Only over the past few years have we begun to hear mutterings about generative AI’s job-stealing potential, but in the game industry, that fear has already become a reality. A new report reveals that industry leaders are eagerly swapping in AI for human work, threatening the long-term viability of a career in video games. Worse, these replacements (or supplementations, in some cases) don’t appear to be exclusive to any one type of development circuit; executives across AAA studios and indie startups are eager to cut costs and race to the production finish line using AI.
The report, published on Wired, details a whiplash-inducing industry pivot driven by generative AI. On the one hand, the game industry has ballooned to a size most of us couldn’t have anticipated a few decades ago: With a global market capitalization of $159.3 billion in 2020, gaming was worth three times as much as the music industry and nearly four times as much as Hollywood. Indie developers have also grown in popularity, thanks to a rising number of gamers drawn toward indie titles. In an ideal world, these trends should provide a general sense of “there’s room for everybody!” across the game industry—and they did until a few years ago.
But as generative AI programs have proliferated, so, too, have opportunities to replace human labor with neural network outputs. Wired’s Brian Merchant tells the story of an Activision Blizzard artist who, in spring 2023, received an email from then-CTO Michael Vance about the “promise” of AI, which was “top of mind” for the company. Activision reportedly assured workers that AI would only be used to produce concept designs, not final assets, and that computers wouldn’t come for their jobs. But in January 2024, Microsoft infamously laid off 1,900 Activision and Xbox employees, many of whom were 2D illustrators. Those who remained were, the artist claims, “forced” to attend AI trainings and use generative programs in their work.
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Microsoft and its many properties aren’t the only organizations using AI to produce cheaper and faster game material. A survey from January found that of 3,000 professionals across the game industry, 49% were already using generative AI in their work. A report commissioned by the entertainment industry last year also found that the game industry used generative AI to conduct regular work more frequently than the TV, movie, or music industries. For some studios, AI is an even cheaper alternative to outsourcing human labor. For others, it’s a way to produce assets faster than in-house workers, many of whom already experience “crunch.”
Unlike entertainment workers involved in TV and movies, Merchant points out, most game professionals are non-union. This means they’re far less likely to work out a generative AI limitation deal like the one Writers Guild of America (WGA) struck with Hollywood last year, allowing leadership to supplement or replace human jobs with AI one by one. That could change: Dan Beglov, a narrative designer who discussed unionization at GDC 2024, told Merchant that AI is “definitely a catalyst for workers to organize.” More than half of developers surveyed at this year’s GDC indicated that they support the idea of unionizing.
Speaking of the power of numbers, financial figures also come into play. Earlier this year, MIT found that employing human workers is still cheaper than replacing them with generative AI, despite the widespread assumption that AI is the least expensive option. Cost-effectiveness also depends on the labor required to fine-tune or repair wonky AI-generated assets; if an image, piece of dialogue, or artificial voiceover doesn’t turn out quite right, a human worker will have to go in to fix it, potentially spending more time and money than the worker would have required without AI.
In the end, as one anonymous game developer told Merchant, it isn’t AI itself that’s responsible for taking game developers’ jobs. Leaders at game studios of all sizes are responsible, and for now, it’s difficult to tell whether this trend of AI-related job displacement will continue on their watch.