manpower working at the labs to 300 this year from the current 160.
The company said technologies that Intelligence Labs has been developing include one detecting illegal programs and one offering users tailored services by utilizing accumulated data such as a preference for combat methods.
“We are planning to apply AI technology suitably to games and game services,” a Nexon official said.
Netmarble established Netmarble AI Revolution Center (NARC) in March last year and has since increased the number of professional personnel by 70 percent in its effort to enhance AI-related projects.
The company has also joined hands with global IT giants such as Google and Amazon Web Services in a bid to secure stable infrastructure to apply AI-related technologies to games.