Konami boss says AI can't replace the human chemistry behind great games
Artificial intelligence can speed up how games get made. It cannot replace the people who make them worth playing.
That is the message from Hideki Hayakawa, president of Konami Digital Entertainment, in Konami's new business report summarising its strategies across entertainment fields, as reported by Video Games Chronicle. The remarks sit in the digital section of the report. They address generative AI, systems that produce text, images, code and other material from simple prompts.
Hayakawa said gains in production efficiency are real. But they are not the point. Even if AI helps teams work faster, he said, the most important factors in producing entertaining and innovative video games are still people and creators.
Speed helps schedules and budgets. It does not decide what is fun to play.
Great ideas come from friction. Hayakawa said the human dynamic inside development teams sparks new ideas and new kinds of gameplay. That chemical reaction, in his words, cannot be easily replaced. No tool, however fast, reproduces the back-and-forth of a team testing ideas together.
He was equally calm about the wider market. Generative AI, he argued, will not bring significant change to the competitive environment. That is because entry barriers have already come down. Generic game engines, ready-made toolkits that handle much of the heavy lifting in building a game, are widely available. UGC has spread too, meaning player-made levels, modes and worlds built with in-game tools rather than by professional studios.
Konami is not stepping back from the technology. Hayakawa said the company provides systematic support so creators can grasp new technologies, assess the risks and safely apply them to game development. The aim is confidence as well as care: understand the tool, weigh the risk, then build. The account of those digital-segment remarks was based on a translation by Automaton, as noted by VGC.
What makes this stand out is the balance. There is no rejection of AI, and no claim that it changes everything. Efficiency is welcome. Authorship stays human.
For players, this means business as usual with a quiet shift behind the scenes. Tools may change. The pitch is that the fun still starts with people in a room testing ideas together. Short version: use the tools, keep the team.
