According to The Verge, 2025 was the year generative AI became a major, unavoidable force in video game development and the games themselves. Major studios like Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft, Nexon, Krafton, and Square Enix are all publicly embracing the tech, with Ubisoft using it for NPC dialogue and EA partnering with Stability AI. This push has led to AI assets appearing in high-profile 2025 releases including the multiplayer hit ARC Raiders, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and even the Game of the Year winner, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, before they were removed. Player and critical reaction has been harsh, with ARC Raiders receiving low scores specifically due to its AI use, and assets being found in games like Anno 117: Pax Romana due to their low quality. Despite this, CEOs like Larian’s Swen Vincke and Nexon’s Junghun Lee argue that using AI is now an industry-wide necessity for survival, driven by the fear of missing out on a potential “golden egg” of efficiency.
The Golden Egg That Isn’t
Here’s the thing: the promised revolution looks pretty shoddy so far. The AI dialogue in Ubisoft’s NPCs sounds unnatural. The images that slipped into Call of Duty and Pax Romana were noticeable specifically because they were bad. A report from a game dev services company, Keywords Studios, found that while AI can streamline some tasks, it can’t replace human talent. And players are already breaking games that rely on it, like manipulating chatbot NPCs in Where Winds Meet to do weird stuff. So if the output is so clearly sub-par, why the relentless push? Swen Vincke nailed part of it: this is a tech-driven industry terrified of being left behind. If your competitor finds a magic bullet and you don’t, you’re dead. But there’s a simpler, more cynical reason.
Follow The Money
It’s the economy, stupid. Billions of investor dollars are flowing into anything with an AI label attached. For publicly traded game companies facing economic pressure, announcing AI initiatives is a fantastic way to signal to Wall Street that you’re modern, efficient, and worth investing in. It doesn’t really matter if the tech currently makes a marginal difference in the final product. The signal is what counts. This explains the huge gap between who’s cheering for AI and who’s booing it. The loudest supporters are in the C-suites of AAA publishers. The most vocal opponents? Indie developers and players.
The Indie Rebellion
And this is where the conflict gets really interesting. Indie developers, who you’d think would benefit most from a supposed “democratizing” tech, are almost universally against it. They’re creating “AI-free” logos for their games. For them, the creative problem-solving that AI aims to automate is the entire point of making games. They’re also more sensitive to the moral and environmental costs—the training data used without consent, the massive energy consumption of AI data centers often placed in low-income areas. They face the same economic pressures as the big studios but don’t have the same resources to chase a trend that, right now, offers more hype than help. When you’re building everything yourself, the quality of every asset matters, and AI’s current output just doesn’t cut it.
NFTs All Over Again?
So is this just gaming’s next NFT bubble? It sure feels like it. A buzzy tech with unrealized promises, embraced by execs for hype and capital, while the actual creators and consumers push back. But there’s a key difference. NFTs were always a solution in search of a problem for games. Generative AI, in theory, is tackling real, painful problems: ballooning development times and costs. The tech is just embarrassingly bad at it currently. The wild promises, like Square Enix wanting AI to do 70% of QA by 2027, show how deep the faith runs. The backlash is real too, as seen when fans rediscovered Clair Obscur’s old AI assets. The bubble might pop, or the tech might actually get good enough to be invisible. Until then, every discovery of a weird AI hand in a Steam game will be a lightning rod, reminding everyone that the industry’s heart is at war with its spreadsheet.
