Artist's concept of Miyamoto preparing to fend off investors eager for further integration of generative AI.
In recent years, broad swaths of the gaming industry have embraced generative AI, both in development and in new user-generated content tools. But legendary Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto says his company would “prefer to go in a different direction” when it comes to AI technology.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Miyamoto said that this wasn’t just a contrarian attitude on Nintendo’s part. “It may seem like we’re just going in the opposite direction for the sake of going in the opposite direction, but we’re actually trying to find what makes Nintendo special,” Miyamoto said. “There’s a lot of talk about AI, for example. When that happens, everyone starts going in the same direction, but that’s where Nintendo would rather go in a different direction.”
Miyamoto's statement comes a few months after Nintendo president Shintaro Furukawa took a less-committal stance at a Q&A with investors in July. “Generative AI, which is becoming a hot topic, can be used creatively, but we recognize that it can also raise issues with intellectual property rights,” Furukawa said at the time.
Ignoring generative AI would definitely take Nintendo in a “different direction” from many major gaming companies. Electronic Arts’ recent Investor Day was filled with talk of algorithmic AI and its potential to make game development more efficient. Microsoft, which has invested heavily in OpenAI, has pledged to integrate its Copilot chatbots into games like Minecraft to offer conversational advice to players. And Nvidia is busy talking up the potential of its ACE generative AI model to power non-playable characters in-game that don’t follow any script.
On the other hand, Nintendo has often been hesitant to jump on the bandwagon of tech industry trends. While Nintendo said it was “looking into” VR back in 2016, it quickly became clear that the company wasn’t interested in following in Sony’s footsteps into the VR space (the gimmicky cardboard Labo VR notwithstanding).
“If you look at virtual reality headsets, I doubt they can appeal to the general public,” Nintendo France CEO Philippe Lavoué said in a 2018 interview. “And what new thing would we bring compared to our competitors? If we do exactly the same as everyone else, we are destined to die because we are smaller than them.”