If you’ve been quietly watching the emerging world of AI from afar and are politely intrigued by what might be possible ‘in the future’ you may well be surprised at just how far the technology has come and what’s available in the field of AI generated creatives and promotion for your game right here, right now.
João Vieira da Costa, CEO and founder of Replai.io took to the stage at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2024 for his session entitled ‘AI video is Already App-ening’ to spell out what’s possible and the results and possiblities on show were real eye-openers.
Replai.io uses a data-to-ads process to generate mobile video creatives by examining your game and produce video. This video can then be used in creative campaigns to attract new users, with the platform able to see which ads gained the best responses and give indicators as to what’s working best in your promo plans.
Most remarkable is the automated nature of Replai. Instead of creating single, painstaking creatives or a raft of options, now that AI is taking the strain it’s possible to put 500 or more creatives out to work and see which deliver the results. Further fine tuning is therefore possible with the system taking care of the heavy lifting from the start and the user able to tweak and approve results all along the way.
If budgetry worries, time contraints, the size of your team, or their speed or skill was holding back the number of creatives you wanted to launch out and test, then Replai looks like a dream-come-true answer to your problems.
So far Replai has been behind the scenes on over five billion dollars of ad-spend per year through their work with top tier developers such as Activision and Royal Match makers, Dream Games.
Data becomes video
Having been in development since 2019, the system uses a computer vision model that is able to recognise creatives and, after providing insight on other company’s campaigns they decided to step up and use AI to develop the creative themselves. The process is called ‘data to video’ and it’s become the source of thousands of videos every month for their developer partners.
Here’s how it works.
In the platform you can select characters or rooms or any aspect of your game’s video and use them to create tags. The system can then look for these tags and create video using them. You can then see which tags – characters or rooms or scenarios – are having an impact, positive or negative.
“We go inside the gameplay – we not only tage your video we tag your gameplay too. It’s like you can perform a Google search on your gameplay,” Vieira da Costa before giving an interesting and extreme example. “Want to localise a video for an American game into France. Let’s say if features the Statue of Liberty in the video in the States? Replai can change that landmark into the Eiffel Tower in Paris as part of an automated localisation process.”
“Teams stop running on gut feeling on what they believe will work and instead the production of creatives becomes a process,” Vieira da Costa explains. “Then with the help of AI they can make 500 or 1000 videos per month. They no longer need agencies to make creatives for them, they can bring it all in house.”
And best (or certainly the most eye-popping) of all they’re able to begin making creatives and trying ideas even when there is no video… Or there is no game… “There’s no level of previous creatives that you need to have,” says Vieira da Costa
Adapt to my style…
“Legally there are two options in the world of AI,” Vieira da Costa explains. “One is that if you’re a public company in which case you’ll want to give the AI a degree of freedom of almost zero. But if you’re a growing company or want to experiment you can give more freedom to the AI and it’ll come up with things that you didn’t expect.”
A handy ‘adapt to my style’ button allows users to take on successful video from elsewhere and have the AI replace and create elements effectively lifting ‘good’ ideas and making them your own. Eventually, and through approving and prompting, the ‘source’ material becomes invisible and the end result is all your own.
“A person that uses these tools can do much more at the end of the week than someone who didn’t,” says Vieira da Costa
It’s certainly an intriguing way of working and – most remarkble of all – it works and it’s available right now.
