CapCut, Tencent and Kuaishou Race to Build AI Film Game Tools
China's largest internet companies are building tools that let creators make branching, playable video stories, and the prize is the creator entry point for a format some expect to be produced at scale. ByteDance's CapCut, Tencent and Kuaishou have all moved into the space, according to Pandaily, which cited a Chinese media report on the shift. Interactive film games sit somewhere between a game and a drama, and the tools being built for them are aimed at whoever makes the next one.
CapCut's China edition opened ICG Studio, an AI platform for interactive film games, and access sits behind a closed beta. A creator starts with a story outline, then the system generates a script along with characters, scenes and props that persist across the project. Talking to an agent lets them branch the plot at any decision point and generate fresh storyboard shots, so the same cast and sets carry from one storyline into another.
But Tencent is spreading its bets rather than backing a single product. It has four of them across separate teams, and they cover different parts of the work. TDream turns a script into video and adds branching choices, while Project Craft generates 2D and 3D game prototypes from text, a product Tencent showed at its own developer event.
The remaining two fill gaps further out. LightSpeed Studios launched a creation platform that breaks interactive story production into six steps, so people without production experience can work through it. DreamNow is a showcase and discovery service for AI video, images and interactive titles, while Kuaishou has said its own AI interactive content features are coming without naming a product or a window.
The genre already has evidence that viewers will turn up. Titles including The Invisible Guardian and Love Is All Around showed the audience exists, yet production costs kept the supply of quality titles thin. Developers told the report that AI is changing the arithmetic, with one producer saying character art that once cost RMB 2,000 an image now lands near RMB 800 with AI help, while a small game budget of RMB 200,000 can fall to around RMB 150,000, and the report gives no figure for how many interactive titles reach players each year.
And the difficult problems sit upstream of the tools. Interactive scripts run far longer than scripts for short drama, and AI still cannot write them well. A hoped for data flywheel, in which every player choice trains better plots, remains unproven, because the reasons behind a click are hard to attribute.
Distribution is unsettled. Most interactive titles still sell as standalone games on platforms such as Steam, and whether titles made with AI will need a game publishing licence is unclear. The report leaves that question open.
So the tools are arriving ahead of the market for what they will produce. The strongest near term opening sits with professional creators rather than a mass audience, which is where the platforms are putting their effort. None of the three has published adoption figures for its tools.
CapCut's ICG Studio is in closed beta, generating scripts, persistent assets and storyboards from an outline
Tencent has four products in play, including TDream for script to video and Project Craft for prototypes
Developers put the AI saving at character art falling from RMB 2,000 to about RMB 800 an image
Interactive scripts, a data flywheel and a distribution channel all remain unsolved
Source: Pandaily
