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Capcom has been on an historic run over the last few years, delivering hit after hit during a period when many other publishers are struggling to keep their heads above water. This year alone, Capcom has released Resident Evil: Requiem, Pragmata, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword, all of which landed to both critical acclaim and commercial success.
So now is obviously the perfect time to wade into the not-at-all controversial topic of AI-powered game development.
Yesterday, Capcom held its own tech conference titled “Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026” during which programmer Satoshi Ishida gave a talk detailing the company’s future plans for its proprietary RE: Engine—which powers all the publisher’s modern games. During this talk, Ishida revealed Capcom’s intentions to gradually transform RE Engine into an “AI-generation game engine.”
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Now, it’s important to stress here that what Capcom appears to mean here is an engine for the AI generation, rather than a generative AI engine. As reported by Gamebiz (via IGN), Capcom’s plans are more nuanced and detailed than slapping ChatGPT into its game development workflows.
During the talk, Ishida stated that the project is called “REX”, and it involves six different programs that will integrate AI and machine-learning technology into RE Engine. Some of these are designed for enhancing program performance during development. Re:Dox, for example, is a data handling program designed to translate different types of data into a common set of rules for faster processing, while RE:UI is built to provide AI-assisted optimisation the RE: engine’s development tools—sort-of like adding DLSS support for Blender.
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Alongside these are tools designed to make the process of game development itself faster. There’s a program called RE: Runtime, which apparently allows the engine to animate large numbers of objects and characters in groups—rather than running those real-time animations individually. Most intriguing is RE: Flows. This is apparently designed to simplify the implementation of game mechanic ideas, then convert them into a standardised programming language. This sounds vibe coding-adjacent to me, though it’s hard to say for certain without seeing it in action.
According to Gamebiz, Capcom says it wants to integrate all these ideas into RE Engine for several reasons. First, modern games are so massive and technically complex that data management is a huge challenge and making changes to that data takes a long time. Second, more than 2,000 people now use RE Engine, including people from many different nationalities, so Capcom wants to create a system that is universally understandable. Third, AI technology is rapidly evolving and is essential for streamlining development—a somewhat arbitrary justification that I’m not convinced by.
Broadly though, these plans fall in line with Capcom’s previously declared stance on AI, where the publisher stated it “will not implement assets generated by AI into our game content”, but would use it to “enhance efficiency and boost productivity” in its development pipeline. Certainly, none of these tools appear designed to create art or character models and so forth, though it seems like some of them would require AI generated or AI assisted code to function.
It’s also worth noting that Capcom’s approach to development has worked pretty well for it over the last ten years, earning a reputation as one of the most reliable developers around. While I can understand the desire to make game development faster and more efficient, as the old adage goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
