Sony expects AI tools to make the game release flood even bigger

The games market is already packed until pening. Between Steam, PlayStation Store, mobile storefronts, and indie-friendly engines, players in Malaysia and SEA are getting more new games than anyone can realistically keep up with.

Sony thinks that flood is about to get even bigger.

During an investor presentation, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino said the company expects a major rise in both the amount and variety of content available to players. The reason? AI tools that make it faster and cheaper for creators to build things, test things, and ship projects that might previously have been too expensive or too slow to attempt.

AI is already inside Sony’s workflow

Sony is not talking about some far-future sci-fi setup here. Nishino said PlayStation’s own development teams are already using AI to reduce repetitive production work in areas like quality assurance, 3D modelling, and animation.

One example is a Sony 3D animation tool called Mockingbird. According to Nishino, it helps artists turn raw motion capture data into in-game animation much faster. The tool does not replace the performers doing the motion capture, but it can cut down animation work that previously took hours into something completed almost instantly.

Sony also highlighted machine-learning work around hair animation. Instead of animators manually placing strands one by one, AI tools can study videos of real hairstyles and apply realistic movement to models with hundreds of strands. Anyone who has seen how much modern games obsess over hair physics knows this is not a small production detail.

Sony Group president and CEO Hiroki Totoki framed this as an efficiency push. In his view, faster workflows could allow studios to chase more ambitious ideas that used to be blocked by cost or time limits.

Sony also mentioned a pilot partnership with Bandai Namco focused on video production. Totoki said the project showed large productivity gains per person, although the team still had to tune general AI models to deal with issues like consistency and control. In other words: useful, but not magic.

More games, harder discovery

For Malaysian players, the impact is pretty obvious. If AI lowers the barrier to making games, we may see even more releases competing for attention on Steam and console storefronts. That can be great for variety, especially for smaller teams in SEA that do not have massive AAA budgets.

But it also means discoverability gets even more brutal. Good games can already disappear under a mountain of new launches, demos, DLC, live-service updates, and discounted back-catalogue titles. If AI speeds up production across the board, finding the actually worth-it games may become the real boss fight.

Sony believes AI can help there too. Nishino said AI recommendation systems can already perform better than manual curation when suggesting games players may like. He also suggested future systems could recommend not just games, but the next gameplay moment, subscription, accessory, or merchandise linked to a player’s interests.

That part is useful, but also a bit sus if you think about it. Better discovery is great. Hyper-targeted upselling every time you open your console? Malaysian wallets already suffering, bro.

Sony says humans still matter

To be fair, Sony is not claiming AI can replace full development teams or magically generate complete PlayStation-quality games from scratch. Nishino said AI is meant to strengthen developers, not replace them, and that human teams still need to define the vision, design, and emotional impact of a game.

Totoki also said Sony’s core principle is that human creativity stays at the centre, describing AI as an amplifier for human imagination. The company’s message is basically: let AI handle more of the grind, while people keep steering the soul of the work.

Still, there is one interesting tension here. Nishino also mentioned prototypes where NPCs have their own personalities and help create a more dynamic world for players to explore. That sounds exciting for RPGs and open-world games, but it also raises real questions about how much of a character’s identity should come from writers and designers versus AI systems reacting on the fly.

For now, the takeaway is simple: AI is not just a buzzword sitting in investor slides anymore. For PlayStation, it is already part of production, and Sony expects it to reshape how many games get made, how fast they arrive, and how players discover them.

For SEA gamers, that means more choice. The challenge is making sure the best stuff does not get buried under the noise.

Source: Ars Technica