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AI is rewriting the rules of $200 billion games industry

Jul 26, 2023 (Japan Times) - Executives and politicians across the world worry about the havoc that next-generation artificial intelligence will wreak on industries from finance to health-care. For the $200 billion (Y28.2 trillion) games sector, the revolution has already begun.

From San Francisco to Tokyo and Hong Kong, the plethora of companies that power the digital entertainment sphere are responding to decades of escalating costs and stagnant prices by feverishly adopting and developing new AI tools. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are on the line. Yet company leaders and studio chiefs told Bloomberg News that the changes, while inevitable and painful, can empower smaller studios, boost creativity and ultimately benefit gamers around the world.

The head of one major Japanese studio is preparing for a future where half his company’s programmers and designers will be unnecessary within five years. At Hong Kong-listed Gala Sports, executives have mothballed non-AI research projects, forced department heads to study machine learning and offered bounties of as much as $7,000 for novel AI ideas. They worry they might already be late. ...continue reading

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A newly formed tropical depression near Taiwan on June 9th is expected to intensify the seasonal rain front lingering over southwestern Japan, raising the risk of warning-level rainfall across Okinawa and the Amami Islands through around June 11th.

Japan's national soccer team arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 8th from Monterrey, Mexico, where it had been conducting a pre-World Cup training camp, and held its first practice session at its base camp for the FIFA World Cup in North America.

A prolonged eruption at Sakurajima on June 7th blanketed parts of Kagoshima City in volcanic ash, turning roads gray and prompting long lines of vehicles seeking car washes after a plume of smoke rose 1,300 meters above the crater.

A powerful earthquake struck off Mindanao Island in the southern Philippines at 8:38 a.m. (Japan time) on June 8th, generating tsunami waves across parts of the Pacific, causing building collapses and casualties near the epicenter, and prompting the Japan Meteorological Agency to issue tsunami advisories along a wide stretch of Japan's Pacific coastline before lifting all of them at 4:50 p.m.

A clinic director and a former Peruvian staff member have been referred to prosecutors after the man allegedly performed medical procedures without a license, including an external cephalic version—a procedure used to manually turn a baby into the correct position before birth—at an obstetrics and gynecology clinic in Fukuoka City, raising concerns about patient safety and oversight in maternity care.

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