Ma Mingtao has a &#34;mysterious self-confidence&#34; towards Cai Haoyu.
Although his AI game startup project &#34;Halo Editor&#34; is not as smooth as imagined, he is truly ignited once again. A month ago, he saw a sentence posted by Cai Haoyu on the social platform X, this former miHoYo chairman, the genius game guru who created &#34;Genshin Impact,&#34; is the &#34;spiritual idol&#34; of many game entrepreneurs.
&#34;99% of developers who create games just to satisfy their own ideas can consider changing careers. The future gaming world will be created by 0.0001% of genius teams like never before.&#34;
AI is once again disrupting the gaming industry, which has been described by the media as &#34;extreme theory.&#34; Cai Haoyu, who has not updated his status for a long time, suddenly spoke out, and the industry's focus immediately shifted to the earlier revealed Anuttacon, which is said to be his new startup project launched in the United States. According to the official website, it aims to &#34;create new, innovative, intelligent, deep, and interesting virtual world experiences, and explore the full potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI) products.&#34;
However, AI games are somewhat &#34;quiet&#34; in China. Zhuang Minghao, a heavy gamer and former vice president of Jingwei Ventures, is very cautious about Cai Haoyu's project and views. Until there is a definite product, no one dares to give a conclusion on AI games. In his view, several AI game teams that received financing in the past two years have now gone silent, and the major game companies have been slow to make decisions, with their investment in AI seeming to have more promotional significance than practical significance.
&#34;Whether it's Google's AI game engine or what Cai Haoyu said, they all seem revolutionary, but it's hard to say when they will truly land.&#34; Zhuang Minghao said.
Cai Haoyu's &#34;followers&#34; are not many, his views have indeed ignited the gaming circle, but the majority &#34;do not understand.&#34; Even Ma Mingtao can only subjectively speculate: &#34;Their resources and technology are not on the same level as ours, but if they want to delve into it, they should be able to come up with something creative.&#34;
He does not think he is on the same track as Cai Haoyu, &#34;Cai Haoyu's words should be about producing large-scale high-quality games, while we focus on allowing non-AI technology savvy novices to participate in game development.&#34; His original intention of entrepreneurship is to enable ordinary people to &#34;feed&#34; AI an idea and automatically generate a graphic text game.
Xiao Mo also feels that Cai Haoyu's new project is a bit &#34;empty,&#34; as he once joined a team of AI comics. The underlying logic of comics and games is similar, but static comics require a lot of manual assistance to patch up, games are much more complex, how to revolutionize?
&#34;For Cai Haoyu, his first big dream as a 'middle schooler' has already been realized ten years ago, now he wants to pursue another big dream, but looking at the current situation, it is indeed not easy to accomplish.&#34; Xiao Mo said.
The &#34;not easy&#34; he mentioned refers to the fact that AI technology at the current stage cannot reach the level of producing high-quality games, and can only complete simple graphic text games
In 2020, NVIDIA's AI game studio GameGAN fully replicated the classic game &#34;Pac-Man&#34; using AI, which was considered the highest standard at the time.
This year, Google's first AI game engine GameNGen generated a small shooting game &#34;Doom&#34; with 0 code, the graphics look very rough, even lagging behind games from 20 years ago, and there is not much innovation in gameplay. In Zhuang Minghao's view, there is no &#34;wow&#34; feeling.
Anuttacon, with ambitious goals, seems to be indifferent to the current &#34;wall&#34; encountered by AI games. Cai Haoyu has assembled an &#34;all-star&#34; team, including former Microsoft global partner Tong Xin, former Microsoft senior research scientist Wu Xiaojian, former Bilibili vice president Wang Yuyang, etc.
&#34;Entrepreneur China&#34; has contacted Cai Haoyu several times based on the new project plan, but as of the deadline, no response has been received.
Struggling
Ma Mingtao started his own business in February last year, triggered by the explosive spread of ChatGPT globally. He originally ran his own murder mystery store and bar, but was completely attracted by the ideal virtual world built by ChatGPT. &#34;Only AI can create the world I envision,&#34; Ma Mingtao said.
He sold his store, raised some money, and found two like-minded partners to establish Halo Future Technology together, eventually forming a team of 5 people.
However, the path of AI games turned out to be much more complicated than they had imagined. Initially, there was a doctor specializing in AI technology in the team, and after working together for nearly 3 months, he quit. &#34;He felt that the development cycle of our product was too long, of course, there were other reasons as well. As a result, all the front-end work in our team was suspended, and we couldn't continue development for 2 months.&#34; Ma Mingtao was very helpless, the original simulator product was planned to be launched in February this year, but there were too many bugs.
