Quick take:
- Scenario Inc. has raised $6 million in a funding round backed by Play Ventures, Anorak Ventures, The Venture Reality Fund, and Founders Inc.
- Gaming industry vets including Oculus co-founder/CEO Brendan Iribe, Twitch founder Justin Kan, and former Blizzard executive Hamilton Chu, among others, also participated.
- GenAI’s early access program already boasts more than 20,000 video game artists and developers.
Scenario Inc. has launched its GenAI engine, a suite of generative AI tools that allow video game artists and developers to ramp up their portfolio of assets. Artists can easily leverage the generative AI tools to design personalised art generators that can create thousands of new brand-new art and graphics assets that reflect their own styles.
Scenario is putting artists in the driver’s seat, giving them control of their works. Recently, AI art generators have been involved in legal battles with artists amid claims about copyright infringements.
On Tuesday, a group of artists including Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a class-action lawsuit against Midjourney and Stability AI, the companies behind AI art tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and DeviantArt. The two companies recently launched an AI art generator tool dubbed DreamUp, which apparently used billions of internet images to use train its AI art tool.
The artists argued the developers of DreamUp did not ask for consent from millions of artists who copyrighted the images.
However, Scenario claims that its GenAI engine “keeps the artist in the driver’s seat, retaining full creative control of the assets that Scenario creates in their artistic style.”
Accompanying Scenario’s GenAI engine launch was a $6 million fundraising, which received backing from leading VCs including Play Ventures, Anorak Ventures, The Venture Reality Fund, Founders Inc. and Heracles Capital.
Other investors participating in the round included gaming vets Oculus co-founder/CEO Brendan Iribe, Twitch founder Justin Kan, and former Blizzard executive Hamilton Chu, among others.
Commenting on the launch, Emmanuel de Maistre, co-founder and CEO of Scenario said: “Digital artists must remain in control of how their art is used in AI products, working alongside AI and not in competition with it. Generative AI will be as transformational for game development as Photoshop has been for digital photography, but it cannot get there without the same commitment to stylistic consistency, ease of use, and the rights of the individual artist.”
On the other hand, Wil Stephens, Fusebox Games CEO commented: “GenAI is so new and powerful that a lot of artists view it as a threat when, really, it is only a threat to those who do not figure out how to work with it and make it work for them. The Scenario Engine is exactly what we need – something we can build, control, and leverage to make our lives easier, or provide to others as a service. The GenAI genie is out of the bottle; Scenario is the only AI company making it grant wishes.”
****
Stay up to date:
