"Video Games Are Cooked": AI's Grip on the Industry
There's a growing feeling in the games industry that something big has shifted, and not everyone's thrilled about it. Mike Rose, founder of No More Robots (the publisher behind titles like Yes, Your Grace and Descenders), didn't sugarcoat it when talking about the current state of things. He compared the rise of generative AI in games to Pandora's box being opened, and he doesn't think anyone's closing it. "From a publisher perspective specifically, it's mega annoying," Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview covered by GeekTyrant.
That frustration isn't happening in a vacuum. Platforms like Steam are already packed, with over 20,000 games dropping every year. Now add AI tools into the mix, making it easier than ever to crank out content, and suddenly that pile gets even bigger. Rose noted that during the last Next Fest, it seemed like around one-third of the demos had either AI-generated key art and/or AI-generated content. "So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!"
The numbers back up the saturation concern. BCG's 2026 Global Gaming Report analyzed metadata from Steam and discovered that around 20% of new games disclose the use of AI as of mid-2025, double the figure from a year earlier. The firm estimates approximately 50% of studios are now using AI in some capacity. Even AAA studios, despite initial reluctance, seem to be moving forward. (The floodgates are open, whether anyone wanted them to be or not.)
That last sentiment hits especially hard when you look at how creators are reacting. Lucas Pope, the mind behind Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, recently admitted he's pulling back from sharing early work altogether. The concern isn't just AI use—it's the idea that anything shown publicly could be scraped, copied, or fed into a system. "It's getting slurped up by AI or people are gonna copy it, or something else like that."
Players have gotten pretty good at spotting AI-generated assets, and the reaction hasn't exactly been warm. Games like Crimson Desert and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had to backtrack and replace AI-generated elements after backlash. Even tech like Nvidia's DLSS AI filters has stirred up criticism. People notice, and a lot of them don't want it anywhere near their games. The physical reality is that AI-generated art often has a certain texture—smooth in the wrong places, lacking the intentional imperfections that signal human craft.
Still, despite the pushback, Rose keeps circling back to what he sees as the unavoidable truth. "People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy. I don't even mean that as an insult! We just are." So for a lot of people, if there's a choice between spending a bunch of time and money making a cool thing versus typing some prompts into a program and having the thing made very quickly, the average person is going to pick the latter.
The industry data reveals a more nuanced picture than the "games are cooked" headline suggests. According to the GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry Report, 52% of game professionals now view generative AI negatively—up from 30% in 2025. Yet personal usage held steady at 36%. The divide between productivity AI and creative replacement AI is the most important distinction in this data, and one the conversation around AI in game dev has largely failed to make.
Only 5% of developers put AI output directly in front of players. Productivity dominates. Creative replacement doesn't. The breakdown shows 81% use AI for research and brainstorming, 47% for code assistance, and 47% for daily tasks like emails and scheduling. Asset generation sits at 19%, procedural generation at 10%, and player-facing features at just 5%. The people using it didn't stop—they just found where it actually works.
Capcom clarified its current stance on generative AI in its games during a March 23 shareholders' meeting. "We will not implement assets generated by AI into our games," the company stated. "However, we plan to proactively use it as a contributing technology to improve the efficiency and productivity of the game development process." The Japanese publisher is exploring ways to implement AI in various areas including graphics, sound, and programming, but actual game content will still be made by humans. IGN covered the announcement.
Capcom built a prototype "idea generation" system using Google Cloud back in January 2025. Technical director Kazuki Abe described it as one of the most labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks in game development, as each item has to be created from scratch. With so many items and background details in the rich environments of games like the Monster Hunter series, Abe noted that "ultimately, we have to come up with hundreds of thousands of unique ideas" for comparison and evaluation. The system uses generative AI to read various game design documents and output further ideas based on them, speeding up the conceptualization process.
Company policies are shifting. 78% of studios now have some AI policy, up from 51% in 2024. The fastest growing category is "select tools allowed," meaning studios are curating specific productivity tools rather than broadly endorsing AI. Visual artists show 64% negative sentiment, game designers at 63%, while business and finance roles went from 44% usage in 2024 to 58% in 2026. Upper management uses AI at 47%, individual contributors at 29%.
The 2025-2026 period introduced the industry to "gameslop"—low-effort titles assembled primarily through AI tools with minimal human curation. According to analysis, 7,000+ Steam titles disclosed AI use in 2025, representing roughly one-third of all releases. The consequences are measurable: AI-heavy games show 15-20% lower user review scores, 2-3x higher refund rates, and significantly reduced player retention. Without quality curation, this volume risks overwhelming discovery systems and alienating players who encounter repetitive, thematically inconsistent experiences.
Whether users actually pay for it remains the real question. The technology isn't going away, but the market is already showing it can distinguish between AI-assisted productivity and AI-generated content that lacks soul. Developers feeling guarded, publishers feeling overwhelmed, and players stuck trying to figure out what's real, what's AI, and whether it even matters anymore—that's the new normal. Maybe games aren't completely "cooked" just yet, but things are definitely heating up, and the kitchen's getting crowded.
Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn
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