PUBG and Inzoi directors offer a glimpse of Krafton’s AI-first culture

In October, the Korean publisher Krafton – which is behind games such as PUBG: Battlegrounds and Inzoi, and whose studio portfolio includes Tango Gameworks, Unknown Worlds Entertainment, and Neon Giant – announced that it would be positioning itself as an “AI-first company.” The firm said it would be “prioritizing AI as a central and primary means of problem-solving,” a move that will involve a “complete” reorganization and the investment of 100 billion Korean won ($69.7 million) in a new GPU cluster.

At Gamescom back in August, ahead of Krafton’s announcement, GamesIndustry.biz interviewed the directors of PUBG and Inzoi, who revealed more about Krafton’s attitude towards AI and how they are embracing its use in their games.

PUBG: Battlegrounds director Taehyun Kim said (via a translator) that Krafton offers PUBG Studios a range of AI tools. “But they don’t force us to use them,” he said. “They just recommend and suggest, and we take a look and then we test them out. And when we find things that are helpful, then we put it into our pipeline. So we do a review and then we decide whether to use it or not. If we don’t find it efficient, then we don’t use it. But if we find it efficient, then we use it.”

Kim said that PUBG Studios is using AI for code reviews. “So we write the code and give that to AI, and it tells us what the problem is, like spelling errors,” he said. “And sometimes it’s wrong, it doesn’t give all the right answers. So we do double checking with humans.” Kim emphasised, however, that the studio doesn’t use AI to generate code.

But the studio is using AI to create concept art. “We don’t use that in the final product,” Kim said. “But we use it in the initial stage, because it’s a lot quicker. And then we do the [final artwork by hand], based on the concept, AI-generated stuff.”

Looking outside Krafton, Kim was positive about how AI has the potential to expand the capabilities of small teams – and more generally, he sees the future is bright for small indie studios that are able to innovate and create games quickly. “When you think about big companies, there’s so many people and it’s a slow process, because you have to go through a lot of approval. But if it’s like a one- or two-person company… with AI, I think they’ll make games very fast, and they’ll make different games.”

Virtual dolls’ house

Whereas PUBG Studios is using AI only for small portions of the development process, the developers behind the Sims-like life-simulation game Inzoi are embracing the technology whole-heartedly.

Inzoi’s director, Hyungjun ‘Kjun’ Kim, said via a translator that AI has “really helped a lot,” particularly in terms of allowing players to mod the game by pulling in their own assets. “They can just input an image, and then our 3D printer makes that image into a 3D object and lets players place the object in the world,” he said. “If you input video, then it becomes poses and motion animations that you can use within the game. And if you input text, then it gives you an image you use, for example, on wallpaper.”

Kjun doesn’t think that using AI necessarily enabled Inzoi to be made any more quickly, and he doesn’t think AI will ever replace humans in terms of making games. “But it actually provides us with new tools to find new types of fun,” he said. “I think our genre really benefits from the use of AI, so it was a natural decision to lean towards AI in building some features. Other genres in Krafton have attempted to try to incorporate AI into their games and their processes, but they found that it’s less useful than it was for the Inzoi dev team.”

Kjun’s team is also experimenting with adding AI-generated dialogue to Inzoi. GamesIndustry.biz was shown a demo in which a young man speaks to his mother, where the dialogue choices and speech were entirely generated by AI. The system also generates activities in the game: The conversation we watched ended with an agreement that the pair should watch TV, prompting the characters to do just that.

It was far from perfect – the voices had a distinctly robotic cadence, and the generated dialogue came up with some odd turns of phrase (“Perhaps your ears are just getting lazy”). But it’s also possible to see why an emergent system like this might work in the dolls’ house world of Inzoi – with players using and abusing it to generate absurd scenarios – when in a more serious title the stilted conversations would feel out of place.

That all depends, of course, on how willing players will be to accept AI in games. Whereas AI assets are already becoming commonplace in mobile titles, players appear to be much less willing to tolerate them in premium-priced games. Inzoi, which is currently in Early Access on Steam, faced backlash from some players when it was revealed generative AI was used in its development.

One of the biggest problems consumers have with AI is to do with the ethics around training data, particularly when AI is trained on text or images that have been used without the express permission of the creators. But Kjun insists that all of the models in Inzoi are trained on internal data. “Actually, we tried using other … data, but we found that our own internal data worked best,” he said.

As for the issue of whether AI will replace jobs, Kjun admitted that he sometimes has that concern. “Maybe someday I might be replaced by AI. But I don’t think so, not in the immediate future, because I think AI tools really make your job easier, and it helps you come up with more creative ideas that really help you. So it’s more like a tool that you can use.”

Regarding the negative reaction in some quarters to the use of GenAI in Inzoi, he said that he expected it. “But I had the belief that AI would make the game more fun, and it would really help us in the long term. And so going forward, we’ll try to keep communicating with our players, make sure their concerns are addressed, and just try to understand where everything is coming from so that everyone has a mutual understanding of where we stand.”

“I think AI tools really make your job easier, and it helps you come up with more creative ideas”

Hyungjun ‘Kjun’ Kim

The belief is that rather than replacing something that humans can do, the use of AI in Inzoi is adding something that was not possible before. But for some, GenAI is a red line they will not cross – and several of the negative Steam reviews for Inzoi mention Krafton’s AI-first approach as a reason for them turning against the game.

The full release of Inzoi is still a long way away according to Kjun, probably well beyond the end of 2026. By the time it finally rolls around, it will be interesting to see whether its audience’s opinions towards AI will have softened or hardened – and whether Krafton’s gamble to go all-in on an AI future paid off.