Is the AI backlash overblown? One dev says players are "fine with it"

There's been a lot of debate about how much AI in video game development is to be welcomed or rejected. There are plenty of opinions. Many gamers and developers are dead against generative AI for finished assets, while some see it as acceptable for ideation, prototyping and workflow improvements. Other devs might use AI for everything if they thought it would be accepted but tread carefully for fear of how it will be received.

Tim Morten, the CEO of Frost Giant Studios and formerly StarCraft production director, is one dev who's making no apologies for seeing benefits in AI, and he seems to suggest that the backlash from gamers themselves may have been over emphasised.

As reported by Game Developer, the CEO of the developer of free-to-play RTS Stormgate, spoke openly about generative AI at Gamescom 2025. He claimed that every developer he speaks with is using "some amount of AI" and exploring how to use it more.

It's "100% the direction that the industry is heading," he's reported as saying. And he thinks that can be beneficial for the industry, helping to streamline workflows and stretch budgets without necessarily meaning that jobs get cut.

"John Carmack made an observation about how work that he used to painstakingly do by hand when he started in the game industry, over the course of his time in the industry got completely obviated," he said. "It didn't mean his job went away. It meant he could focus on solving other problems.

“I think right now, in some players' heads, AI means taking jobs away. I am not a publisher. I am not a business person. I am a game developer. The last thing in the world that I want to do is eliminate my job. But what I do want to do is fulfill these grand visions. Stormgate is a grand vision for a game – I want tools that help me be able to do that".

Morten recommended that developers train AI models before using them on their own assets to provide more consistency and also to respect intellectual property.

As for Frost Giant's own use of generative AI for Stormgate, the developer used third-party tools to animate character portraits because it "didn't have the bandwidth" to do so otherwise. Morten said that after testing the game with and without the AI portraits, the developers felt that having the faces animate when dialogue plays added to the game.

And players' reactions? Morten says that most were “fine” with it, although he recognised that some did express vocal disapproval. That might suggest that those gamers opposed to the use of AI are a relatively small proportion of the overall audience but one that makes their feelings known most loudly on social media – as seen in the public roastings of Call of Duty Black Op 6 and Blizzard's artwork for Diablo Immortal X Hearthstone.

The debate about generative AI in game design isn't going to go away any time soon. For some, it's an emotional issue, or a matter of principle, while others see it in practical terms: ultimately it will be players who decide whether they're happy enough with the results to play a game.

For more of the week's video game development news, see the Unreal Engine 5 game with 18,000 characters rendered in real time.