‘I think we all want that’: Razer CEO claims players are in favour of AI tools in game development

The co-founder and CEO of Razer claims players are in favour of AI tools in game development if they lead to games being made faster and having fewer bugs.

In an interview with The Verge, Min-Liang Tan was asked about the company’s announcement that it will invest $600 million into AI over the next few years, and reports that it plans to hire 150 AI engineers.

The interviewer put it to Tan that players are “in open revolt against AI coming into their games”, and suggested that Razer’s claims that “AI is the future of gaming” may be disconnected from what the gaming public is actually saying.

Tan replied that there was a difference between AI-generated content and AI-powered tools, and claimed that while players are against the former, they are overwhelmingly in favour of the latter.

“I would say that the question is, ‘what are we unhappy with?'” Tan replied. “When I say we, I mean us as gamers. I think we’re unhappy with generative AI slop, right? Just to put it out there. And that’s something that I’m unhappy with.

“Like any gamer, when I play a game, I want to be engaged, I wanna be immersed, I wanna be able to be competitive. I don’t want to be served character models with extra fingers and stuff like that, or shoddily written storylines, so on and so forth. I think for us, we’re all aligned against gen AI slop that is just churned out from a couple of prompts and stuff like that.

“What we aren’t against, at least, from my perspective, are tools that help augment or support, and help game developers make great games. And I think that’s fundamentally what we are talking about at Razer, right?

“So if we’ve got AI tools that can help game developers QA their games faster, better, and weed out the bugs, I think, along the way, we’re all aligned, and we would love that.

“If we could get game developers to have the opportunity to create better, to check through typos and things like that, to create better games, I think we all want that. So I think that’s the way that we see it.”

Giving an example, Tan explained that Razer is building a ‘QA companion’ designed to make it easier for QA testers to submit bugs.

“QA tends to be an expensive endeavor,” he said. “The gamer doesn’t see it at the end of the day, but it can take up like 30% to 40% of the cost, or delay games for the longest time.

“Now, what we’ve done is create a companion, a tool that works with the human QA tester to be able to automatically fill in forms, to say “okay, if this is…’ – say the form is a Jira ticket – to say ‘this is a bug that is identified, there’s a graphical bug, there’s a performance bug’.

“All that’s logged very quickly, so it’s sent to the developer at the same time. The developer then can go in and say, ‘okay, this is how I’ll fix the bug’, or ‘these are suggestions on how I fix the bug.'”

Tan stressed again the difference between using AI for creativity versus productivity, saying: “The way that we see it is that AI is a tool to help game developers make better games.

“In this case, rather than replacing human creativity – and that’s something I personally feel very passionately about – we want to figure out how we use AI in the gaming industry to get AI to do things better. In the broader scheme of things, I think that’s what we have been focused on.

“But there are other reasons why I think gamers are unhappy with AI, and I agree with them. I don’t like slop either, right? That’s one. Two, is it raising the cost of RAM? It is also raising the cost of RAM. I don’t like that at the same time.

“Back in the day, there was the GPUs versus crypto situation and things like that, and this is the same thing. So I do think, however, that all gamers would love better games, more fun games, more engaging games, and if AI can help create that by doing better QA, I mean, I’m all for it.”