Look on AI in game dev -- slightly outside the day-2-day
With all the talk around AI, why not join the fun? As a CEO, I’m a bit removed from the day-to-day hands-on work, still I’ve been doing my share and thinking about the near future Must-Win-Battles with AI.
On the engineering side, the impact is already very real. Agentic AI is making programmers more efficient, automating parts of the work and gradually changing how codebases are built and maintained. Since so many teams rely on external engines like Unity & Unreal, it’ll be interesting to see how those ecosystems evolve and shape new ways of working. Similar shift is happening across art, audio, and data. It’s easier than ever to sketch, plan and analyze. For example Stitch and Suno are fun and Claude generates savvy dashboard within no time (mentioning these as examples bc I’ve personally played with them).
Design is a bit different. The fun often comes from small ideas and well-crafted details. It’s those carefully designed moments, the little surprises and polished interactions, that create something memorable. Especially in mobile, where “snackable” moments matter a lot.
That said, AI can definitely help here. Even if not yet in crafting experiences in the field of design, it’s great for things like level generation, phasing of progression, playing levels, and overall figuring out rough ideas quickly. It’s also becoming powerful in marketing, generating creatives, testing variations, and optimizing campaigns. It’s not hard to imagine that soon a big part of UA will be handled end-to-end by AI. That’s great!
Competition is pushing everyone, including small studios, to move faster, automate and and produce more content, without losing their identity. And that creates a real tension: how much time do you spend building your game versus learning and building new tools? There’s no one right answer. In the near term, AI will cut time spent on asset creation, prototyping, and repetitive work. There are clear gains to be made from better tools but winning also means having the right team. If first programmers and then UA managers were the MVPs before, designers will be next. AI still can’t create what genuinely feels fun and new.