Google Cloud’s games boss Jack Buser says practically every top studio is using AI to develop games more quickly, and for less.
But there’s still a lot of concern around telling players about it – and many studios aren’t telling players at all.
Speaking to us at GDC after his talk on building “living games” with AI, Buser has been on the frontlines of new games tech for decades. He spent over ten years at Sony helping build PlayStation Home, Now and Plus. He then moved to Google to work on projects including Stadia and Google Cloud’s ‘ecosystem for living games’.
He’s now in charge of games at Google Cloud, which offers studios AI tools designed to help speed up and lower the costs of game development.
And so naturally, Buser is incredibly optimistic about AI’s role in potentially solving the games industry’s game production cost crisis. “The cost of game development across the entire industry, mobile included, has nearly doubled since 2017,” he tells us.
“More than half of playtime is in games that are over six years old. So you’re spending twice as much to reach less than half of the audience. And you’re not feeling any of this growth, because it’s being gobbled up by companies that are probably not you, unless you’re Roblox or a Chinese game company. And so for many companies, it’s pretty bleak right now.”
Buser says AI offers a way out, and that AI-powered Google tools like Gemini and Nano Banana Pro are helping remove “the drudgery and repetitive, low value work” in game development pipelines. But he’s also aware AI is a divisive topic. He recalls going to GDC in years gone by and encountering resistance to 3D graphics and online play – and he likens that tension to the current backlash to AI, though the dissenting voices aren’t as loud in mobile.
“Mobile has always been ahead of the game,” says Buser, noting how companies like King and Plarium are major Google Cloud customers for things like unifying data silos. “If you stack ranked all the game companies by revenue, all 10 of the top game companies are a customer to some degree,” he says.
When asked for a specific example of how a major game studio is now making games faster and cheaper, he cites Capcom as a big user of Google Cloud’s AI tools.
“One of the big problems that they have is they’re building these massive worlds and they’ve got to fill it with content,” explains Buser. “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 task, the main character, the big enemies, the main scene, objects, that kind of stuff.”
In mobile specifically, Buser references the impact AI asset generation has had on marketing already. He says many of his clients are feeding a brand bible into Google Cloud’s tools, which then spits out imagery and assets for the next live op, season or social media push “without endless art reviews and countless people sitting there and all the red tape and bureaucracy”
This all sounds quite sensible and useful, and yet there seems to be an AI-related furore in the games business on a weekly basis. So we ask Buser why he thinks there is such vocal resistance to AI toolsets.
“When there are technological revolutions in this industry, oftentimes you have a reaction from the player that’s like, hold on, I know what my favourite games are, and I’m worried about change – am I going to like the games of the future? Because I sure like the games I’m playing now. And I totally get that reaction.”
He continues: “I think what players don’t realise is that their favourite games right now were already built with AI. 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.”
And Buser believes that player sentiment will change over time – once the actual benefits of faster, more efficient game production are out in the players’ hands.
“They’ll start to realise, like, this is actually helping me get my favourite games faster,” he adds. “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.”
