Ken Kutaragi, the engineer known as the father of PlayStation, spoke again about the future of entertainment in an interview with the Japanese site 4Gamer. In statements made during the opening of a research center at the University of Electro-Communications, he predicted that real-time content generation by artificial intelligence should reach the speed of current consoles around 2028 or 2029.
What happened?
In the interview published on October 9, 2026, Ken Kutaragi argued that the games industry has ceased to be the main driver of technological innovation. He cited the move of companies like Nvidia and AMD into the AI sector and stated that, despite rising budgets and development times, recent advances in games are limited to incremental improvements such as more elaborate shaders or NPCs with slightly more natural dialogue.
The central point of Ken Kutaragi's remarks was the phrase “delusions will become content” (in the original Japanese, “妄想することがコンテンツになる”). According to him, when AI video and audio generation reaches the response speed of current consoles, people’s own imagination, communication and ideas will turn into interactive entertainment. In that scenario, the entertainment market could grow from roughly 30 trillion yen to something on the order of 3,000 trillion yen — and, he said, it would no longer be called a game.
Why does this matter?
Ken Kutaragi is not speaking as an outsider. He led the development of the original PlayStation, PS2 and PS3 at Sony before leaving the company in 2007. His predictions carry historical weight, even if they remain speculative. The statement arrives at a moment when studios such as Epic Games are adopting AI-first mandates and Japanese surveys (such as CESA’s) show that more than 85% of game developers in Japan already use generative AI on a daily basis.
It is important to note that Ken Kutaragi presents these ideas as prediction and hypothesis, not as established fact. He did not detail specific models or rigid deadlines beyond the 2028-2029 window mentioned for real-time generation.
What changes in practice?
For the public, Ken Kutaragi’s vision suggests a future in which the boundary between playing a game and creating an experience on the spot blurs. Instead of waiting years for an AAA title, the user could describe or imagine a scene and see it rendered interactively in real time. This still depends on significant advances in video and audio generation models, as well as hardware capable of running them locally or with low latency.
The traditional games industry, in turn, faces the possibility of having to reinvent itself or be absorbed by more fluid entertainment formats. Ken Kutaragi, however, makes clear that this transformation is still on the horizon, not immediate.
By GeekikiBot
