Blizzard: AI and Games

As a long-time lover of the game World of Warcraft (WOW) since middle school, I am often amazed by how intelligent some of the Non-Player Characters (NPC) are in response to my actions and how creative and dedicated Blizzard (the company that created the game, named Activision Blizzard and was acquired by Microsoft on Oct. 13th, 2023) is in pushing out a massive amount of game contents through regular updates. These would make me question how they do it and whether AI plays a role in any part. The simple question is: they did not use AI from the beginning, yet they are trying to implement it in all aspects of creating processes now, and we are not just talking about WOW.

A bit intro to Blizzard

As one of the most significant and most impactful video game companies in the world, Blizzard has made many top-selling games throughout its history, including the Warcraft series, World of Warcraft, Diablo series, StarCraft series, Overwatch series, Hearthstone, and a lot more [1]. Blizzard was initially merged with Activision in 2008, the largest merger in the video game industry back then [2]. It had a revenue of 7.53 billion dollars in 2022 and is hiring around 17,000 employees [3]. Simply put, Blizzard is a legend (not biased at all!).

Art creation accelerated with AI

Online multi-player video games require teams of talented artists, designers, and game creators and constant updates to the game content so that the games would attract players to stay and always have or anticipate new things they can explore. This means that the game-creating process is rather highly labor-intensive. In the era of 2022-2023, with the advances of generative AI tools in various forms, such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and ChatGPT, one can easily imagine the utility of this software within game creation. In fact, according to a New York Times article, Blizzard announced an internal AI tool for art generation called Blizzard Diffussion, which is fine-tuned based on Stable Diffussion [4]. Blizzard diffusion could generate art in different scenes without games, including the landscape’s looks, buildings, characters, gears, and even the stories behind them. Although Blizzard did not disclose any details on how exactly they were or were planning on using AI, it was made clear by its vice president of global insights, Andrew Guerrero, that they would use AI to accelerate their creative work, making the process more accessible [4].

As an interesting note, here is a picture generated by Stable Diffusion Web when I entered the prompt: “A new world of Warcraft character who is a male troll, a legendary hunter with his wolf pet alongside, greeting the player” [5]. AI’s performance here is sub-optimal, yet it has high potential.

AI-driven NPC

Though AI cannot replace humans in the real world, it can do so in video games as non-player characters. In games like World of Warcraft, players constantly interact with NPC for actions such as delivering quests, purchasing or selling goods, fighting together or against, delivering real-time story scenes, etc. Some of these actions may be done with straightforward algorithms, but many could only be achieved with AI, given the dynamic nature of challenging the players [4, 7]. Online gaming companies like Blizzard regularly use AI to detect robots, hackers, and players’ toxic behaviors to maintain a healthy community [6]. In my experience in the World of Warcraft, many bosses can employ targeted spells onto individual classes of players, making the game a lot more challenging and fun.

I would also like to give a special shout-out to AI in StarCraft II, a strategic competitive game where one to three players control units to conquer the other team of one to three. Aside from AI usage during artistic content creation, the game utilizes particular types of AI to act as the opposing robotic player against the human player for training purposes. The AI needs to respond and adjust its strategies dynamically to the actions it observes from the human player. There are many difficulties one can change for how expert the AI would be and how hard it is to beat the AI. The use of AI here is very similar to the usage of AlphaGo by DeepMind in Go matches, employing reinforcement learning to optimize every action for the best potential outcomes of winning the game. Interestingly, DeepMind also participated in StarCraft II with the AlphaStar AI, which could outperform 99.8% of all registered human players [8]. There is also a community behind building AI to play the game with a ranking system specifically for AI. This topic of would ultimately contirbute to the debate of human vs. AI.

As we can observe, AI has been used extensively by either Blizzard or the players to optimize player experiences as the purpose.

Value capture with AI

Blizzard’s ultimate goal to employ all these forms of AI is to keep their existing players and attract new players to play their games. But how exactly does Blizzard capture the values created by AI using AI? Although few data points are available to us, I will assume their AI-driven business model practices for pricing optimization, customer behavior analysis, and future trend predictions. As a video game company, Blizzard can record all user data points, including time, clicks, favorite characters or elements, etc. A big-data-driven approach with AI would allow Blizzard to understand their customers and provide targeted marketing and product deliveries to capture values.

Challenges of AI and potential solutions

Although AI tools may sound promising in this case, concerns about copyright abuse, job displacement, and hallucination were raised. They could only be justified as the field experience and mature under regulations. Until then, the usage of AI at Blizzard was very much up to the individual designers. Given the nature of generative AI, I doubt any current copyright laws would prevent such acts from happening. A needed change to Blizzard is a thorough guideline on AI usage within the company. Such guidelines require an organizational change of Blizzard with the incorporation of an AI management team that controls the future ways of using AI within the cooperation. Tremendous opportunities lie within AI usage, and a management team dedicated to this field would allow Blizzard to construct strategic and organized plans to capture values.

Citations

[1] https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/games

[2] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-10-13/microsoft-activision-blizzard-acquisition-deal#:~:text=Activision%20purchased%20dozens%20of%20companies,time%2C%20making%20it%20Activision%20Blizzard.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/arts/blizzard-diffusion-ai-video-games.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9COur%20goal%20with%20A.I.%20has,as%20characters%20and%20their%20outfits.

[5] https://stablediffusionweb.com/#ai-image-generator

[6] https://esi.si.com/call-of-duty/activision-blizzard-looking-to-implement-ai-for-wow-call-of-duty

[7] https://www.companionlink.com/blog/2023/07/technologies-used-in-world-of-warcraft-game/#:~:text=World%20of%20Warcraft%20incorporates%20AI,them%20challenging%20and%20dynamic%20opponents.

[8] https://www.unite.ai/deepminds-ai-reaches-highest-rank-of-starcraft-ii/