Glen Schofield, a video game industry veteran known for co-creating the Dead Space series and working on multiple Call of Duty games, has said the gaming industry is facing major challenges and that developers can look to artificial intelligence technologies to help solve some of the issues. Schofield made these comments at the same time that many in the video game industry have raised concerns, objections, and fears about the further adoption and implementation of AI.
“We need to fix the gaming industry right now,” Schofield said at Gamescom Asia recently, as reported by IGN. “It’s broken. It’s beaten, it’s battered, our developers are battered, they’ve been taking it on the chin for the last couple of years. We need to bring it back to what it was. Instead of all this negativity.”
The games industry should embrace AI, not fear it, Schofield said.
“AI isn’t here to replace us,” he said. “It’s here to make us faster, better, and more efficient. And AI is for all of us, it really is. It’s not just for directors and artists; it’s for writers and marketing execs.”
Schofield called upon games industry executives, owners, and founders to start training developers on AI and begin to use the tools “as soon as you can.” This is already happening, as a survey from 2024 found that the majority of game developers worldwide already use AI in their development pipelines, despite misgivings from workers about it.
A concern about AI voiced by many is that it could replace people and human creativity, but Schofield said humans will always be vital to the process. “Remember, ideas are the lifeblood of the industry,” he said to developers in the room. “And those ideas? They come from you.”
Previously, Schofield said the adoption of AI in the games business might cause some “disruption” in the job market in the short term, but more jobs will be created overall on a long-enough timeline. “When cell phones appeared, people worried about operators and pay phones. Instead, we ended up with billions of devices, new apps, streaming, and millions of jobs that didn’t exist before. The internet, the PC, even the automobile all followed the same pattern,” he said.
Schofield is not the only prominent game developer to believe that adopting AI can help the video game industry. Masahiro Sakurai, who is best known for creating the Kirby franchise and for his work on the Super Smash Bros. series, has said the AAA game development scene is unsustainable but that AI can help.
Sony has been using AI tools for game development for years, crediting machine-learning systems for helping speed up development on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. EA Sports said CFB 25 might not have turned out as good without the developers using machine-learning and AI.
Meanwhile, Candy Crush developers who got laid off by Activision Blizzard said they are being replaced by AI tools they helped create. A recent report from Financial Times said EA might look to further implement AI systems to help ramp up development amid its private sale to an investor consortium. Workers at EA have blasted the proposed sale over a range of concerns, including the possibility of mass layoffs and studio closures.
Regarding concerns from workers about AI across the global games industry overall, 30% of developers cited in the survey mentioned above said they believe generative AI is having a negative impact on the video game business (up 12% from 2023). The surveyed developers cited things like IP theft, energy consumption, and AI program biases as contributing to their feelings toward generative AI.
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