Arc Raiders‘ use of AI tools continues to create divides in gaming. The CEO of its developer’s parent company, Nexon, recently claimed that generative artificial intelligence tools are everywhere in game development — plenty of game developers say otherwise.
Nexon CEO Junghun Lee recently told Japanese outlet Game*Spark (and translated by Automaton), “I think it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI.” Nexon’s studios, like Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios, have been utilizing AI in development, with Lee saying, “AI has definitely improved efficiency in both game production and live service operations.” He went on to ponder, “if everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: how do you survive? I believe it’s important to choose a strategy that increases your competitiveness” and indicated Nexon’s stategy is “human creativity,” even as it has adopted the use of AI.
This isn’t the first time Nexon or one of its studios has championed AI use. When Arc Raiders, the latest extraction-shooter-of-the-month, launched, it stirred up controversy due to its use of AI voices. Essentially, Embark Studios hired real flesh-and-blood voice actors to record lines for the game, and used text-to-speech software to implement generated voice lines based on the recordings, like it did for 2023’s The Finals. As Arc Raiders is an ongoing live service title, Embark argued this process will allow it to swiftly include voice lines for new and future items without the need to bring voice actors back to record.
However, indie game developers have been quick to call the claims that AI is widespread in the industry as “bullshit” and its use as unnecessary. Strange Scaffold creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr. responded to Lee’s comments in a post on Bluesky Tuesday night, writing, “We don’t use generative AI at Strange Scaffold and I can confirm that a *lot* of other studios are not—whether indie or AAA. Get outta here with this normalization bullshit.” Nelson called AI “the thing already making our medium worse.”
Several more developers waded into these waters with anti-AI messages and assertions that their games, like Strange Scaffold’s, don’t use AI tools. Promise Mascot Agency developer Kaizen Game Works commented there’s “no genAI” in its games, calling its work “All pure, human nonsense and love.” D-Cell Games producer Chi Xu said no AI was used in the development of the upcoming rhythm adventure game Unbeatable, writing, “relinquishing creative choices to tools makes your work empty, vapid, and meaningless.” Necrosoft, the developer of the upcoming tactics RPG Demonschool offered up a blunt statement on the matter: “Hello, not only do we not use AI we would rather cut off our own arms than do so.”
Of course, not everyone is against the use of AI in game development. In response to Eurogamer’s review of Arc Raiders, in which the outlet criticized the game’s use of generative AI, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said, “Political opinions should go into op eds folks,” in a post on X.
Someone questioned how an opinion on AI is “political,” and Sweeney followed up by saying, “views on whether this is a net good and should be rewarded, or bad and should be fought against, are speculative and generally distributed along political lines.” He continued, arguing, “Game developers compete to build the best games in order to attract gamers. When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people.”
Nelson from Strange Scaffold had touched on that, calling reliance on AI a “skill issue” in a post on Bluesky. “And one other thing: we’re being told that AI is the only way to make games cheaper and faster, to pull us from this precipice of production nightmares the industry has found itself in. That it’s necessary. We put out roughly 3 motherfucking games a year, not touching the stuff. Skill issue.” Polygon spoke to Nelson earlier this year where he elaborated on how the studio is able to put out hits at a rapidfire rate. (Strange Scaffold published Clickolding, I Am Your Beast, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown in ten months’ time from July 2024 to May 2025, for example.)
Polygon reached out to Nelson for comment and received the following statement, which we’ve pasted in full below:
In the most charitable read, there are five major reasons a game developer is using AI right now. They are being forced to by their management, they genuinely believe it will help them make a new type of video game, they are afraid of being left behind, it lets them do things they otherwise did not have the budget or time to create by providing results that are decent enough to sell, or it helps them address a quality and precision gap in their processes. Those last two are especially dangerous. If your game design and world building processes are so broken and last-minute that you cannot incorporate time to get a voice actor to record lines, or writers and engineers to build the format and ideal vision for those lines ahead of time? An AI solution steps in with something that’s “good enough” to exist in the project, but provides no path for those processes or the player experience that may be harmed by them to be identified and fixed. If a publisher wants to put together seasonal cosmetics, but has neither budgeted for the time or cash required to pull those together, AI can perhaps generate an image that’s “good enough” to modify and sell, but again, a broken process that’s resulting in a worse player experience gets protected rather than pointed out as an explicit problem to fix. The use of generative AI in game development paves the road to gradually not just harm player trust, but fill games with “good enough” band-aids to deeper fundamental problems that it’s hard to see the human skill and creativity that lies underneath. And players deserve better.
Representations for Nexon did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
