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The games industry has been in a spot of bother for a while now. Layoffs, canceled projects, and underwhelming returns have become commonplace, and a higher-up at Google believes AI, of all things, could be crucial in facilitating a turnaround.
Jack Buser, now the global director for games on Google Cloud and previously the global director of games on Google Stadia, discussed the state of things with GamesIndustry.biz. "Once you start to look underneath the surface of what's going on in the industry, you realize like, oh my gosh, we are in trouble," he says, touting rising development costs and a stat suggesting more than half of players are happily enjoying games over six years old.
"This is not a sustainable business model," he continues. "We have to transform as an industry to meet this moment so that we can drive into the future."
His solution? AI, something Google Cloud's been pushing hard for some time now, pitching its usefulness at this year's GDC. "Divisions like marketing, business strategy, and analytics, all of these departments that support that development team are being accelerated radically with AI," he states.
"Making sure that you're more effective in your marketing communications," he adds, "making sure that you can actually communicate with your audience at the pace at which the community is moving is very difficult using traditional manual processes."
He points to Series Entertainment, a company that managed to raise $28 million from a number of investors in 2024 that prominently uses gen-AI, as an example of an outfit that's handling bigger workloads thanks to AI. "We're seeing the long tail, as well as the sort of torso of the industry start to realize that with AI, they can punch way above their weight, way above their weight, and they can actually compete with some of these larger budget games by leveraging AI," he explains.
What he's talking about is already happening. Several studios, including Activision, have been accused of using generative assets in games, and EA has reportedly integrated chatbots across the business. Buser's pitch may sound good on paper, but it doesn't look at the qualitative reality, which is that output is generally more questionable when AI is involved than not.
Audiences can spot a generative AI asset pretty easily, and finding one will cause backlash. Recently, we saw that exact thing happen with Crimson Desert and some questionable paintings, which developer Pearl Abyss apologized for letting slip into the final release (there's since been a patch to remove them, too). There are clear systemic problems within the industry right now, and just like any other complicated problem, they won't be solved by taking advantage of fancy new tech.
