How AI is Transforming the Quality of Games Not Just Production Speed from Game Studios

Updated: May 07 2025 10:37

AI Summary: At a GDC panel, gaming experts from Meta, Operative Games, and Series Entertainment discussed how AI is transforming game development by enhancing human creativity rather than replacing it. They highlighted AI's role in democratizing creation tools, speeding up content production, enabling emotionally resonant characters, and potentially powering dynamic runtime elements in "Living Games" that adapt to players, emphasizing that while AI acts as a powerful enabler, human craft and creative vision remain crucial for crafting compelling game experiences.

At a recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) panel titled "Can AI Make Your Game Better?", gaming experts from Meta, Operative Games, and Series Entertainment shared insights into how AI is transforming the game creation process – not by replacing human creativity, but by enhancing it. As Gina Richitzky, who leads emerging formats work at Meta, pointed out in her opening remarks, opinions on AI tend to fall into extremes: some view it as a passing fad, others as the solution to everything, and still others fear it will eliminate jobs entirely.


The reality, as illustrated by the panelists, is more nuanced. "It's never one extreme," Richitzky noted. "It's really how do you take the technology and how do you craft it into something that's meaningful?" The panel brought together three distinct perspectives on AI's role in game development:

• Joey Vergara, a technical game designer at Meta, focusing on creation tools that use AI to help developers create content more quickly and efficiently
• Jon Snoddy, who just announced his startup Operative Games, focusing on creating emotionally resonant AI characters
• Josh English, CTO at Series Entertainment (formerly Series AI), representing one of the largest gaming studios fully invested in AI technology

Meta's Joey Vergara highlighted how AI tools in their Horizon platform are "raising the floor" for creators. Similar to how RPG Maker or Unity democratized game development in the past, AI-powered tools are making game creation accessible to more people than ever before.

"One of the things that's really powerful about these tools, it really gets you from a blank page into something you can start working with," Vergara explained. He described how an entire world for a video demo was created in just two hours using AI prompts.

The value proposition is clear: AI allows smaller teams or solo developers to achieve quality levels that previously required large teams with specialized skills. As Vergara put it, "If you're working by yourself or a smaller team, there's just some quality bar you would not be able to hit by yourself without a lifetime of experience."

Meta is investing not just in individual AI tools but in how these tools connect. For example, a single prompt might generate not just visual elements but also corresponding sound effects, visual effects, and even code snippets to create a cohesive experience.


While Meta's tools focus on content creation, Jon Snoddy's Operative Games represents another frontier: using AI to create deeply engaging characters. Drawing on his experience from 15 years at Disney's research and development division, Snoddy emphasized that compelling AI characters must have motivation and backstory – just like characters in traditional media.

"We spent about a year really in just handwriting prompts, trying to find those things of what makes a character feel stiff or disconnected," Snoddy explained. His team discovered that human-like characters need to feel as if they have lives beyond their interactions with players. They're "always in the middle of something... always going towards something or from something."

In a video demonstration, Snoddy showed an AI character named Daniel interacting with a team member over a Zoom call. The character displayed emotional reactions, casual conversation skills, and backstory that made him feel remarkably human – right down to a stain on his shirt and stories about karaoke with Korean investors.


What makes this approach distinctive is Operative's focus on structured storytelling rather than completely open-ended experiences. "Storytelling is deeply human," Snoddy noted. "We want to create things that feel like a story... that feel like it has the sense of a beginning, a middle, an end."


Josh English from Series Entertainment provided a glimpse into what might be the most transformative application of AI in games: embedding generative AI within the games themselves. While many developers are focusing on "design time" AI tools, English predicts we'll soon see games where AI powers dynamic level generation, story creation, and NPC behaviors at runtime.

You're going to be able to have a conversation with an AI and it will build the level. It will be able to lay out the story. You'll create design the quest for you. It will actually power the non-player characters that you interact with that will adapt based upon the choices that you make as a player.

Series Entertainment Inc. has been leveraging Google Cloud's AI infrastructure to streamline content production and enable their developers to build games faster than traditional teams. Their approach extends beyond just development efficiency – they're pioneering what they call "Living Games."

"We coined a term which drives our strategy, called 'Living Games,'" David Buser of Series Entertainment explained. "This represents what happens when these worlds collide. You're actually able to not just transform what a game company and game development studio can look like and how they behave, but also you can transform the player experience."

The studio isn't just using AI to speed up development – they're building generative AI directly into the gameplay loop by incorporating it into game mechanics themselves.

"Something we're going to be releasing next year [is] we have AI built into the game mechanics that interact with the player to help tell the story," English revealed in a recent interview with SiliconANGLE. "So based on the player's interactions with the game environment itself, it can adapt to tell an immersive story together."

This approach addresses one of the biggest challenges in game development: producing enough fresh content to keep players engaged. As English notes, "If you look at an ordinary game studio, a great deal of work is put into producing new content for a game to keep the player base happy. Adding AI to the equation, it can tailor the game and gameplay experience on the fly."

The result? "It radically reduces the cost involved and the time involved in producing new content," English added. "At the same time, on the back end, it's still empowering our creators to build new experiences as well. So, I think it's bringing the best of both worlds." This vision points to games that fundamentally change based on player choices, creating deeply personalized experiences that go far beyond the branching narratives of traditional games.


Perhaps the most important takeaway from all three panelists was that despite AI's incredible capabilities, human creativity and craft remain essential. As Jon Snoddy put it, "AI is kind of like a magic wand. The first time you use it, you just can't believe... there's a picture there and it's kind of an amazing picture. But when you really start to use it professionally, it gets much more difficult. Doing something great is still hard."

Josh English echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that AI won't replace human game designers but will instead amplify their capabilities:

The person who's going to make the game better is you, not the AI. What it is going to do is enable you to make a better game.

This theme of AI as an enabler rather than a replacement was consistent across all perspectives. The technology may democratize game development and automate repetitive tasks, but the human touch – the creative vision, the understanding of player psychology, the crafting of meaningful experiences – remains irreplaceable.



As of May 2025, we're seeing the practical implementation of AI in several key areas:

• Creation tools that generate assets, sounds, textures, and code
• Character systems that create more believable and emotionally resonant NPCs
• Design tools that help developers iterate more quickly
• Early examples of runtime AI that adjusts game experiences dynamically

Series Entertainment alone is launching multiple games this year that incorporate AI technologies, demonstrating how quickly this field is moving from experimental to commercial.

The panel suggests we're approaching a future where anyone will be able to "develop a level, create a story, construct a narrative, lay out the beats for that story, create some compelling characters for that, write some music for it" – all with the assistance of AI tools.

The panelists framed AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a partner or teammate in the creative process. As Joey Vergara demonstrated, AI tools can help developers test ideas more quickly and overcome technical hurdles. For Jon Snoddy, AI enables new forms of interactive storytelling that were previously impossible. And for Josh English, AI represents a "force multiplier" that handles the boring, repetitive aspects of game development so that human creators can focus on "finding the fun."

As Meta's Gina Richitzky concluded:

AI does not replace creative talent... it's the human touch, it's the creative talent, it's the story, it's the character, it's the orchestration of it that makes it feel alive.