Is the games industry becoming more optimistic about AI? | Mobile Mavens part 2

• "One of the most unfortunate side effects is that games get copied more easily, and this is now being felt especially in the indie / Steam development scene." - Elina Arponen.
• "The winners will be teams that use AI to buy time for thinking, not to stop thinking." - Peter Fodor.
• "It could democratise game development while making it harder than ever to actually succeed as a developer." - Adam Smart.

We continue to see AI changing how studios develop and operate their games. For some, it brings new opportunities, but for others, concerns remain about its wider impact on the industry.

In this second part of our Mobile Mavens, we hear from more industry experts about whether their attitudes toward AI have changed over the past year, how they are using the technology, and what challenges and opportunities they see ahead.

Here's what the rest of our Mavens had to say. You can also read part 1 here. 

Susan Cummings

Co-Founder at 10Six Games

The opportunity is crazy - this magical new technology - new types of games that simply aren't possible without it, are what drives and excites us at 10six. 

In YOU vs Zombies, you tell us as little or as much about yourself or anyone else you want to be, and in seconds, our human-designed and built systems get morphed around this input. Your character looks like you, the story is set where you live, and so on. Real representation for every player is finally possible in a video game.

For PC developers, the biggest problem is fear. Fear that admitting to any use of AI is like a Scarlet Letter on the game. Interestingly, mobile developers haven't faced the same issue, nor have Roblox developers. 

Also, as with any new technology, it's difficult to be an early adopter, especially with a tech that is changing constantly. For all of these reasons, the game industry in the West has been very slow to truly innovate here and to find and build the fun, novel use cases that it will take to convince gamers.

Adam Smart

Director of Product - Gaming at AppsFlyer

We’re waiting for the first genuinely great PC or console game built openly with AI. If it’s brilliant, will players really care how it was made?

I think that moment will settle a debate the industry is currently dodging. My attitude towards AI is both optimistic and concerned, and that question is where the two meet.

Split gaming into two markets. Mobile has already answered it: studios admit they’d be behind competitors if they hadn’t adopted AI. It’s a competitive necessity, especially for smaller teams doing more with less.

PC and console haven’t, especially in the West, where studios fear backlash more than they chase the upside. Meanwhile, APAC publishers are openly using AI to build games faster and cheaper, not waiting for permission.

It’s the dot-com boom again. Bricks-and-mortar businesses that resisted the internet, trusting their old models would protect them, mostly disappeared. Western studios resisting AI to “protect” the industry may be accelerating their own decline instead. I’m genuinely surprised any studio still isn’t using AI-assisted development in some form.

Epic’s AI MegaJam could force the issue, legitimising something much of the industry is still uncomfortable discussing openly.

My bigger worry sits beyond that first great game, though: discoverability. AI will make games dramatically easier to create, flooding already crowded storefronts. Organic discovery is hard enough now and could become nearly impossible. And with paid UA already dominating discovery, what incentive do Apple and Google really have to fix that?

So: optimistic about AI’s potential, concerned about its consequences. It could democratise game development while making it harder than ever to actually succeed as a developer.

Vadim Andreev

CEO & Co-Founder at Rokky

In 2026, we saw an acceleration of AI being adopted into the game development workflow, allowing a new generation of developers to make quick games through vibe coding.

AI in game development has shown to benefit studios over the last year by lowering the production barrier for games while speeding up development cycles. This is then allowing developers to release more frequently and create new channels for generating profits from players - profits that can then be used to keep employees hired and studios afloat.

Next year, I expect AI to be more widely embraced in gaming. Just as AI video generation moved from rudimentary short clips to full-length content and even full series over the last twelve months, game development is poised for a similar leap in its design and production.

Particularly in the indie sector, small teams that are embedding AI across every phase of development are empowered to release highly polished, high-end titles. Studios that integrate these tools early are the ones that will secure a decisive competitive advantage over those that resist implementation.

