“And at least part of that plan involves AI”, reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment.
…having spent the past four days dashing between appointments with CEOs and developers, there is one sentiment that has remained consistent among almost everyone I spoke to. We need to make games quicker.
Amen. Twenty years ago, 3 years was a long dev cycle, and most games were churned out in 12-18 months. It also relied heavily on crunch, but maybe we could get back to 3 year dev cycles that don’t, and that can be considered somewhat “normal”.
Of course, it’s one thing to say you want to make games more quickly, and quite another to actually do it. More to the point, how do you do it?
Well, I, for one, would start with the bloat that made its way into mainstay series. The icon barf of Assassin’s Creed. Turning series open world that have no business doing so. Making a huge game as the first outing in a series instead of seeing if there’s even an appetite for the premise in the first place.
One option is to make games that look worse. Given how super-detailed graphics seem to be far less important to a younger generation raised on Roblox and Minecraft, this would seem like a fair enough strategy. … Yet there seemed to be little appetite for this strategy among the people I spoke to at Gamescom. Perhaps it’s an unwillingness to fly in the face of conventional wisdom in an industry where frame rates are often fetishised. Perhaps it’s more about simple pride in the craft.
So are we refusing to do what’s actually necessary to keep people’s jobs sustainable, or…?
So what’s the alternative? One option is to use AI to speed up the development process. And it’s an option that more and more studios are taking up. … AI is the games industry’s dirty little open secret – the majority of people I spoke to said they were using AI in some form or another.
And this is where I know a lot of people would like to stop reading, but I’d encourage you to continue anyway.
Utilising AI to generate snippets of code was a popular choice.
To date, this is the only use I’ve ever heard, as a programmer, as something that might be useful for my job. Not that I’ve done it. I can still come up with snippets quickly enough just from old fashioned documentation most of the time. But sometimes it’s written so generic that it takes hours of your day or more to actually learn it. And that’s not the most common thing in the world that I run into that.
I do wish the author broke down how much, and which pieces, of this came from developers compared to executives/managers/owners. I’m glad to hear that everyone agrees that shorter dev cycles are a goal worth pursuing. I’m not convinced AI gets us there, and I wonder how many programmers really feel it’s speeding them along in their day-to-day such that it can reduce a development schedule by literal years.
It is shitty in many ways. First, I view videogames as art (because they are art) and taking out the human element just makes them a product created by a machine. Coding is a form of human expression. I understand the capitalist urge not to pay people, but replacing people with AI is a moral wrong. Microsoft, for example, after purchasing many studios over the past few years, has fired over 15,000 people in 2025 alone, despite making record profits and charging us more for new games.
I would be terrified if I were a full-time coder. Like many other occupations, programming jobs are in jeopardy. I would be considering other fields or specializations because these corporations plan to replace them all. Google already is saying that more 25% of their code is written by ai. That will only increase and bleed over to game development.
Second, by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary, you are creating an inferior product. Just throwing a game in early access because it isn’t complete isn’t a good solution and there are hundreds of games currently in that status. Personally, I avoid anything that is early access, with a few exceptions. I get the point in the article about making games with lesser graphics, which I am fine with if the project warrants it, but it feels like these companies don’t care what the product is as long as it sells. They are going to create ai-slop and charge us more for it. This is how the AAA industry dies.
I’m a coder, and I’m not in fear of losing my job. Definitely not long term. They can chase this trend all they like, but they’ll soon realize what they need people for. Or, something I find less likely, they don’t need those people, and you can’t un-ring a bell. Sometimes new technologies shrink the need for a certain kind of job, like farming, or they erase the need for it altogether, like telephone switchboard operators. I don’t see AI shrinking this profession all that much, and if it does, there’s nothing anyone can do that will undo it. Even Comcast can’t make people stick with cable using all the nastiest tricks in the book; sometimes things just become obsolete.
by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary
“By any means necessary” are your words, not mine, nor the article’s. I too took issue with the article saying that early access can just be a fallback; that’s not actually solving the problem and just kicking the can down the road. But we got tons of great games made in under 3 years, even with high production value.
This is how the AAA industry dies.
As we know it. But it might be how it finds a path to sustainability rather than the feast or famine of betting your career on a project that took 7 years to make. Rather than perpetually updated live service games, AAA used to make sequels on a rapid cadence. Rather than games that take dozens of hours to finish, often filled with a bunch of busy work, we used to get games that took a fraction of that, often with far better pacing.
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The enshittification of videogames.
Which part?
It is shitty in many ways. First, I view videogames as art (because they are art) and taking out the human element just makes them a product created by a machine. Coding is a form of human expression. I understand the capitalist urge not to pay people, but replacing people with AI is a moral wrong. Microsoft, for example, after purchasing many studios over the past few years, has fired over 15,000 people in 2025 alone, despite making record profits and charging us more for new games.
I would be terrified if I were a full-time coder. Like many other occupations, programming jobs are in jeopardy. I would be considering other fields or specializations because these corporations plan to replace them all. Google already is saying that more 25% of their code is written by ai. That will only increase and bleed over to game development.
Second, by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary, you are creating an inferior product. Just throwing a game in early access because it isn’t complete isn’t a good solution and there are hundreds of games currently in that status. Personally, I avoid anything that is early access, with a few exceptions. I get the point in the article about making games with lesser graphics, which I am fine with if the project warrants it, but it feels like these companies don’t care what the product is as long as it sells. They are going to create ai-slop and charge us more for it. This is how the AAA industry dies.
Sources:
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/in-new-memo-microsoft-ceo-addresses-enigma-of-layoffs-amid-record-profits-and-ai-investments/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/29/24282757/google-new-code-generated-ai-q3-2024
I’m a coder, and I’m not in fear of losing my job. Definitely not long term. They can chase this trend all they like, but they’ll soon realize what they need people for. Or, something I find less likely, they don’t need those people, and you can’t un-ring a bell. Sometimes new technologies shrink the need for a certain kind of job, like farming, or they erase the need for it altogether, like telephone switchboard operators. I don’t see AI shrinking this profession all that much, and if it does, there’s nothing anyone can do that will undo it. Even Comcast can’t make people stick with cable using all the nastiest tricks in the book; sometimes things just become obsolete.
“By any means necessary” are your words, not mine, nor the article’s. I too took issue with the article saying that early access can just be a fallback; that’s not actually solving the problem and just kicking the can down the road. But we got tons of great games made in under 3 years, even with high production value.
As we know it. But it might be how it finds a path to sustainability rather than the feast or famine of betting your career on a project that took 7 years to make. Rather than perpetually updated live service games, AAA used to make sequels on a rapid cadence. Rather than games that take dozens of hours to finish, often filled with a bunch of busy work, we used to get games that took a fraction of that, often with far better pacing.