Card game developer says it paid an 'AI artist' $90,000 to generate card art because 'no one comes close to the quality he delivers'
The maker of digital trading card game Champions of Otherworldly Magic says it has spent $90,000 on card art, the entirety of which has been paid to a single «AI artist» who receives $15,000 per month despite dedicating less than two full work days to the project each month.
«We pay our AI artist 15,000 USD per month for exactly 10 hours of work,» reads an X post from the official Champions TCG account. «Why? In that time, he still makes HUNDREDS of AMAZING bits of artwork—ASTRONOMICALLY FASTER than ANY team of traditional artists.
»His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs, no mistakes… It has consistent evolutions, skins, alt art styles—literally no one is on his level. We don't care how he makes it, we only care that the end user enjoys our game."
According to Champions TCG co-founder and CEO Miles Malec, who spoke to PC Gamer over DM, the artist has made over 1,000 images with generative AI over the course of six months, and was paid $15K each month. The anonymous artist «has 15 years of digital art experience» and doesn't use social media, he says.
«For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time,» said Malec. «The guy's a pro and he charges what he's worth. We are well connected in the space and no one comes close to the quality he delivers.»
According to Malec, Champions has made «about $500K» in card sales so far. Its raison d'etre is that its cards are NFTs which can be traded or purchased with cryptocurrency, but the developer also sells «gems»—which can be traded in for card packs—in exchange for regular US dollars, and those credit card transactions are where most of the revenue has come from so far.
The card images aren't quite «100%» AI generated, as the X post says. Malec says they're also touched up by hand: «AI can do bulk of the work/initial generating but to make sure no errors, extra fingers, etc everything needs to be edited and filtered.»
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