Earlier this week, Pocketpair Publishing boss John Buckley said his company isn't interesting in handling games built with generative AI: "If you're big on AI stuff or your game is Web3 or uses NFTs, there are lots of publishers out there [who will], but we're not the right partner for that." One of those partners, it seems, is PUBG maker Krafton, which announced today that it is transforming into an "'AI-first' company."
The announcement, posted on Krafton's Korean-language site and translated via Google, says the change will represent "a complete reorganization of the company's operational development system, placing AI at the center of problem solving." The goals of the new strategy include "fostering change in individuals and organizations, increasing company-wide productivity, and accelerating mid- to long-term corporate value growth," the company said.
To make the magic happen, Krafton said it will invest roughly 100 billion Korean won ($69.7 million) in a GPU cluster to "support multi-stage tasks requiring sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning [and] serve as the foundation for accelerating the implementation of agentic AI." Another 30 billion won ($21 million) will be allocated annually, beginning in 2026, "to actively support its employees in directly utilizing and applying various AI tools to their work."
"Through our AI First strategy, Krafton will expand the growth opportunities for each member, expand creative attempts centered on player experience, and lead AI innovation across the gaming industry," Krafton CEO Kim Chang-han said. "We will establish operational standards centered on AI and present best practices that can be referenced in the global gaming industry."
What this works out to in practical terms remains to be seen but on a gut level, well, I think it sounds terrible. Broadly speaking, I see two likely outcomes: Layoffs, because C-suite types love to imagine that good videogames can be made by thinking machines that don't need to be paid or given time off; or a catastrophic collapse when the AI bubble pops and companies find themselves sitting on mountains of Nvidia hardware that's suddenly destined for Craigslist, and of course the mountains of debt they took on to acquire it in the first place. Maybe it'll be the ol' one-two: First the layoffs, then the collapse. That's how these things often work out, after all.
And hey, maybe it'll all work out. It's entirely possible that Krafton's vision for the future is right on the money, and all of this will indeed pave the way to a better, more productive, and more creative future for all of us. I don't think so, and JP Morgan chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon would seem to agree—not that AI is going to give us good videogames, of course, but that the bubble is going to pop and it's going to be pretty bad when it does.
