Kang Seung-mi, executive director at Samjong KPMG, said at a forum titled "The AI Era: A New Leap Forward and Policy Tasks for Korea's Content Industry," held Sept. 29 at the National Assembly Members' Office Building in Yeouido, Seoul: "Game companies feel greater pressure to use AI to produce results and deliver performance." She added, "They are adopting AI faster than general content firms."
According to Kang's presentation materials, company-wide AI adoption stands at 33.8% in the general content industry but reaches 49.6% in gaming. The gaming industry mainly uses AI for text and image generation to improve the efficiency of producing game content such as video and music.
The gaming industry's use of AI is expanding beyond games into fields including robotics and defense. Krafton signed a memorandum of understanding with Hanwha Aerospace to establish a joint venture focused on physical AI. NC AI, NCSoft's AI affiliate, is applying physics and simulation technologies accumulated during game development to the creation of AI foundation models.
Such adoption is expected to gradually contribute to revenue growth. The share of companies reporting higher revenue after adopting AI was greater in gaming (7.6%) than in the general content industry (2.6%). While the immediate revenue impact remains slow, the industry is actively pursuing AI-driven monetization.
Still, some warned that as AI lowers the barrier to game production, low-quality titles will inevitably proliferate. Je Sung-won, a director at Wrtn Technologies, said, "We see it as inevitable that low-quality content will increase as game production becomes easier," stressing that "what fundamentally remains valuable is who made it, rather than whether AI was used."
Copyright is another issue that must be resolved first. Lee Yong-min, an attorney at Yulchon, said, "There is no social consensus on whether AI must obtain permission from creators when training on existing works, or whether this should be treated as an exception under fair use." He added, "The government needs to set a baseline so the industry can carry on detailed discussions from there."
Others urged government action to address these problems. Kim Min-cheon, a department head at the Korea Internet Corporations Association, said, "For our content companies to compete in global markets, they need policy support in administrative and financial terms," arguing that "active communication between the government and the field is needed for practical policy and legislative activity."
