Google Cloud Chief Reveals: 90% of Game Developers Secretly Use AI to Enhance Your Favorite Games

Gamers are extremely negative about any manifestations of AI use in games, although analysts note that it does not always harm the product quality and can significantly save developers time and money.

Experts have no doubt that gradually AI will become an integral part of any technical work, including game creation, but Google Cloud head Jack Buser believes that the application of this technology is already much larger than studios admit.

What is known

In an interview with Mobilegamer.biz, Jack Buser stated that more than 90% of studios have been actively using AI for several years, but it's not entirely about generative models. He explained that developers use it to speed up routine tasks, for example, secondary and insignificant content is created using Gemini and Nano Banana Pro, and then improved manually, allowing specialists to focus more on truly important elements of the game in the time saved.

It seems to me that gamers do not realize that their favorite games are already created using AI. These projects have already launched. We conducted a survey during Gamescom last summer among studios around the world, and nine out of ten developers told us: “Yes, we use AI.”

At the same time, you can see other studies where the numbers are closer to 40-50%. And you might ask yourself: that's still a lot — almost half of all developers. Where's the difference? It's in how willing studios are to outright state that they really use AI.

As an example, Buser mentioned Capcom — the company that publicly stated “no AI-generated element will enter the final version of its games,” is actively using it at early stages of production to create ideas and select the most successful ones.

Capcom uses Nano Banana and Gemini to quickly generate countless ideas, and then, with the help of Gemini, they select and systematize them... from thousands of options, they choose those that are most likely to be of interest to the art director.

Then the art director takes these ideas and directs the team of artists to work with them. AI has already pre-filtered and chosen, let's say, the most successful pebbles by the road, so all the creative energy of the team goes into really important things — the main character, major enemies, key scenes, objects, and so on.

Jack Buser expressed confidence that over time gamers will change their skeptical attitude towards AI, and developers will learn to skillfully use models so they do not spoil the final result.

People will start to understand that AI actually helps them get their favorite games faster. And the industry becomes more innovative because there is more room for risk: no longer needing to wait for one project for seven years — a studio can make five games. Perhaps only two of them will succeed, but that's okay because the other three will turn out to be interesting and unusual — and they simply wouldn't be made under the old model.

Source: Mobilegamer.biz