Square Enix vets say devs of the future will need to 'master the use of AI', but the human touch will still be vital

AI's a touchy subject in the development industry, but in other areas it's a lot less controversial—take Japan, for instance, which is embracing the technology a lot more than audiences in the West are. That's not to say there isn't any push back at all, mind.

Still, an example of how there's more of a positive spin on it overseas comes courtesy of a Famitsu interview (translated here by Automaton) where seasoned JRPG devs from Square Enix seem broadly positive on the tech—and are repeating some oft-heard talking points that I, at least, am personally very bored of, even if I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.

Hiromichi Tanaka, who worked on many Final Fantasy games during his tenure (which ended in 2012), says that the creations of the future "will definitely come down to how well people can master the use of AI." Yoshinori Kitase (also a veteran, and current producer on Final Fantasy 7: Revelation) concurs, saying: "major game companies will need to rethink their development methods to avoid being swept away by this wave."

Kitase points out that we've already had an increased wave of indie games from the popularisation of accessible game engines, and "when you add support from new tools and technologies on top of that, even people with limited experience can more easily make games."

We have seen a touch of that in all of these decompiled games, but there's also the fact that people with limited experience are also able to just up and steal ideas easier, too. And I'm not talking about a corporate aversion to piracy, here. The developers of Moonlighter recently had to yank their ReVamp demo from Steam because it was getting cloned—that's an indie dev having its hard work copy-pasted.

Kitase does at least acknowledge that people don't tend to find purely AI-generated or cloned slop tasteful, though: "Humans need to be involved in the initial step of turning zero into one," a turn of phrase he uses to describe the human creative spark and original ideas. "That will never change. The next generation of creators absolutely needs the ability to turn zero into one."

Tanaka adds that this'll turn the industry into a "competition of ideas". Which is a nice fantasy on paper, though I'm not entirely sure it's panning out that way in practice—as mentioned above, indie developers, already on rocky ground in an unkind industry where discoverability is a nightmare, are at risk of either having their games cloned or drowned in a sea of AI slop.