AI Is Already Taking Jobs in Game Development — Just Not Where We Expected

On August 12, 2026, former Saber Interactive lead writer Stella Sacco claimed that she had been removed from Rideshare "Stimulator" and that the remaining writing was handed over to ChatGPT. The studio denied the accusation: according to Saber, the story and dialogue were written by humans, and no writers were replaced by AI. The following day, Saber CEO Matt Karch weighed in: "Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her." He added: "I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest."

It is difficult to say who is right in this particular employment dispute. One side says her work was handed over to AI; the other says she was fired for unrelated reasons and that AI is used only in an optional mode. What matters here is something else. The head of a major studio publicly entertained the idea of replacing a writer with a language model and made it clear that he saw nothing inherently unacceptable about doing so.

First, the most important point: there is no direct evidence that the wave of layoffs across the video game industry was caused by AI.

Layoffs are nevertheless at record levels. According to the annual Game Developers Conference survey, 28% of respondents said they had lost their jobs within the past two years. Among respondents in the United States, that figure reached 33%. Over the past 12 months alone, 17% said they had been laid off. Half of all respondents reported layoffs at their current or most recent employer, while two-thirds of AAA developers said their companies had cut staff. According to Game Industry Layoffs, the industry lost around 14,600 jobs in 2024 alone.

Companies most often cited restructuring, budget cuts, market conditions, canceled projects, and shifts in strategy. Automation and AI implementation were mentioned by just 6% of respondents — far less often than the other factors. The industry is still going through a correction after the pandemic-era boom, when studios expanded their teams in anticipation of growth that ultimately proved temporary.

So it would be wrong to claim that all 14,600 people lost their jobs because of AI. The reality is more complicated — and, in my view, more troubling.

AI is not yet replacing entire studios or professions. Instead, it is displacing people from individual jobs and taking over specific tasks — especially work considered secondary and rarely associated with a particular creator's name.

Voice acting. The National Association of Voice Actors' (NAVA) 2026 survey included 1,379 respondents. Of those, 21% said they had at least once known for certain that they had lost a job to a synthetic voice, while 9% had experienced an unauthorized digital replica of their voice or a character they had performed. The survey covers the voice-over industry as a whole rather than video games specifically, and it does not distinguish between major and minor roles. But this is no longer a prediction — it is the documented experience of performers themselves.

Localization. Game translators often work as freelancers without long-term contracts, which makes it particularly easy to replace full translation with post-editing of machine-generated text. According to research by Totally Human, among 45 games with AI disclosures and estimated revenue above $1 million, 9% disclosed the use of AI for localization. The sample is small and does not represent the entire market, but practical examples already exist. Players found fragments of unedited machine-translated text in the Brazilian Portuguese localization of The Alters, while the Steam page for Rideshare "Stimulator" explicitly states that AI is used for some localization. Humans do not necessarily disappear from the production chain under this model, but instead of translating from scratch, they are tasked with checking and correcting the model's output.

Procedural writing. This is exactly the case with Rideshare "Stimulator." According to Saber, the story campaign was written by humans. The free-drive mode, however, features an endless stream of passengers whose dialogue and missions are generated by a model. The studio presents this as a technical necessity: manually writing content for an unlimited number of rides would be impossible. Without generation, the feature would probably either be much more limited or not exist at all. But some of the secondary writing that might once have been assigned to junior writers is now genuinely being produced by a model.

Entry-level positions. This is a more long-term concern. In the open responses to the GDC survey, more than 50 students mentioned a shortage of entry-level jobs, competition with laid-off industry veterans, and workers being displaced by AI tools. That sample does not prove that AI has already eliminated a specific number of jobs. But tasks such as "draw a hundred icons," "translate secondary text," or "write item descriptions" have traditionally served as entry points into the industry. If those tasks become less common, newcomers have fewer opportunities to gain their first experience and progress to more demanding roles.

Until recently, studios caught using AI were more likely to blame an oversight or temporary assets: a placeholder that was never replaced, a texture that slipped through, or a draft translation left in the final build. Now executives are increasingly defending the approach itself in public.

