PlayStation And Bandai Namco Are Testing Generative AI For Game Development
Sony and Bandai Namco are officially working together on a new pilot project exploring generative AI and other future-facing tech for game development.
The announcement came through Sony’s corporate strategy presentation and earnings update, where Sony Group president and CEO Hiroki Totoki tried to frame the whole thing carefully: AI is not meant to replace artists or game creators, but to help boost what they can already do.
That distinction matters, because gamers are understandably allergic to any corporate AI announcement that sounds like “we found a cheaper way to make art.” Totoki’s message was basically: the human side still leads, AI just helps speed things up.
According to Sony, its work so far has shown major improvements in production speed and productivity per person. Totoki also acknowledged one of the biggest problems with generative AI — inconsistency. Anyone who has played around with image or animation tools knows the pain: one output looks fire, the next one suddenly has alien hands or a totally different style.
Sony says it has been working around this by using different AI models, fine-tuning them, and building up internal know-how to generate results that better match the intended style, accuracy, and cost targets.
For Malaysian and SEA players, the key thing here is not just “AI is coming”. It is what kind of games this might affect. Bandai Namco is behind huge franchises with massive regional fanbases, from Tekken to Dragon Ball, Naruto, Gundam, Elden Ring publishing, and more. If this tech helps studios polish animations, speed up QA, or reduce repetitive production work, we could eventually see faster updates, better localisation pipelines, or more consistent post-launch support.
But yes, the concern is real too. SEA has plenty of artists, animators, modders, indie devs, and outsourcing studios. If big publishers use AI responsibly, it can remove boring grunt work. If they use it badly, it can squeeze creative workers. That line is thin, bro.
PlayStation boss Hideaki Nishino also explained how Sony is already using AI internally. One example is Mockingbird, a tool that generates facial animation from captured performance data much faster than traditional methods. Naughty Dog, known for The Last of Us, and San Diego Studio, the MLB The Show 2026 developer, were named as teams using the tool, including on released titles.
Sony also said AI-powered payment tools have helped generate more than $700m in additional revenue over the past few years by improving how payments are directed. On the graphics side, Nishino pointed to PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, the machine learning-powered upscaling tech used on PS5 Pro, saying it has benefited newer releases such as Saros and Ghost of Yotei.
Looking ahead, Sony wants to use machine learning for personalisation too. That could mean recommendations for the next game you might enjoy, or even accessories you may want to buy. With AI potentially lowering the barrier to making games, Sony believes curation and recommendations will become even more important.
That part is interesting for SEA, where players already face a flood of releases across Steam, PlayStation Store, mobile, Game Pass, and free-to-play titles. Discovery is brutal. A smarter recommendation system could help smaller or more niche games reach the right audience — assuming it does not just push whatever makes the most money.
The timing is also a bit spicy. Sony also forecast lower PS5 sales for its 2026/2027 fiscal year, partly because of memory shortages linked to the generative AI boom. The company has not locked in a PS6 release date or price yet, and has even suggested it may need to rethink business models because of the memory supply situation.
So yeah, Sony is clearly betting big on AI, even while AI is also making console hardware planning messier. Add in its earlier patent for an AI ghost that can play games for you, and it is obvious PlayStation sees this as more than just a side experiment.
For now, the Sony and Bandai Namco pilot is one to watch closely. If it helps developers make better games without flattening the human creativity behind them, bagus. If it becomes another cost-cutting buzzword, gamers will smell it from a mile away.
Source: Eurogamer
