It’s a story as old as time itself, a veteran employee trains a new hire and then when layoffs come that veteran is replaced by their trainee. In this case we have a 21st century twist, the new trainee is an AI that the game developers at King have been training over the last several years.
First mentioned in a 2023 article about the usage of AI inside King:
Which is why the firm appears to be taking a steady approach to letting AI loose on its crown jewel; it could all go very wrong, very quickly. CTO Steve Collins, the man in charge of all things tech and AI at King, describes the firm’s current use of buzzy new tools as a way to optimise the player journey – and cut out the boring bits of game development.
“Most of the roles in our organisation will be improved with these technologies,” Collins tells us. “Just like any new technology that comes in, new tools will make jobs easier, or take away some of the more mundane or more repetitive parts.”
“I ask engineers how much time they actually spend doing something that they consider to be creative, and they say about 15-20% of the time. I’d love that to be 100% of what they do.”
Cut to this 2024 article and it’s clear the usage of AI has grown extensively at King:
“Then the designers decide if that is an intended experience that they wanted – yes or no – and they go back and refine the level. We also have built a tool on top of this playtesting that does automatic tweaking by AI.”
“But again, the tweaking is an assistive tool where the designer determines the criteria for what is a good tweak or refinement for each level. It’s an assistive tool, right? Consider it like a co-pilot for coding, but this is a co-pilot for designing.”
Asadi says that the more that King’s designers use their AI copilots, the better the tech gets – and could lead to a kind of prompt-based approach at some point in the future.
Now jump forward to 2025, when Microsoft (the owner of Activision/Blizzard/King now) have announced massive layoffs across their gaming divisions and the fruits of all that AI training becomes much darker:
Many level designers, user research staff plus UX and narrative writers have also been told they’re at risk. In particular, these staff have spent the last few years building and training AI tools to do their jobs. They’re now effectively being replaced, say sources.
“Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they’ve spent months building tools to craft levels quicker,” said one staffer. “Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams. Similarly the copywriting team is completely removing people since we now have AI tools that those individuals have been creating.”
“The fact AI tools are replacing people is absolutely disgusting but it’s all about efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall,” they continued. “If we’re introducing more feedback loops then it’s crazy to remove the developers themselves, we need more hands and less leadership.”
I very much do not expect this to be the last time we hear stories of game developers who spend months or years training AI tools, that are ultimately replaced by the tools they helped create. You can learn more about this story in the video below.