In October 2025, Krafton declared itself an "AI First" company and announced plans to invest more than KRW 100 billion — around $70 million — in computing infrastructure. A few weeks later, the company launched a voluntary resignation program with severance packages based on employees' length of service. Krafton stressed that this was not a headcount reduction program, but an opportunity for employees to decide for themselves whether they were prepared to work within the company's new structure.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has described Steam's mandatory AI disclosure as a "Scarlet Letter" attached to a game, after which "there is a hater community trying to kill the game." Matt Karch openly says that, in retrospect, he would have been happy to replace a writer with AI.

These are no longer just attempts to explain away isolated controversial assets. Executives at major companies are increasingly presenting AI as an ordinary production tool and no longer seem to regard public discussion of replacing some human labor as reputationally unacceptable.

Now for the part that does not fit the darker picture. Without it, the conclusions would be one-sided.

In November 2025, researchers at Totally Human counted 10,258 games on Steam with generative AI disclosures. They estimated their combined gross revenue at around $660 million, while 9,556 of those games failed to make even $10,000. This is an approximate calculation based on review counts and game prices rather than Valve's own sales data. More importantly, without comparing those results with conventional releases, the figures do not prove that players are punishing games specifically for using AI: most games released on Steam receive very little attention regardless.

A similar caveat applies to Steam Next Fest. Among the 10 most-played demos at the June 2026 festival, only one had an AI disclosure. That shows that AI-disclosed games barely appeared among the leaders of that particular event, but it does not tell us why. Players may have avoided them because of AI, or they may simply not have been interested in the games themselves.

Even studios that have embraced AI acknowledge the technology's limitations. Embark Studios used text-to-speech in ARC Raiders for some system dialogue. Eurogamer gave the game a 2/5 review, making its use of AI one of the central points of criticism, and the developers later re-recorded some of those lines with professional actors. Studio head Patrick Söderlund explained the decision plainly: "There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is." Embark has not abandoned text-to-speech entirely and continues to treat it as a useful production tool.

For now, then, the evidence supports neither extreme particularly well. AI cannot independently create a complete game, but its presence alone does not doom a project to failure either. The available data points to something else: the technology is most often used for supporting tasks, while work that depends on expression and authorship still frequently requires human involvement and revision.

The problem is not that today's AI can independently write a game better than a team of professional writers. There is no evidence for that.

A model does not have to outperform a person for that person to lose a job. It only has to produce something the client considers acceptable, cheaper, and faster. That is how entire professions may remain intact while their lower rungs gradually disappear: background voice work, draft translations, item descriptions, and other secondary writing.

The consequences would not appear immediately. These jobs have served not only as sources of income, but also as ways to enter the industry, gain experience, and move on to more demanding work. If AI takes over entry-level assignments, the industry could eventually face a shortage of experienced specialists who simply never had anywhere to learn their craft.

That is why the Saber story matters beyond the specifics of an employment dispute whose circumstances remain contested. The issue is not simply whether Stella Sacco was replaced by ChatGPT or fired for unrelated reasons. What matters is that the CEO of a major studio publicly said that, in retrospect, he would have been happy to replace her with AI. This is not Saber's official position, much less evidence of how the industry as a whole feels, but Karch himself clearly considered it acceptable to say so publicly.

After the controversy began, a generative AI disclosure appeared on the Steam page for Rideshare "Stimulator." Saber says it had always intended to add the disclosure once the game's feature set had been finalized. There is no way to verify that; all we know for certain is the sequence of events: Sacco made her claims on August 12, and the disclosure appeared a few days later.

On August 15, Karch sent Sacco a private email and, according to her, "apologized unreservedly for the awful way he spoke about me in the press." She accepted the apology. It concerned the manner of his public response, however: Karch did not retract his statement that he would have been happy to replace the writer with AI. Saber, for its part, continues to deny that Sacco or anyone else was actually replaced by AI.

AI has not replaced writers, translators, or voice actors as professions. But it is already allowing employers to eliminate some of the individual jobs that once gave those specialists income and experience. That — rather than fantasies about a game created entirely by AI — is where the real threat lies.