Genshin and LOL Unite at the Unity Developer Conference — A Glimpse into the Future of AI Gaming
AI + Gaming: The Next Big Leap
In Shanghai, the latest signs of an "AI + gaming" wave are here.
From Love and Deep Space to League of Legends, developers are quietly harnessing AI to create entirely new worlds. Some see this as comparable to gaming’s first leap into the 3D era — except this time, AI is holding the controller.
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Unity Developers Conference 2025: AI in the Spotlight
Game engines are now openly discussing AI empowerment. On day one, Unity China CEO Zhang Junbo declared:
> We must deeply integrate AI capabilities to fully unleash creative potential.
Key trends from Unity’s report:
- Only 4% of developers don’t use AI in their workflow.
- Players are increasingly open to generative AI, as seen with Cai Haoyu’s AI-powered game.
Bottom line: AI has evolved from an assistant into the core engine driving creativity and efficiency.
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Unity’s AI Graph: Game Asset Creation Transformed
Unity — alongside Epic's Unreal Engine — is one of the top game engines worldwide. With a 73.12% mobile game development share, its reach is unmatched.
Unity 1.7.3 Key Update
- AI integration is the central focus.
- Collaboration with Tencent Hunyuan delivers AI Graph, a deeply embedded AIGC workflow platform inside Unity.
Why It Matters
Traditional AAA game production is slow and resource-heavy:
- Concept → Demo → Final Release requires huge asset investments.
- Steps like modeling, UV unfolding, topology often depend on external AI tools.
Now, with AI Graph:
- Directly call industry-leading AI from within Unity.
- Simply enter a text prompt or image to generate full 3D character models.
- Increase 2D efficiency by 30%, 3D asset efficiency by 70%, while reducing costs by 10%.
Benefits:
- Automatic render pipeline alignment → zero format conflicts.
- Real-time editing and collaborative workflows.
- Onboarding tutorials for beginners → making games easier even for non-technical creators.
Unity China Technical Director Gu Shenhua notes:
> For beginners, AI Graph is a super-accelerator from idea to prototype.
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The Bigger Ecosystem: AITOearn
AiToEarn官网 offers:
- Open-source tools for AI content generation.
- Cross-platform publishing to Douyin, Kwai, WeChat, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, X/Twitter.
- Built-in analytics and AI model ranking.
Such platforms lower barriers and connect AI directly to production pipelines — enabling both game developers and content creators to turn ideas into monetizable reality.
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AWS: AI Powering the Game Lifecycle
AWS — the world’s largest cloud gaming infrastructure provider — asks three core AI questions:
- What can AI do?
- What can I do with AI?
- What can my players do with AI?
AI Across the Lifecycle: Build → Run → Grow
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1. Build
AI in the creation phase:
- Boosts development speed, enriches content, reduces costs.
- Amazon Bedrock → smarter NPCs.
- Amazon AI Bot → faster level training.
- AI tools → player-generated content.
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2. Run
Post-launch support:
- Amazon GameLift Server → low-latency, global hosting.
- AI-driven analytics from massive datasets.
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3. Grow
Retention & monetization:
- Serverless game analytics → player segmentation, LTV prediction.
- AI-powered sentiment monitoring & personalized recommendations.
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Developer Spotlight: AI in Coding
With cross-platform games like Genshin Impact:
- Mobile: Java
- PC/Console: C#
- AI reduces cross-language coding overhead.
Amazon Q for Developer assists in:
- Navigating large codebases.
- Documentation parsing.
- Automated workflows.
AWS predicts 2024–2025 as "the year of generative AI and AI agents" in gaming.
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Player Perspective
AI enhances:
- Rapid updates.
- Richer interactivity.
- Faster bug fixes.
Example:
- EA’s Apex Legends migrated one million players in 10 days using GameLift.
- Party Animals launched in 9 regions with <45ms latency.
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Meshy: Specializing in 3D Generative AI
Founded in 2018, Meshy caters to 3D GenAI creators:
- 5M+ community members.
- Selected by A16Z as a top pick.
3D GenAI Architectures
- Diffusion Models → rich, scanned-like detail.
- Autoregressive Models → hand-crafted-like output; better for city modeling.
While full AAA games like Love and Deep Space remain beyond scope, 3D GenAI dramatically cuts production costs.
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Use Cases
- VR/AR worlds for metaverse.
- UGC enhancements for player retention.
- Location-based games (Pokémon GO) asset updates.
- Pet-raising games content enrichment.
AAA examples:
- Black Myth: Wukong → 3 years modeling, RMB 15–20M/hour costs.
- Spider-Man 2 PS5 → $30M USD on engine debugging.
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Indie Gains
- Text-to-3D/Image-to-3D in minutes.
- Direct Unity import via script.
Meshy’s team confirms AI adoption is now an industry open secret.
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Industry Trends: AI + Mini-Games + Coding
Zuo Ruiwen from Tuanjie Engine highlights:
- Prototyping with AI — weeks → days/hours.
- Mini-game ecosystem — 84.4% of Chinese gamers play them; AI enables bulk asset generation.
- Playable Ads — short, lightweight, perfect for A/B testing with AI assets.
- AI-Assisted Coding — Copilot, Cursor, full solution generation.
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Current Challenge: Player Resistance
Despite inevitability, AI usage transparency matters:
- Jurassic World: Evolution 3 faced backlash after AI disclosure.
- Blizzard faced criticism for AI-generated in-game assets.
Zuo Ruiwen:
> The AI + gaming trend is unstoppable.
Solution:
- Label AI-generated content.
- Unity’s digital watermarks for tracking.
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Conclusion: Embrace the Wave
AI + gaming is not a passing fad — it’s the next leap, reshaping how games are built, run, and monetized.
Platforms like AiToEarn官网 demonstrate the power of combining AI creation with multi-platform distribution, empowering global reach, analytics, and monetization.
Over time, transparency will turn skepticism into player acceptance, much as happened with ChatGPT adoption.
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