A Plague Tale: Innocence

Score: 7/10. Sony’s announcement at its 2025/2026 fiscal year earnings briefing sounds more alarming than it really is, because the first cuts are aimed at the production pipeline, not the creative core.

Sony said it has reached a “joint action plan” with Bandai Namco, including a collaborative pilot around generative AI and future technologies to support game development. Sony Group President and CEO Hiroki Totoki also put the company’s position plainly: human creativity must remain at the center, and technology is not a substitute for artists or creators, but a tool to amplify human imagination. Corporate messaging is easy enough to stage, but at least Sony did not sell AI here as the next Shenmue. That restraint counts for something.

The more meaningful part was the internal example presented by Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino. An AI tool called “Mockingbird” can automatically generate facial animation from motion-capture data, significantly shortening production time, and it has already been used by top studios including Naughty Dog on projects related to The Last of Us. In practical terms, this kind of AI looks less like a creative replacement and more like the increasingly mature engine toolchains console development adopted years ago: absorb repetitive labor first, and let artists and animators spend less of their lives grinding through manual work.

That makes it more convincing than many AI-heavy pitch decks outside the company. The value is concrete: it tackles production cycles, not the fantasy that “one person will make AAA games” any day now. Believing that is about as exaggerated as watching old motion-control promos and assuming everyone could suddenly play at the level of Virtua Fighter.

Sony’s AI push is not limited to content production either. Hideaki Nishino also confirmed that the PS5 Pro machine-learning super resolution technology, Spectral Super Resolution, has already improved image detail in recent titles including Saros and Ghost of Yōtei. This is actually the easier direction to accept. Console players are practical: steadier frame rates, sharper image quality, and fewer jagged edges matter far more than listening to a long presentation about an “ecosystem vision.”

Still, AI does not only have a polished side. The article notes that AI-driven payment tools have brought Sony more than $700 million in incremental revenue over the past few years by optimizing payment paths. On the other side, the AI boom is also competing for memory resources, and Sony predicts PS5 sales will decline in fiscal year 2026/2027. Because memory costs and supply remain uncertain, the launch timing and pricing of PS6 are still undecided, and Sony is even considering adjusting its business model because of that. That is the real issue. The same technology that helps the company make money is also pushing hardware costs upward, and the pressure eventually lands on players and developers. It is reminiscent of the early PS3 era: technically advanced on paper, expensive and difficult in practice.

My take is straightforward: in the short term, there is no need to panic that AI will ruin every good game. Right now, it is closer to a high-end wrench than a director. The bigger concern is platform curation and recommendation. Hideaki Nishino also said that if AI keeps lowering the barrier to game development and the number of releases keeps rising, a platform’s ability to filter and recommend will become more important than ever. Sony is already planning to use machine learning to build personalized tools that can accurately predict and recommend the next game or even peripheral a player may want. Without strong filtering, storefronts will eventually turn into another marketplace full of asset flips, where you can scroll through ten pages and still not find anything real.

So the point of this news is not the cheap headline that “Sony is also all-in on AI.” It is that top-tier projects like The Last of Us have already integrated AI into specific production workflows. I can accept the efficiency gains. Whether Sony can also protect taste and quality will depend on the games it ships next, not on how polished the wording sounded at the briefing.