Elina Arponen

CEO & Co-Founder at Quicksave Interactive

AI is great when it comes to speeding up your internal processes and giving you a tireless sparring partner for your work. What it does well is raise the floor on quality, but it doesn’t raise the ceiling: there is still plenty of room for extraordinary human creativity.

One of the most unfortunate side effects is that games get copied more easily, and this is now being felt especially in the indie / Steam development scene.

After discussing this with developers, we’re suggesting one possible solution: interactive trailers. You don’t have to share a full early access build or demo. Instead, you can choose to showcase just the part of the game that conveys the idea. None of your own game code needs to be included.

We’ve started a letter to build support for this idea before we propose it directly to Steam/Valve.

Peter Fodor

Founder at AppAgent

More optimistic about the tools. More worried about how people use them.

A year ago, the industry feared that AI would replace us. Today I worry about something else. Everyone in gaming now believes AI can solve almost everything. 

It can’t.

We have pushed hard on AI at AppAgent. We built AdAgent, our AI-assisted video ad production. We built AppBrain, a second brain that holds what our whole company knows. Two years ago, most clients would not let us use AI on their games. Today, most of them allow it, as long as we stay within strict legal limits.

So yes, AI is powerful. It has solved the creative volume problem. But volume was never the problem studios actually have.

Here is my prediction: in the next 6 to 12 months, many studios will hit a wall. They will have far more ads, dashboards and reports, and the same flat revenue.

Most games are not limited by how many ads or channels they run. The real ceiling is the wrong audience, the wrong message or the wrong emotional driver.

Building our own tools taught us three things:

• AI rarely invents. Even with all the context we give it, the best outputs still need a human hand. In AdAgent, our creative leads sharpen the twist in an ad, fix the pacing of an edit, or pick the one competitor insight a client needs to hear.

• AI sees what wins, but not why it wins. “Goblins perform well in Clash Royale ads” is just a description. The real work is finding the principle behind a winning creative and adapting it to your own game. AI still struggles with that.

• Small fixes bring small gains. Most teams use AI to speed up the workflows they already have. That brings marginal gains. Real P&L impact comes from rebuilding how the work is done. The bigger the company, the harder this shift is, and the bigger the disappointment when the rush calms down.

Execution will be automated, and that’s fine. Studios will pay for expertise and judgment again: which audience, which game to build, where the next dollar goes. The winners will be teams that use AI to buy time for thinking, not to stop thinking.

Erik Dubbelboer

Principal Engineer at Poki

Attitudes towards AI in games appear to have become more measured over the past year, as initial excitement has given way to a more practical conversation about what the technology can add for players.

It clearly lowers the barrier to creating games, which should bring more new developers and ideas into the gaming ecosystem. Quality remains the biggest challenge, though, because AI does not yet fully understand what makes a game genuinely fun or engaging, and novelty fades quickly once the results become predictable and repetitive.

As AI makes it easier to create, human curation becomes even more valuable. AI could also make safety and moderation easier to manage, but quality control is harder to automate, so having a human eye on what players actually enjoy will matter more as the volume of AI-generated content grows.

Philip Morris

Head of Business Development at PingPlayers

AI is not replacing tasks, but it is changing them. Sentiment is souring even as the tools become more useful. Over the past year, attitudes have moved clearly towards concern rather than optimism, among both developers and core players.

GDC’s State of the Game Industry survey found that 52% of respondents said generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, up from 30% last year and 18% the year before.

In my opinion, what matters most is for what part of the development process AI is used. Gamers appear to be most negative about AI for creative work such as art, music, sound, narrative and dialogue, and more open to it for things like dynamic difficulty adjustment. But AI is indeed reshaping core roles and their impact on the needs of the business.

As Lirui Ding from the Transcend Fund pointed out, “speed doesn’t win games, strategy does”. To pitch AI features in games credibly, AI has to sit in the architecture itself, it shouldn’t be a bolt-on or afterthought.

Personally, when I see my 10-year-old playing Fortnite, UGC is where the most interesting conversation lies. He can’t code, but he has a youthful imagination Claude would love to tap into. Developers continue to build the foundation, and an ever-growing community piles in the content. And you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle now can you?