Is the games industry becoming more optimistic about AI? | Mobile Mavens part 1

• "After several weeks spent optimising our processes, my team can now handle at least twice as much work per week without overtime." - Alisa Eren.
• "Almost every game team I speak to is already using AI somewhere in development or publishing." - Wenfeng Yang.
• "We've effectively reached a point where AI is simultaneously making some aspects of game development cheaper and easier, while making the physical infrastructure supporting those games more expensive." - Kimberley Shearer.

AI remains a huge talking point in the games industry as it is becoming an increasingly common part of how games are developed.

Studios are finding new ways to use the technology across various aspects of the business, from speeding up everyday tasks to helping smaller teams achieve more with fewer resources. 

However, this growth also comes with challenges. Concerns around the ethical use of AI, copyright issues and more, such as the ease at which games can be copied, continue to raise questions about AI's impact on the industry.

So as the technology continues to evolve, are attitudes changing? We asked our Mobile Mavens how their views have shifted over the past year and how they may be using the technology.

Here's what they had to say. Stay tuned for part 2. 

Alisa Eren

Organic Growth Lead | Mobile Games at Burny Games

Over the past year, I’ve become more optimistic about AI’s practical value, but also more aware of how fundamentally it is changing competition. The mobile games industry has changed significantly: thoughtful, professional use of AI is becoming a requirement for staying competitive.

As Organic Growth Lead at Burny Games, I use AI daily to extend my team’s capabilities. We continuously refine custom skills and workflows in Claude, automatically create tasks in Asana, and build automated user acquisition dashboards. Connecting these tools brings data, insights, and next steps into one workflow, reducing manual coordination and giving us more time to act on what we learn.

After several weeks spent optimising our processes, my team can now handle at least twice as much work per week without overtime. For me, the real value is the freedom to focus on strategy, creative thinking, and ideas that would otherwise remain in the backlog.

As more teams gain these capabilities, competition intensifies. Faster production raises the baseline for everyone. The opportunity is to amplify your team’s expertise, the challenge is to preserve quality and independent judgment as you scale. I believe the strongest teams will combine a broad range of skills with systems that make those skills go further.

Will Luton

Founder/CPO Village Studio Games

The vibe across the games industry and the investment world seems to be that we’re moving along the Gartner hype cycle on LLMs and we’re all in various points between the peak of inflated expectations and the slope of enlightenment.

What I do know is that there are a few things that are now undeniable for games:

1. Consumers generally don’t like it being publicly facing (e.g. art, video, sound), especially in console/PC.

2. It is impactful in speeding up development.

3. It’s not as impactful as some thought or hoped.

4. It’s not yet been meaningfully implemented as a game mechanic.

I think this is healthy overall. What I’m seeing is that AI can be an accelerator in some aspects of development where it is carefully guided by a human to do boring, repetitive stuff. But that it quickly falls apart when you give too much autonomy or trust. The idea that we, in the near term, can one shot a fun, meaningful game from a single prompt is becoming increasingly laughable. We still need people who can read and write code.

So here at Village Studio we have a strong AI policy, which is that all the staff get to use the AI tools they wish, but that all art, sound, writing and everything else in the final game is 100% human-made. I use it for coding day-to-day, but it’s very closely controlled. Mostly line completion and bits of refactoring. I have lost days and weeks of work from bad AI code. It’s finding the balance which is key.

I’m generally an optimist (not just on AI) and I see benefits to AI, but I also see lots of risks. I think cyber security is one. Lots of hacking is simply prodding about looking for weak spots, and this falls into the “boring, repetitive” bucket that AI is good at.

However, I think this works both ways in that white hat AI can be doing the job in a positive way and so in the long term we will be much more secure, but in the short term we can expect lots of problems.

I think there is a real risk that we may be facing a dot-com-style bubble, where the wheels fall off of the circular infrastructure finance around GPUs and data centres. I think this could be accelerated by open models, running locally on a user’s own machine. Already, some of these pass the “good enough” threshold in my experience.

 If this becomes commonplace and people spend most of their day using local, open LLMs versus the Claudes and ChatGPT, then the trillions of infrastructure become useless.

Colan Neese

SVP of Gaming at Screen Engine

Attitudes have split more than they’ve swung. Coding assistants went into studios quietly with very little pushback, so the concern has moved to jobs, which is real, and to anything players can actually see, which is why art is where the fights will be.

The bigger change is the sheer number of games being made. AI pushes the number of games toward infinite while the hours people have to play stay fixed, and mobile has lived in that world for fifteen years.

Our attention share data shows the squeeze: the top ten games’ share of tracked gaming attention falling from 36.5% to 27.8% between the Gears 5 launch week in 2019 and the E-Day launch week this fall.

Personally, I’m an optimist. The hard part of making a game was never the idea, it was building it, and AI is pulling those two apart for anyone with an idea and a free weekend.

A lot of what hobbyists are doing with it today raises serious IP questions, but early YouTube was built on pirated clips too, and my bet is the next big wave of UGC comes from people who never could have made a game before.

