Tom Henderson, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Insider Gaming, made a statement during episode 60 of the Insider Gaming Weekly podcast on April 24 that pretty much sums up where the games industry stands right now on generative AI: “Every studio is doing it. Capcom, Ubisoft, Microsoft, everyone is doing it.”
And before you write that off as another hot take from someone trying to stir things up, Henderson has the industry connections to back it up, this is someone who has been breaking gaming news for years and knows how the sausage gets made.
His comments didn’t come out of nowhere either. They landed right in the middle of a wave of similar confirmations from other credible voices. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier took to Bluesky on April 23 to state that “almost every big studio is using genAI tools, particularly Claude, right now.”
Around the same time, Jack Buser, global director of games at Google Cloud, told Mobilegamer.biz something that should raise a few eyebrows: “I think what players don’t realise is that their favourite games right now were already built with AI. Those games have shipped.”
He also cited a survey Google conducted around Gamescom where roughly nine out of ten developers admitted they were already using AI tools in their games. Nine out of ten, and yet the public conversation around this has barely scratched the surface.
Studios are using AI and hoping nobody asks about it
The reason most players haven’t heard about any of this is simple: studios don’t want them to. The fear of player backlash is very real, and the industry has learned through painful experience that the moment you disclose AI use, you’re handing the internet a grenade.
A March 2026 poll of 826 developers found that 66% claimed they weren’t using generative AI at all, while Google’s private survey data puts actual adoption at closer to 90%. That gap tells you everything you need to know about how transparent studios are actually being.
The preferred strategy for most is to say nothing and hope nobody notices. But that plan doesn’t always work. Ubisoft and 11 Bit Studios both ended up having to issue public apologies after players discovered that AI-generated assets used in early production had accidentally been left in their shipped games.
Sandfall Interactive, the studio behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one of the most acclaimed RPGs of last year and a multiple Game of the Year winner at The Game Awards 2025, quietly patched out AI-generated placeholder textures that players spotted shortly after launch, without ever making a proactive public statement about it.
Henderson himself called out the double standard at the time, pointing out that Larian Studios faced enormous backlash for openly discussing their AI use in development, while Sandfall walked away with the top prize of the year without saying a word.
Larian’s situation is worth revisiting because it illustrates exactly why most studios keep their mouths shut. After Schreier reported in December 2025 that Larian was using generative AI tools during the development of Divinity, their follow-up to Baldur’s Gate 3, the reaction from fans was immediate and fierce.
Studio head Swen Vincke had to respond publicly, clarifying that AI was only being used at the very early ideation stage as a rough reference tool, and that everything gets replaced with original concept art before anything moves forward. The backlash was intense enough that Larian eventually walked back its use of AI in the concept art phase entirely. That’s the kind of PR nightmare studios are trying to avoid, which is why most of them have simply decided that transparency isn’t worth the risk.
What Capcom, Ubisoft, and Microsoft are actually doing with AI
Here’s the part that tends to get lost when these conversations turn into outrage cycles: the way most major studios are actually using generative AI is a lot less dramatic than people imagine. Nobody is asking an algorithm to write the next Resident Evil or design a new open world from scratch. The real use cases are far more mundane, and in many cases, pretty hard to argue against.
Jack Buser described Capcom’s workflow specifically when speaking to Mobilegamer.biz. According to him, one of the biggest challenges for studios building massive open worlds is simply generating enough content to fill them. Coming up with ideas for every single environmental detail, every pebble on the side of the road, every blade of grass, every minor prop, and going through the art review process for each one creates an enormous amount of manual work during pre-production.
What Capcom is doing is using Google’s AI tools to rapidly generate and curate ideas for those low-value assets, so that the art director and the rest of the team can focus their creative energy on the things that actually matter: the main characters, the enemies, the key story moments.
This matches what Capcom’s own technical director Kazuki Abe described in a 2025 interview with Google Cloud Japan, where he explained that he developed a system using Gemini models capable of generating and evaluating ideas in seconds, something he called “an essential advantage in the fast-paced gaming industry.”
Capcom has also been upfront with investors about its position, stating clearly that it will not be implementing AI-generated assets into its final game content, while confirming it plans to actively use the technology to improve efficiency across graphics, sound, and programming.
Ubisoft has arguably been the most public about its generative AI ambitions. The French publisher has been building out an experiment called Teammates, a playable first-person shooter prototype powered by Google Gemini and built on its proprietary Snowdrop engine, where NPC companions respond dynamically to real-time voice commands from the player. An 80-person team worked on the project, and Ubisoft has confirmed that teams across all of its studios are actively exploring AI use cases in programming, art, and overall game quality. Microsoft, meanwhile, has been the most transparent of all three.
Through a collaboration between Microsoft Research and Xbox Game Studios’ Ninja Theory, the company developed Muse, formally known as the World and Human Action Model, or WHAM, a generative AI system trained on over 500,000 gameplay sessions from Ninja Theory’s game Bleeding Edge. Phil Spencer has spoken openly about the technology’s potential for faster creative ideation and even for preserving older games on new platforms.
The picture that emerges from all of this isn’t one of studios cynically replacing their artists with algorithms. It’s one of an industry quietly adopting tools to manage the reality of modern game development, where budgets are ballooning, timelines are stretching to seven years or more, and the pressure to deliver massive, content-rich worlds keeps increasing. The problem isn’t that studios are using AI.
The problem is that most of them have decided the safest move is to pretend they aren’t, and that’s a conversation the industry is eventually going to have to have with the people buying their games.
Tom Henderson said it plainly: everyone is doing it. The question is how much longer they can keep acting like they’re not.
Do you think studios should be honest about using AI in their games, or is it just another development tool that doesn’t need disclosing? Drop your opinion in the comments, we want to know what you think!