{"id":447478,"date":"2026-02-26T23:12:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T23:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/447478\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T23:12:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T23:12:08","slug":"ai-will-change-games-but-not-in-the-way-ceos-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/447478\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Will Change Games, but Not in the Way CEOs Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2024, not long after laying off five percent of the company\u2019s workforce<\/a>, EA CEO Andrew Wilson got on a stage to wax poetic about all the ways generative AI would help take the gaming industry to the next level. Machine learning tools, he said<\/a>, sticking to a script that may as well have been spat out by an LLM, would give developers an \u201cexponentially bigger canvas upon which to create, and richer colors so they might paint more brilliant worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s hardly the only executive who\u2019s promised his customers the world in recent years, though how exactly AI is going to impact game development remains as ambiguous now as it was the day we were first introduced to ChatGPT. While some, from EA and Ubisoft to Remedy and Larian, prepare to ride the wave, others are putting up walls and turrets. Hooded Horse\u2019s Tim Bender has called the technology \u201ccancerous\u201d<\/a> and added a No AI Assets clause to the company\u2019s publishing contracts. Meanwhile, a survey by Game Developer<\/a> found that 36% of industry professionals are using GenAI in their day-to-day work, but that half of them think it\u2019s making games worse, not better.<\/p>\n

Right now, it\u2019s possible we\u2019re headed for a future in which many triple-A titles will be incredibly large but feel lacking in substance, akin to the early days of No Man\u2019s Sky\u2019s procedurally generated, endless universe. Wilson himself suggested as much when he mentioned that College Football 25 \u2013 with its 150 stadiums and 11,000 athlete avatars \u2013 could not have been made without help from GenAI. Our ever-inflating expectations for larger maps and more realistic-looking graphics have pushed development cycles for franchises like Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls into the double digits, and AI seems like an obvious and cost-effective way to bring those numbers back down again while delivering gargantuan amounts of content. <\/p>\n

But while AI could probably program testicle physics for horses, it can\u2019t create a character as deeply human as Arthur Morgan. Consequently, the more you try to automate workflow, the less human (and therefore engaging) your games become. For this reason, I believe we should expect another, equally influential shift to sweep across the industry, one that will push some developers into the opposite direction. Instead of giant, hollow worlds with glossy AI finishes, I suspect we\u2019ll see more games that are smaller in scope, tighter in design, and a little rougher around the edges. In short, we\u2019ll see games that go where AI cannot follow. <\/p>\n

To form an impression of how AI will impact games tomorrow, we can start by looking at how the technology is being used today. According to that Game Developer survey, AI use among industry professionals varies by level of seniority, with upper management using AI tools more frequently than those below them. Across the board, people are more reliant on AI for researching and brainstorming than actual asset generation. In other words, the more complex and creative a task, the less AI is used.<\/p>\n

Another Game Developer survey<\/a>, conducted in 2025, found that nearly half of industry professionals fear extensive use of AI would decrease the quality of their games. Brandon Sheffield, founder of Necrosoft Games and director of Demonschool, argued that overreliance on AI tools will cause games to become more generic in style and design, as these tools tend to slavishly replicate their training data without putting an original spin on them. Hidden Door CEO Hilary Mason, also interviewed for the survey, called AI \u201caspirationally mid,\u201d adding that a technology which lacks both vision and ambition cannot produce anything other than mediocre slop. <\/p>\n

People from various creative industries agree that AI tools remain just that: tools, used to take care of mindless busy work so that employees are free to focus on the tasks that they alone can do. This includes writing emails or cleaning up code, but also generating reference material and altering the color, lighting, or perspective of concept art and other types of assets. Take one look at social media, though, and you\u2019ll see that AI\u2019s role in that \u201cbusy work\u201d is just as contested. <\/p>\n

Tomorrow\u2019s best game designers, like yesterday\u2019s most celebrated painters, will search for the limits of what AI can achieve and set up shop outside that boundary.\u201c<\/p>\n

We can also learn a thing or two about AI\u2019s impact on game design by looking at the impact of previous technological revolutions<\/a>, like the invention of the camera. The camera did not, as many painters in the early 19th century feared, destroy the art of painting, but merely forced it to evolve. Now that there existed a device which could, in an instant, capture the likeness of anyone and anything, and do so with greater precision than even the most talented artists, there was no good reason to keep on painting realistically. Rather than compete with technology, art went in a direction where technology could not follow: towards abstraction and subjectivity, towards Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, and other movements that represented not the world as it is, but how we as individuals experience it.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow\u2019s best and brightest game designers, like yesterday\u2019s most celebrated painters, will search for the limits of what AI can achieve and boldly set up shop outside that boundary. Right now, AI is predictable, regurgitating information in consistent, clearly recognizable patterns, so games made by humans will become more unpredictable and surprising. Genre titles \u2013 easily mimicable<\/a> on account of their fixed rules and tropes \u2013 will give way to games that evade straightforward categorization. Just as we no longer use labels and describe almost all visual art as \u201cpostmodern,\u201d so too might gaming arrive at a point where we can no longer distinguish shooters from Soulslikes<\/a> or platformers from puzzlers. In many cases, the lines dividing these terms are already much blurrier than they were in previous decades.<\/p>\n

