“Video Games Are Cooked”: The Harsh Reality of AI’s Grip on the Industry

There’s a growing feeling in the games industry that something big has shifted, and not everyone’s thrilled about it. Generative AI has gone from a curiosity to a full-blown presence in game development, and according to one indie publisher, there’s no turning back now. Whether players and developers like it or not, the floodgates are open.

Mike Rose, founder of No More Robots, the publisher behind titles like Yes, Your Grace and Descenders, didn’t sugarcoat it when talking about the current state of things. He compared the rise of generative AI in games to Pandora’s box being opened, and he doesn’t think anyone’s closing it.

"From a publisher perspective specifically, it's mega annoying," Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse.

"If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it's just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!"

That frustration isn’t happening in a vacuum. Platforms like Steam are already packed, with over 20,000 games dropping every year. Now add AI tools into the mix, making it easier than ever to crank out content, and suddenly that pile gets even bigger. Even with disclosure rules in place, the sheer volume of AI-assisted projects is becoming hard to ignore.

Rose also isn’t a fan of how AI-generated art looks, and he didn’t hold back on that either, saying: "Honestly, don't you think it's just so gross-looking? Kinda gives me the ick to look at genAI art. I'd rather not, thanks."

He’s not alone there. Players have gotten pretty good at spotting AI-generated assets, and the reaction hasn’t exactly been warm. Games like Crimson Desert and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had to backtrack and replace AI-generated elements after backlash.

Even tech like Nvidia’s DLSS AI filters has stirred up criticism. People notice, and a lot of them don’t want it anywhere near their games.

Still, despite the pushback, Rose keeps circling back to what he sees as the unavoidable truth. "I've been speaking with dozens of folks around the games industry for an upcoming story on generative AI in games and in game development.

“One thing I've been asking is how people want to see gen AI be treated in this space. On this point, Rose focuses on "the elephant in the room" here: "It's probably never going away again."

"People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy. I don't even mean that as an insult! We just are.

“So for a lot of people, if there's a choice between 'spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,' vs 'type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly' – the average person is going to pick the latter.

"And that's the thing really: Our feelings on it don't matter. It doesn't matter that a bunch of us don't like genAI. It's gonna get used now, and it'll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked."

That last sentiment hits especially hard when you look at how creators are reacting. Lucas Pope, the mind behind Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, recently admitted he’s pulling back from sharing early work altogether. The concern isn’t just AI use, it’s the idea that anything shown publicly could be scraped, copied, or fed into a system.

"It’s getting slurped up by AI or people are gonna copy it, or something else like that."

That’s a pretty rough place for the industry to be. Developers feeling guarded, publishers feeling overwhelmed, and players stuck trying to figure out what’s real, what’s AI, and whether it even matters anymore.

Maybe games aren’t completely “cooked” just yet, but things are definitely heating up.