Jan Sommerfeld

COO at Almedia

Over the past year, AI has had a huge positive impact on our business across all sectors, but it isn't without its potential pitfalls.

At Almedia, we use it in a variety of different departments, from analysing campaign performance to triaging bug reports. We're even working to make our data available across the company so staff can securely query it in plain English.

The biggest opportunity is freeing people from repetitive work so they can focus on what needs their judgment, and the main challenge we anticipate is cost. As any company scales its use of AI, there's a real risk of costs spiralling out of control, so it's naturally one I'm making sure we stay on top of.

Kimberley Shearer

CMO at PingPlayers

AI has enormous potential to simplify game development, automate infrastructure management and help smaller teams achieve more with fewer resources. One particularly interesting development is AI-assisted infrastructure management, where developers can use natural language to deploy servers, troubleshoot issues, manage configurations and interact with infrastructure APIs.

However, one of the biggest surprises has been the extent to which the AI boom is influencing the economics of traditional gaming infrastructure. The rapid expansion of AI data centres has contributed to significant increases in RAM prices and greater pressure on hardware supply chains.

We've effectively reached a point where AI is simultaneously making some aspects of game development cheaper and easier, while making the physical infrastructure supporting those games more expensive.

So the biggest impact of AI on multiplayer gaming may be how it transforms the technology running behind games rather than what it creates inside them.

Pascal Clarysse

Author “The Slingshot Formula", CEO Big Karma

For general context, at Big Karma, we are a small mission-driven indie studio with limited funding.We essentially use 3 AI tools in our daily diet: Claude Code, Tripo and Gemini.

Gemini is included in our Google Apps Workspace, at $48 a month for the whole team. We all use it for everything that doesn't require advanced thinking or complex tasks, so we keep our Claude credits reserved for work that requires a higher level of intelligence.

Our Claude Code is a 20x Max account for which we pay 200$ a month. It is in the hands of our lead developer, running locally on his computer, which is the most expensive and powerful machine in our arsenal.

We also have a rule that any team member who requests something to be generated must review it in full (accountability still remains at the human level). Besides coding assistance and sophisticated calculus, Claude is constantly improving at beta-testing and bug-tracking, which is another way it helps us save cost and gain speed.

The animators use Tripo to "first-draft" many visual tasks. Our characters, based on real-life Paralympic athletes under likeness licensing, are first hand-drawn by the hyper-talented Miguel Francisco (Angry Birds, Angry Birds Star Wars, Best Fiends). We generate a 3D render from it through Tripo, then our 3D animators heavily correct and clean it up manually.

In capital, the ratio of AI use in our monthly burn is still well under the 1% mark, but the impact on our efficiency and work pace is far greater. We'd probably need 2 or 3 more man-months split among additional part-timer/freelancer roles to make up for it if we didn't have it. And still then, I doubt we would iterate this fast.

I pragmatically appreciate those gains, while remaining confident and optimistic that the best creations in arts and entertainment will remain tied to the human experience: intuition, taste, judgement and pain remain the core ingredients for an original take as opposed to simple derivative work.

As an economist and marketing expert, I am acutely aware that if the means of production enable faster development for all of us, the explosion on the supply side will shrink individual demand for each title.

This is especially true when organic discovery is already kind of broken and user acquisition already costs a lot for anyone who doesn't enjoy either Turkish government subsidies or extremely robust user LTV (or both). That part truly worries me, for us at Big Karma, as well as for all the other indie studios and middle-class companies across our industry.

Wenfeng Yang

Founder at Big Bang Accelerator

Almost every game team I speak to is already using AI somewhere in development or publishing.

In development, tools like Tripo help teams create low-poly assets, prototype ideas and get designers, artists and programmers on the same page. High-end assets still need specialist workflows and human expertise, while AI’s use is expanding into video, audio and integration with game engines. In publishing, teams use AI to produce ad creatives, run A/B tests and analyse products - for example, combining Sensor Tower data with tools like Codex.

AI-native products are also starting to show commercial potential. Products like Zeta, OOC and Tipsy suggest that people are willing to pay for AI-powered interaction and companionship. For games, I think there’s much more to explore here, especially characters, stories and gameplay that develop differently for each player.

On the investment side, we’re also seeing game companies become LPs in funds backing AI startups. They want to participate in developing these technologies as well as using them.

The bigger long-term change, in my view, is the emergence of AI-first companies. Today, we still organise teams much as we always have, with people doing most of the coordination. AI could take on much more of the information sharing, task tracking and follow-up, leaving people more time for creative direction and judgment. I’d rather have talented people making better games than chasing each other for updates.

That’s why I’m more confident about AI than I was about the metaverse. For me, AI has passed a simple test: teams are using it to get real work done. I see it as a lasting change in how games are made, what players experience and how companies work.

For more on AI, we'll be covering the topic at Pocket Gamer Connects Jordan on November 7th and 8th and PGC London on January 18th and 19th, 2027.