Proactive Investors - Artificial intelligence, deep learning, large-language models…
Since the stunningly quick mass adoption of ChatGPT and AI-based protocols, these buzzwords have rapidly entered company discourse, with management and those on the frontlines wondering what it all means for their businesses.
Videogames services leader Keywords Studios PLC (LON:KWS) is no exception to this.
Keywords: Not just an outsourcing company
Keywords’ service lines are multitudinous and complex, but the remit is simple: Make videogame from this country compatible with this other country.
Proofreading and language translation is the most obvious service, but other surface-level products include age-rating support, geopolitical assessment of in-game content and graphic design.
Below the surface, Keywords handles technically complex porting and optimisation services. Then there is the quality assurance (QA) aspect of the business, i.e. making sure the game works at the user end.
There is no doubt that some of the service lines lend themselves nicely to AI processes which could potentially be performed in-house by Keywords’ existing clients.
This fact wasn’t missed by Deutsche Bank (ETR:DBKGn) analysts, who this week stated: “The recent busy period of AI-related gaming newsflow from the likes of Unity, NetEase (NASDAQ:NTES) and Ubisoft confirms to us that we could even see formerly heavily-outsourced tasks in gaming moving back in-house to be automated.”
But this fact also wasn’t missed by Keywords’ chief executive Bertrand Bodson at a recent fireside chat.
Asked if AI technology could be deployed by game developers themselves, Bodson acknowledged the issue while attempting to clear up some misconceptions.
“To some extent, why couldn't you then do it yourself?” He pondered. “But I think there's a lot of misconception there on that front. And that's where I always fight against the word of we're just an outsource at arm's length, doing a bit of work here on the side when (a client) is short on resources.”
To Bodson, the idea that Keywords is merely an outsourcing client negates the fact that Keywords has a much closer partnership with its clients than one might suspect.
“At the core of it, we do co-development, we have a platform to be able to very quickly do porting across multiple platforms in multiple languages,” said Bodson.
Bodson sees Keywords as a company that can actually help game developers navigate what is going to be an increasingly complicated era for development.
Issues like cloud infrastructure, load balancing, network resilience and complex workflows go well beyond simple language translations, and they are issues that Bodson believes will sustain these strong client relationships.
ChatGPT’’s language barrier
Even on the language translation front, generative AI has a long way to go before coming close to the industry experts.
Keywords has been trialling ChatGPT alongside its own in-house translation tools supplied by KantanAI, a company that the group purchased in 2019.
During the fireside chat, chief operating officer Jon Hauck explained: “(ChatGPT) is nowhere near the quality because it's running off of generic datasets.
“Very often the language in games is genre specifics, it's game specific. And you need to build those in-game datasets in order to do effective machine translation”
Hauck pointed to the work Keywords did on Pokemon, the massively popular Nintendo IP in which gamers battle monsters with various different abilities and fighting styles.
“There is something like 4,000 battle moves that are specific language to the Pokemon game, and we got those translated into 35 languages in our datasets,” he explained. “That kind of industry-specific nuance is really important to understand.“
Keywords’ M&A strategy also feeds into the group’s narrative of integrating with, not being replaced by, AI.
In the years since the KantanAI acquisition, Keywords has bolted on a number of noteworthy companies including Helpshift, a chatbot for player support, and Mighty Games, software group that helps analyse the quality of developers' code.
Rather than doom and gloom, Bodson reckons that, for the industry as a whole, AI “is an incredible force for good”.
Either way, the rapid march of AI, and its effects on companies such as Keywords, will be an intriguing story to follow in the months and years to come.