AI cannot have personal experiences, so games will likely become more and more grounded in personal experience. Unlike, say, Pixar\u2019s recent move away from autobiographical storytelling in favor of \u201cmass appeal\u201d<\/a> \u2013 a decision which, judging by the box office performance of the studio\u2019s latest film, Elio, isn\u2019t exactly paying off \u2013 developers pushing for authenticity will want to draw from ideas they cannot get from LLMs. Think Ryan and Amy Green\u2019s That Dragon, Cancer, about their child\u2019s battle with terminal illness, Adam Robinson-Yu\u2019s A Short Hike, inspired by memories of past hiking trips, or even Cory Barlog basing Kratos\u2019 relationship with Atreus on his own struggles entering fatherhood.<\/p>\n

Chances are, developers will also become increasingly keen on exploring the darker, messier, more confusing aspects of human nature and existence. The side that AI \u2013 being non-human \u2013 cannot comprehend. ChatGPT has the emotional complexity of your most obnoxious LinkedIn connection, and could never \u2013 as journalist Ioan Marc Jones points out in The Bookseller\u2019s article about AI\u2019s expected impact on writing<\/a> \u2013 start a story like Albert Camus begins The Stranger: \u201cMaman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don\u2019t know.\u201d Think, here, of Papers, Please, which lets players explore the psychological conundrums of working as a border patrol officer in a semi-dystopian society, or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice\u2019s nuanced portrayal of psychosis.<\/p>\n

Finally, AI-generated content often looks polished and perfect to the point of actually being kind of ugly and uncanny, so tomorrow\u2019s games might embrace flaws, imperfections<\/a>, and other signs of hands-on tinkering that let the humanity behind them shine through. Indeed, if AI won\u2019t speed up triple-A development through automation, it may well do so by convincing AI resisting perfectionists to let go of some of their more compulsive, time-consuming tendencies. Red Dead Redemption 2 didn\u2019t need horse testicle physics to reach the heights that Rockstar wanted to reach. Hell, it didn\u2019t even need Guarma, yet the studio\u2019s insistence on meeting such seemingly arbitrary and ultimately pointless benchmarks for size and detail contributed to a crunch culture so infamously brutal<\/a> we\u2019re still talking about it today, nearly a decade later. <\/p>\n

The more low-quality AI-generated content gets released into the world, the more people will hunger for genuinely human art. \u201c<\/p>\n

As with painting, what games lose in visual and technical polish they\u2019ll make up for in conceptual depth. Before the camera, painting was all about what was being painted, not how it was painted. Painting today, on the other hand, typically isn\u2019t about the painting itself so much as how we, the viewer, interact with it: how artists manipulate shape and color to draw attention to the ways culture and brain chemistry quietly shape our perception. Just as the Mona Lisa makes you forget you\u2019re looking at a painting as opposed to a real person, many triple-A games today want you to forget you\u2019re playing a game and make you feel like you\u2019re inside some kind of Hollywood blockbuster instead. Tomorrow\u2019s games \u2013 rejecting the immersive potential of AI \u2013 will want to make it clear that you are, in fact, playing a game: something invented, constructed, and meta. <\/p>\n

While many creatives fear that AI will put them out of work, there are convincing reasons to believe this will not happen \u2013 at least, not to the apocalyptic levels they anticipate. Paul Downs, a CG animator and animation teacher in Florida who I spoke to for a different, upcoming IGN article about animation, told me he believes that \u201cAI slop will cancel itself out.\u201d The more low-quality AI-generated content gets released into the world, he reasons, the more people will hunger for genuinely human art. This would be true of any artform, games included. <\/p>\n

Two other seasoned artists I spoke to \u2013 Dariush Derakhshani and Sam Nielson \u2013 both agreed. Derakhshani recalled a time when his supervisors used GenAI to storyboard a film, only to give the job to a human when the results proved completely unusable. Comments by EA\u2019s Andrew Wilson or DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg \u2013 who once predicted that AI would slash labor costs by up to 90%<\/a> \u2013 are, as far as Derakhshani is concerned, nothing but \u201cempty posturing to inflate stock prices.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nielson, who teaches at BYU and worked as a designer on the Game Boy Advance game LEGO Bionicle: Quest for the Toa, echoes the results of the various Game Developer surveys, arguing that \u201cthe inherent complexity of both design and storytelling\u201d and the \u201cspecific psychological criteria\u201d for how audiences respond to those things make it difficult for AI to fully automate creative processes. \u201cA retired colleague who taught 3D animation used to say that students who were hoping to find the button that makes animation easy were making a mistake,\u201d he told me, offering an anecdote that \u2013 to my ears \u2013 rings true for gaming also. \u201cBecause once that button is invented, everyone will push it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Then again, perhaps not everyone. In a future where many companies, big and small, will turn to AI to automate significant and in some cases just about all parts of their production processes, we can be sure that a number of creative and ambitious developers will keep on making games that reflect and relish in the unmistakably human craft behind them. <\/p>\n

Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2024, not long after laying off five percent of the company\u2019s workforce, EA CEO Andrew Wilson…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-447478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}