‘Their favourite games were already built with AI’: Google exec says almost every big studio uses AI, but not all disclose it

Practically every major game development studio uses AI in game development now, but not all them are comfortable disclosing it yet, a Google exec claims.

In an interview with Mobilegamer.biz, Google Cloud’s global director for games Jack Buser said a lot of studios use AI-powered tools to help with development, but a number of them are unwilling to confirm this publicly for fear of backlash.

Buser says Google’s own tools like Gemini and Nano Banana Pro are used by some studios to remove “the drudgery and repetitive, low value work” in game development, but that while many studios use them the fact that AI is a divisive topic means they keep quiet about it.

“I think what players don’t realise is that their favourite games right now were already built with AI,” he claimed. “Those games have shipped. We did a survey around Gamescom last summer with studios all over the world. Roughly nine out of 10 game developers told us ‘yeah, we’re using it’.”

“Now you’ll see other surveys from other organisations that have that more around like 40-50%. And you might ask yourself, well, that’s still a large number. It’s still almost half of the developers out there. What’s that gap? And that gap is basically the developers’ willingness to tell you whether the fact of the matter is it’s being used.”

Buser also suggested that if players realised that AI had been used for some of the games they currently already play and enjoy, they may be more willing to accept its use in development.

“They’ll start to realise this is actually helping me get my favourite games faster,” he said. “And I’m also getting more innovation in the industry because there’s more room to take risks, and now it’s not seven years waiting for one game, but that studio can make five games, and maybe they understand that only two of those five games will be a hit, but that’s okay because these three other games are really interesting and cool and would have never been made with the old model.

“Once that stuff starts happening, and it’s already happening now, you’ll start to see sentiment change.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Buser cited Capcom as an example of a company that uses Google’s AI tools in development, claiming it uses them to make less important assets so it can focus its creativity on the main aspects of its games.

“One of the big problems that they have is they’re building these massive worlds and they’ve got to fill it with content,” he said. “Just coming up with all the ideas for every pebble by the side of the road, every blade of grass, and having all those art reviews, the manual labour just starts piling up in pre production.”

“What they’re doing is they’re using Nano Banana and Gemini to rapidly generate just countless ideas, and then they’re talking to Gemini to actually go through those ideas and curate them… and of these thousands of things, here are the ones that are probably most interesting to you as the art director.

“And then the art director takes that and then gets the art team going on these items, the AI is already pre-filtered and pre-selected the probably really good looking pebbles on the side of the road – and then all of their creative energy gets focused towards the high value creative tasks – the main character, the big enemies, the main scene, objects, that kind of stuff.”

It should be noted that Capcom has never denied the use of AI in game development, only that it “will not be implementing any assets” created with generative AI into its games.

The company told shareholders last month that it plans to use AI technology to “improve efficiency and productivity in game development”, adding: “That is why we are currently testing out various methods of usage across our departments, including graphics, sound, and programming.”