Also founded on the belief that AI can change games, the MeowJito Studio also has a team of 5 people. Established in Shanghai in 2023, the initial members of the team included an NPL algorithm engineer from Alibaba and a planner from NetEase Games. However, the development cycle did not meet expectations. Their self-developed game &#34;Word Spirit Plan&#34; was originally scheduled to be officially launched in June this year, but now the updated release date on Steam (the world's largest game distribution platform) has been changed to the fourth quarter of 2024.
MeowJito founder Li Chi posted on Xiaohongshu in March this year hoping to successfully find financing. By June, MeowJito's demand on the industry resource docking platform &#34;Game Teahouse&#34; was still &#34;looking for distribution, looking for investment.&#34;
Compared to the MeowJito team with mature industry experience, Ma Mingtao seems more like a &#34;reckless person&#34;: &#34;During our entrepreneurship, we have met many investors, but on the one hand, they want to see mature works, which we don't have yet; on the other hand, the general evaluation of the project is 'top-notch idea, but the team's capabilities are not there yet'.&#34; He has no choice, this is a &#34;chicken and egg&#34; problem, AI games are still too new, talent reserves are far from enough, if investors don't invest, it's definitely impossible to form an excellent team
The beta version of the Aperture Editor has attracted some novel authors to use it spontaneously, but as Ma Mingtao put it, the generated graphic text game works are difficult to reach an industrial level, and creators need to spend more time polishing and modifying the content of the game itself.
In March last year, Xiao Mo had high hopes for &#34;AI being able to easily generate deliverable comic works.&#34; It started well, with the team receiving investment intentions from Toutiao and Baidu, but in less than half a year, he discovered the shortcomings of AI comics: &#34;A single image can pass, but when several images that only pass are put together, the entire work fails.&#34;
Therefore, he withdrew early, &#34;From the perspective of AI, art and games are actually the same. I am quite pessimistic about the prospects of the entire AI game.&#34;
Without investment, Ma Mingtao could only continue to maintain a small team. He had to force himself to transition from a complete AI technology layman to a semi-proficient person who can read code and fix bugs.
But he still has a passion for AI, &#34;Even if in the future, this team is left with only me, I will persist in realizing what I have in mind step by step through AI.&#34;
Every game company is labeling themselves with &#34;AI,&#34; but until last year, &#34;AI games&#34; still failed to become an independent statistical unit in major investment and financing media. Most of the companies that received financing were AI technology companies, with few game production companies.
The Main Battlefield of AI Games
At present, it seems that only one path is viable - AI NPC (non-player characters controlled by AI in games).
So much so that from 2021 to the present, the star company in this track, InWorld, has received over 1 billion RMB in financing from companies including Microsoft, Intel, Disney, and Samsung. Embarrassingly, InWorld's turning point was from the initial AI game production to producing AI NPCs. It has established partnerships with game companies such as NetEase Games and R Star Game Studio (developer of the &#34;Grand Theft Auto&#34; series), completely transitioning from being the &#34;first party&#34; to the &#34;second party.&#34;
In the eyes of many practitioners in the gaming industry, AI NPCs exist more on the user experience side and do not have much impact on the game production process. This is quite controversial, as some players say, if all the teammates you team up with to fight monsters are &#34;robots,&#34; then what fun is there in playing games? However, this has still become the main battlefield for various game companies, the first &#34;stronghold&#34; occupied by AI.
In 2017, NetEase established the Fuxi AI Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with the main focus on AI NPCs. Its products &#34;Justice&#34; and &#34;Endless Reincarnation&#34; have become classic cases cited in the industry whenever AI games are mentioned.
Wufeng, who once worked at NetEase Fuxi, mentioned that &#34;Justice&#34; has more than 200 AI NPC characters that can interact with players.
&#34;It has enjoyed a large share of the AI game dividend, on the one hand, creating a new gaming experience where players can freely interact with intelligent NPCs in a 'small society' and establish long-term emotional connections with these intelligent NPCs who are not scripted.&#34;
&#34;At the same time, it also plays a very good marketing role in the market. When a product can provide an experience that breaks through established limitations, it will have a very good marketing effect,&#34; Wu Feng said.
In the mobile game &#34;Endless Hegemony&#34; launched by NetEase this summer, it already supports &#34;AI teammates.&#34; Different from the somewhat dull robot teammates in the past, AI teammates will follow instructions, maintain real-time voice communication with players, and even allow for custom voice settings.
