Several gaming industry professionals acknowledge the efficiency gains AI tools bring to backend work but remain cautious about AI-generated content directly facing players. In PocketGamer.biz's Mobile Mavens roundtable discussion, respondents shared their actual usage over the past year and raised risks such as copyright, costs, and job changes.
Alisa Eren from Burny Games stated that the team handles tasks like task creation and user acquisition dashboards through customized processes, at least doubling weekly workload without overtime. However, increased production speed also raises the industry's competitive baseline. Village Studio allows employees to use AI for programming assistance and repetitive tasks but requires that all art, sound, and text in the final game be created by humans, warning that excessive trust in generated code could lead to losses.
Other respondents mentioned that such tools are also used for ad creative testing, bug report categorization, data queries, low-poly asset drafts, and server management. Small team Big Karma stated that related expenses account for less than 1% of their monthly burn, yet save work equivalent to an additional two or three "person-months."
Respondents' concerns mainly include copyright, job changes, player resistance to visible AI-generated content, runaway tool costs, cybersecurity, a surge in game supply, and pressure on hardware supply chains. Attention data cited by the roundtable shows that from the launch week of Gears 5 in 2019 to the launch week of Gears of War: E-Day this year, the attention share of the top ten games has dropped from 36.5% to 27.8%. Overall, they are more accepting of human-supervised assistive tools than replacing entire development teams with single prompts.