Cognition Dissemination: Square Enix’s AI Promises Are Not Concerning
It’s become a tradition for Square Enix CEOs to make grandiose promises about pursuits they want the company to tackle at the start of each year. This year is unfortunately no exception.
In his “New Year’s Letter from the President” CEO Takashi Kiryu gushed about the innovation inherent in AI, if you want to call it that. “I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming,” he said. Kiryu didn’t stop there. He also said Square Enix intends to “be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both [their] content development and our publishing functions.” The company’s goal in the short term will be to “enhance [their] development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in [their] marketing efforts. In the long term, though, he wants the company to “leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.”
This follows the address from the company last year, where prior CEO Yosuke Matsuda claimed he wanted the company to explore the then-newfound market of NFTs. Matsuda’s comments last year followed… his own comments the year before regarding the exploration of cryptocurrencies. Regardless of who’s at the helm of Square Enix these days, that individual (and perhaps the entire board) will intensely desire to push the development teams in directions where they could explore shiny new technologies, so to speak.
This all seems insipid at best, and grim at worst, considering what the scenario of an AI takeover could result in for talented workers once a company realizes the work it can provide is good enough. But I’m not too worried about that, at least not at this very moment.
The company’s NFT pursuits give me faith that Kiryu’s words are merely pretty-sounding hot air aimed at shareholders whose collective eyes light up whenever company corporate heads mention new technology possibilities. Square Enix’s NFT efforts themselves have yet to go very far, and likely won’t. Their first efforts were Final Fantasy VII NFT cards, themselves sold for the kinds of ridiculous and inflated prices that NFTs went for after being introduced. The cards are $3 individually and around $80 in packs. Those prices are ridiculous for detailed images that could send computers into overdrive while downloading them. It’s an ironic twist for cards from a game with central themes about the planet’s destruction due to human meddling. The planet’s dyin’ from your NFT downloads, Cloud.
Their other NFT pursuit involved a project known as Symbiogenesis, which tricked fans into thinking was related to a new Parasite Eve project when the trademark was first discovered. The art distributed on the Symbiogenesis app is considerably less impressive-looking than the FFVII stuff, more on par with samey half-assed efforts like those from Bored Ape Yacht Club and the other Slurp Juice-clamoring nonsense. It’s tough to tell how these efforts are performing, but Square Enix’s silence on this matter might speak volumes. NFTs spent a good chunk of 2023 collapsing in epic fashion, a faster comedown than even the biggest skeptics predicted. It’s tough to imagine that Square Enix is among the few organizations finding continued success selling detailed pics.
The chances of the company’s AI efforts similarly faltering are high. They could mimic the ones they’ve already tried. Square Enix attempted to rerelease Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii’s classic adventure game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, to preview their AI pursuits. The game involves processing player meanings and guesses for mystery solving, and AI should have theoretically been better at doing this compared to the interpretations the original 40-year-old game made. The modern AI, it turns out, was even worse at guessing these meanings than the original version. The project was tossed aside shortly afterward, though there’s still plenty of time for the company to release a straighter remake of the original with a more modern art style. Hopefully that’s being worked on.
Kiryu’s letter makes it clear, however, that Square Enix isn’t ceasing their pursuit of this innovation anytime soon. There are teams within the company, and perhaps some working with them outside it, that will waste plenty of time trying to implement AI in games. This could equal plenty of pain for the developers when this doesn’t work out, after it’s been proven time and again that AI isn’t up to snuff regarding putting out its own results. The work it generates needs much polishing from humans afterward, with written works in particular demanding so many touch-ups that they might as well hire a human to write the whole damned thing.
At best, this could interfere with the developments of other games that could be worth playing. At worst, it could equal layoffs when their efforts falter. The higher-ups rarely pay the price for companies making terrible decisions, a phenomenon witnessed from several gaming studios last year. We’re on track to see more of this pain throughout 2024. I’m not making the argument that there won’t be any pain for anyone here. I’m merely saying that there isn’t much concern for Square Enix implementing AI in otherwise-solid games built with solid ideas in mind.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