Tencent's AI LAB studio has a similar research direction. The AI product &#34;Masterpiece&#34; in the game of Go has achieved four consecutive championships in professional competitions. Currently, the online gaming function is only open to professional players, while ordinary players can use its &#34;review&#34; function.
On the other hand, the AI product &#34;Mastermind&#34; based on &#34;King of Glory&#34; mainly serves as a role in guiding and training beginners. In 2019, Mastermind made its first appearance at ChinaJoy, playing 504 matches against human players and only losing 1 match. In the entertainment section before the King of Glory World Championship that year, Mastermind played against 5 professional players and did not lose a single match.
Similarly, miHoYo laid out its own AI sector in 2018, establishing the &#34;Entropy Reversal&#34; research department. Its creation &#34;Lu Ming&#34; has become a well-known virtual anchor on Bilibili. In the anime mobile game &#34;Starry Sky Railway,&#34; there are also a large number of AI-assisted generated plot dialogues.
Major game companies have highly similar entry points for AI. In the eyes of many practitioners, this situation is very &#34;bone-chilling.&#34; Developing games from start to finish using AI may be a fruitless and thankless task at this stage.
The Irreplicable &#34;Genshin Impact&#34;
The common problem everyone sees is that AI is still not capable of creating works above industrial redline standards.
&#34;It's no problem for AI to generate a single-person image, but it can't handle multiple people, large scenes. If you need to deliver a four-panel comic, and each panel can only achieve 60%, then the combination would be 60% × 60% × 60% × 60%, requiring a lot of manual touch-ups in the end,&#34; Xiao Mo said.
Ma Mingtao encountered the same problem: &#34;Whether it's character illustrations, backgrounds, or text, AI cannot achieve perfect presentation. If creators need more time for post-editing and polishing, it actually reduces efficiency.&#34;
In the creative process, AI sometimes encounters &#34;unexplainable&#34; problems. Li Xinglei, CEO of Haidu Technology, which translates overseas online literature under Zhangyue, once mentioned to reporters that &#34;in a place where ellipses were originally used in the text, AI will take the liberty to interpret and generate hundreds of words based on the context, which will need to be proofread and verified later.&#34;
In the eyes of game investor Ming Hao, even though major companies are pursuing AI NPCs that are closer to real people, even the most realistic AI teammates cannot provide the emotional value that human teammates can bring. &#34;If you know your teammate is AI, then I can't even be bothered to scold them.&#34;
&#34;In general, AI tests your capabilities in the background, and it also requires a very high level of expertise from you. It is impossible for a complete beginner to handle it.&#34; There used to be a legend that the murals in the popular game &#34;Black Myth: Wukong&#34; were made using AI
&#34;If they have the technical strength, they could have focused on AI companies instead of making games,&#34; Xiao Mo said.
During an emergency shareholders' meeting, Lu Hongyan, Chairman and General Manager of Jibite Games, answered the question about whether AI will change the gaming industry: &#34;When AI reaches that stage, it may not just be games, many industries will be changed. We still use AI as a tool, and we have not seen any research results that are particularly close to practicality for AI-native games.&#34;
As for the imagination space of AI games in the next 2 to 3 years, Zhuang Minghao remains cautious: &#34;Perhaps various functions will enter the product pipeline, and the infiltration of AI and AI functions in existing game projects will be more visible. And the pure AI games started today will officially be available to users at that time, but as the first attempt, it is difficult to have high expectations.&#34;
&#34;Our vision is to create a virtual world by 2030 where one billion people worldwide are willing to live in,&#34; miHoYo wrote on its official website.
It is no surprise that Cai Haoyu will continue the underlying logic of this vision in the new project. They are planning a major industry-disrupting move, but can the concept of AI games alone replicate the new landscape created by &#34;Genshin Impact&#34; in 2020 across the entire internet?
This question, no one dares to answer

miHoYo

Cai Haoyu, former chairman of miHoYo, recently spoke out on social media, proposing that future games will be created by a very small number of genius teams, and AI will revolutionize the gaming industry. However, his new project Anuttacon is facing challenges in China, with a cautious response from the industry. Zhuang Minghao, former vice president of Matrix Partners China, pointed out that AI game teams often make little progress after financing, and major game companies have doubts about the actual effects of AI investment. Cai Haoyu's views have sparked discussions, but most people still feel confused about this

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