Playamp CEO Oliver Bulloss says all of MTG’s studios – including the likes of Plarium, InnoGames and Hutch – have AI tools embedded across practically all of its development, art, marketing and business intelligence pipelines.
The newly-rebranded group of midcore game studios also includes Snowprint, Ninja Kiwi and Futureplay.
Bulloss frames AI as an “amplifier” for existing teams rather than a replacement for its staff, stressing that when AI saves time, studios reinvest savings into more projects, not cost-cutting.
At InnoGames, rather than shutting down the underperforming live service title Sunrise Village, a two-person team spent roughly two months building a custom “AI Stage Designer” that automates level story, quests, balancing, asset labelling, layout and cutscenes. This has cut stage development time from ten weeks to three, with a team of three now producing what previously took around 25 people “at the same frequency and quality level as before,” says Bulloss.
No one was laid off, he says, as staff freed up by the changes were moved from Sunrise Village onto InnoGames’ newer title, Cozy Coast.
Across all of its active titles – Forge of Empires, Cozy Coast, Elvenar and Heroes of History – InnoGames has rolled out AI-assisted art production covering concepts, illustrations, UI sprites, icons and texturing, which it says cut its planned 2025 external art outsourcing spend by 60%.
Plarium’s data team has built three internal production tools – VizOps, Nexus and Chronicle – entirely without hand-written code, cutting iteration time roughly tenfold. VizOps manages business intelligence and data report lifecycles with automated testing and AI code review. Nexus continuously scans datasets for anomalies before they hit dashboards or models, while Chronicle gives support and QA teams a full player action timeline built from raw event data.
Two LLM agents built into BigQuery also let Plarium staff query company data in plain language, rather than building or hunting for dashboards.
The Raid: Shadow Legends maker has also built an AI-first development framework in VS Code with native Claude Code integration. Aimed at both developers and non-developers, it’s already used for prototypes and playable ads and is now being extended to larger 3D productions for early market testing.
Plarium’s internal art generation platform, Artmaker, is designed to protect company IP while giving artists a cheaper, purpose-built alternative to public AI tools for asset experimentation and production.
AI is also utilised outside of the development cycle. AI-assisted, character-led video campaigns have cut marketing production timelines from months to weeks, Plarium says, with AI-assisted trailers now performing on par with traditionally produced ones. InnoGames – which ran its first AI static ad in May 2023 and its first AI video ad in October 2024 – says AI is now involved in the majority of its ad production, with creative output up three times compared to the same period in 2023.
