Capcom has clarified its current stance on generative AI in its videogames. The major Japanese publisher and developer behind popular series like Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and Monster Hunter has revealed that while it doesn’t use gen-AI assets in their games, it is exploring ways to use generative AI to streamline the game development process.
On March 23, Capcom publicized the questions and answers from its latest shareholders’ meeting. In this session, Capcom was asked about its stance on using generative AI in game development.
“We will not implement assets generated by AI into our games.” Capcom replied. “However, we plan to proactively use it as a contributing technology to improve the efficiency and productivity of the game development process. To this end, we are currently exploring ways to implement it in various areas, including graphics, sound and programming.”
As previously reported by Japanese news site Game*Spark, Capcom revealed back in January 2025 that it built a prototype “idea generation” system using Google Cloud. Basically, it’s a system that uses generative AI to help brainstorm ideas to flesh out a game’s world, something that Capcom’s technical director Kazuki Abe described as one of the most labor-intensive and time consuming tasks in game development, as each item has to be created from scratch.
With so many items and background details in the rich environments of games like the Monster Hunter series, Abe noted that “ultimately, we have to come up with hundreds of thousands of unique ideas” for comparison and evaluation. Each of the thousands of items in a game requires multiple proposals including text and visual references, to make sure that even background objects fit the game’s setting.
Capcom’s Google Cloud-based system uses generative AI to read various game design documents (including text, images, and spreadsheets) and output further ideas based on them, thus speeding up the conceptualization process. The system allows individuals to use generative AI to brainstorm and generate ideas on their own, and has apparently been highly evaluated by Capcom’s staff. Abe explained that generative AI can be used to produce visual references to convey ideas to art directors and artists, who ultimately produce the finished assets.
So it seems that Capcom will use generative AI to streamline time-consuming and repetitive game development tasks, but actual game content will still be made by humans.
Generative AI in the games industry is a hot topic, and Capcom has recently popped up in the news due to Resident Evil Requiem being used in the tech demo for Nvidia’s DLSS 5 AI graphics tech last week. The reveal drew widespread criticism for giving Resi protagonists Grace and Leon a “photo-realistic” glow-up that some found soulless and an insult to the original artists’ vision. Nvidia later confirmed that DLSS 5 is redrawing games by taking frames and motion vector data from the source material, and drawing a new image that’s slapped on top.
A survey by Game Developer published earlier this year found that 36% of industry professionals are using GenAI in their daily work. However, the survey also showed around 80% relied on it for researching and brainstorming, with more complex and creative tasks still requiring a human touch.
Speaking at Gamescom in Bangkok last October, Dead Space creator Glen Schofield argued that AI could be used to fix a games industry beleaguered by rising costs and layoffs. “AI isn’t here to replace us,” Schofield opined. “It’s here to make us faster, better, and more efficient.”
Still developers are having to tread carefully with AI, and some have endured high-profile backlashes from fans. Last year, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian was forced to respond to a Divinity GenAI backlash, eventually promising not to release the game with any AI components. And just this weekend, Crimson Desert developer Pearl Abyss announced it had launched a “comprehensive” audit of all in-game assets after admitting the use of AI-generated images in the final release should have been disclosed.
Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.
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