AI in Games: Studies May Not Survive – Google Cloud Exec

Generative artificial intelligence is triggering an adjustment of accounts throughout the video game industry, and some studies will not survive the consequences.

That is the warning of Jack Buser, global game director at Google Cloud, who points out that the industry is entering a revolution as great as anyone in its history.

“Some of these video game companies will achieve it, and some not,” Buser said Decrypt. “And some will be born through this revolution.”

Buser, a veteran of the industry with 30 years of experience, works with editors and studies to adopt cloud and IA infrastructure, from climbing multiplayer systems to analyzing players data and testing generative tools. That role places it at the intersection between large technology and video game development, where studies connect to Google’s servers and AI models to build or maintain their titles.

He pointed out that AI is arriving just when developers face growing financial pressure and a reduced players participation with new games.

“More than half of the game time is in games over six years,” he added. “Then, if you are creating a new game, you are competing for less than half of the game time available. And if you are the creator of one of those oldest games, you are fighting to keep it relevant and keep the players committed.”

After decades of growth, the global video game industry fell post-pandemic, with income that decreased in 2022 before recovering. In 2024, it generated $ 182.7 billion, 3.2% more than the previous year. Income is expected to increase to $ 188.9 billion in 2025, an increase of 3.4%.

“You have a broken business model, and the result is dismissal, cancellations of games and other problems throughout the video game industry in recent years,” Buser said.

However, Buser believes that generative AI could be the departure of the industry. A Harris Poll survey commissioned by Google found that nine out of 10 developers are already using AI tools somewhere in the production process.

“If you are paid for use in use in your development pipeline, from the concept to quality control, and you attack each case of use with AI, you can have a fairly radical reduction in development time,” he said.

Developers are testing generative tools aimed at changing how they look, feel and evolve the games in real time. Buser called this the era of the “living game”, titles that use the real time to analyze the behavior of the player and generate new content instantly. Unlike traditional games, which depend on patches and downloadable content launches (DLC), these systems could be adapted in minutes instead of months.

“Take Darth Vader in Fortnite, for example: the player’s reaction was strong,” Buser said. “We are only scratching the surface.”

But the launch was not soft. When Fortnite introduced a Darth Vader driven by AI earlier this year, the bot vomited racist and homophobic insults before Epic Games quickly patch the system.

Not everyone received the experiment well. After the launch, SAG-AFTRA filed a work complaint against the EPIC subsidiary, Call Productions, accusing the company to replace voice actors with artificial intelligence without the consent of the union.

“This accusation concerns the critical role of the union to negotiate terms on the replacement of the work of the negotiation unit with AI technology,” said a SAG-AFTRA spokesman to Decrypt. “We support AI tools a lot to improve the audience experience, but employers cannot implement these types of uses without first coming to the union and negotiate terms.”

Buser drew comparisons between the increased role of AI and previous revolutions in the history of video games, moments when technological changes redrawed the map of the industry. Some companies adapted to the movement of cartridges to CD-ROMS. Others not.

“You will see some companies that could not succeed,” Buser said. “And then you see other mass games companies today that were what I will call Native CD-ROM. This is exactly the same thing that is happening now.”