Shift Up CEO Kim Hyung Tae has personally responded to players criticising an AI-generated music video promoting the studio's upcoming game Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, defending the technology as a tool built on human artistry rather than a replacement for it.

The video, uploaded to Shift Up's official YouTube channel on 31 July 2026, depicts the game's protagonist EVIE singing and dancing to an upbeat pop track titled 'Wanna be in Love'. It was produced using generative AI — software that creates images, video or audio from a text or data prompt. The song itself is an original Shift Up composition (Eurogamer, 4 August 2026).

Players pushed back quickly, raising familiar concerns about AI displacing creative work. Kim Hyung Tae took to X to answer them directly. EVIE, he said, was created over more than a year by Shift Up's artists and modellers, and the AI only renders and presents the character based on the team's data, designs and craftsmanship. In his framing, the technology is a presentation layer — not the foundation (Eurogamer, 4 August 2026).

Kim has been blunt about AI elsewhere, calling it 'essential' and a must-use for studios that want to compete with Chinese developers. He cited a stark scale gap: Chinese studios invest 1,000–2,000 people per game, while Shift Up employs roughly 150. About 80 percent of the studio's revenue comes from overseas markets (Eurogamer, 4 August 2026).

Stellar Blade: Blood Rain was first revealed at Summer Game Fest on 6 June 2026. It has no announced release date but is expected to launch sometime in 2027. The original Stellar Blade, a single-player action game released on PlayStation, is also headed to Nintendo Switch 2 — a move Shift Up announced on 10 June 2026 (shiftup.co.kr).

As of 31 July 2026, Shift Up had not issued a formal company statement on the music video, according to InvenGlobal. Kim's response came through his personal X account.

For fans, the exchange lands at the intersection of two live debates: whether AI-generated promotional material diminishes the human craft behind a game, and whether studios outside China can scale their output without it. Kim's answer to both is that AI extends what his team already built — though how players receive that argument may shape the conversation around Blood Rain as its 2027 window approaches.

Shift Up's broader portfolio includes the mobile hit Goddess of Victory: Nikke, which reclaimed the number-one revenue spot on the Korean App Store and reached second in Japan and Taiwan as of 3 July 2026, along with Destiny Child and a flagship project codenamed Project Spirit (shiftup.co.kr).