Google Cloud’s games boss Jack Buser has been waxing lyrical about AI’s application in game development again.
You may recall we spoke to Buser earlier this year, when he claimed that practically every top studio is using AI to develop games more quickly, and for less. He added that there’s still a lot of concern around telling players about AI use, though, and many studios aren’t telling players at all.
Here at Gamecom Dev yesterday, Buser elaborated further on his experience of AI in modern game development. Most notably, Buser said that Google is so taken with Parallel’s next game, Colony, that it is showcasing the game on its Gamescom Dev booth. The survival sim showcases “real-time AI inference” that allows players to create their own 3D cosmetics near-instantly.
“They’re also using AI for all kinds of agentic systems in the actual game design itself,” said Buser. “These guys are definitely pushing the boundaries of how you might leverage AI during real-time gameplay.”
Parallel has previously raised $35m from the likes of Coinbase and Solana to build blockchain-powered games, but appears to have moved onto focusing on AI-based development since.
Elsewhere in the talk, Buser countered the assumption that AI is being used to take people’s jobs. He said he has “yet to find a game company say ‘we’re going to put AI into practice to get rid of this team’. That just doesn’t happen. I just haven’t seen it. I mean, it must happen out there somewhere. I just haven’t seen it.”
Referencing the artists in the room for this talk, Buser claimed that AI is also being used for pre-production “almost universally”, and cited Series Entertainment, maker of romance games The Ultimatum: Choices and Single’s Inferno: Choices for Netflix, as an example of an AI-native studio.
Buser claimed that using AI allowed the Series team to “cut their entire development pipeline down by about 90% in terms of time.”
Buser’s brisk talk also referenced Capcom, Plarium, Nexon and Square Enix as partners using Google AI for debugging, crunching data, chat moderation and for NPCs respectively.
