The China Mail - Video game creators fear AI could grab the controller

Already, "generative AI is used a lot more in commercial game development than people realise, but it's used in very small ways" such as dubbing, illustrations or coding help, said Mike Cook, a game designer and computer science lecturer at King's College London.

Such uses of AI are rarely noticeable for the player of the finished product, he added.

One study from the American startup Totally Human Media found that almost 20 percent of titles available this year via the Steam distribution platform disclosed the use of generative AI during development.

That would account for several thousand games released in recent years, including mass-market juggernauts like "Call of Duty: Black Ops 6" or the life simulation game "Inzoi".

The growth of AI should allow studios to "merge several job roles into one, assisted by these tools", said AI consultant Davy Chadwick, who predicted a "30 to 40 percent boost" to developers' output.

Progress has come at a rapid clip, with the latest tools able to generate 3D assets like characters or objects from a simple text prompt, which can then be dropped straight into a game world.

"In the past, if you wanted to create a high-quality 3D model, it's going to take you two weeks and $1,000," said Ethan Hu, founder of the California-based startup Meshy.ai, which claims to have more than five million users.

"Now the cost is one minute and $2," he said.

- High stakes -

Industry heavyweights have come at generative AI from different angles, with Electronic Arts partnering with the startup Stability AI while Xbox maker Microsoft develops its own model called "Muse".

The stakes and potential rewards are high in the world's biggest cultural industry, worth almost $190 million in revenue in 2025, according to the data firm Newzoo.

Industry actors hope new technology will both juice productivity and reduce the cost and time needed to develop a high-quality game, said Tommy Thompson, founder of the "AI and Games" platform.

But "there's a lot of distrust and fear" among workers in a sector that has already gone through several waves of layoffs in recent years, said one employee at a French game studio on condition of anonymity.

The tools "are supposed to make us more productive but would ultimately mean job losses", the worker added.

His own experiences with AI in game development showed that in 3D modelling, "the objects produced by this kind of AI are extremely chaotic" and ill-suited to immediate use in-game.

"For the moment it's frankly a deal-breaker... it takes as much time to fix it up as to make it" from scratch, the developer added.

Such fears have kept major industry players from making waves about their use of AI.

Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Quantic Dream all declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

Rather than replacing artists, AI tools "allow them to speed up their creative process" by automating busywork, said Felix Balmonet, a co-founder of French 3D asset generation startup Chat3D.

He added that his company was already working with "two of the five largest studios in the world".

- Picky players -

Some in the industry already fear that refusing to use generative AI tools would effectively mean dropping out of competition.

"We will have to ask ourselves whether we use them on our next game," said the head of one French studio who is "personally against" AI models and just completed a multi-year project "without AI".

Most publishers and investors contacted by AFP said the use of AI was not a factor in their decisions to finance a development project.

"You have to be careful when using AI," said Piotr Bajraszewski, business development chief at 11 bit Studios in Poland.

Gamers blasted his studio's latest project, "The Alters", after its June release for including AI-generated text that was not flagged up beforehand.

The studio said the content was simply forgotten placeholder copy, but the incident underscored how much weight some players still give human creatives' work.

T.Luo--ThChM