Google Cloud Exec Reveals: Your Favourite Games Were Already Built With AI

“What players don’t realise is that their favourite games right now were already built with AI.”

That’s the core argument from Jack Buser, Global Director of Games at Google Cloud, in a recent interview at GDC. According to Buser, nearly all top-tier game studios are now using AI tools to speed up development and reduce costs – but most are reluctant to disclose this publicly, and many aren’t telling players at all.

Buser has spent decades on the frontlines of game technology. He worked at Sony for over ten years, helping build PlayStation Home, PlayStation Now, and PlayStation Plus. He later joined Google, contributing to projects such as Stadia and Google Cloud’s ‘ecosystem for living games’. Today, he leads Google Cloud’s games division, offering AI tools designed to help studios improve efficiency and cut production costs.

Speaking about how AI might solve the industry’s growing cost crisis, Buser is highly optimistic. “The cost of game development across the entire industry, mobile included, has nearly doubled since 2017,” he said. “More than half of playtime is in games that are over six years old. So you’re spending twice as much to reach less than half of the audience. And you’re not feeling any of this growth, because it’s being gobbled up by companies that are probably not you, unless you’re Roblox or a Chinese game company. So for many companies, it’s pretty bleak right now.”

Buser believes AI offers a way out. Google Cloud’s AI tools, such as Gemini and Nano Banana Pro, are helping remove “the drudgery and repetitive, low value work” from game development pipelines. However, he acknowledges that AI remains a divisive topic – comparing the current backlash to earlier industry resistance to 3D graphics and online play.

Buser specifically noted that mobile gaming has been ahead of the curve in AI adoption. Companies like King and Plarium are major Google Cloud customers, using its tools to unify data silos. “If you stacked ranked all the game companies by revenue, all 10 of the top game companies are a customer to some degree,” he said.

When asked for a concrete example of a major studio using AI, Buser cited Capcom. “One of the big problems that they have is they’re building these massive worlds and they’ve got to fill it with content,” he explained. “Just coming up with all the ideas for every pebble by the side of the road, every blade of grass, and having all those art reviews, the manual labour just starts piling up in pre production.”

“What they’re doing is they’re using Nano Banana and Gemini to rapidly generate countless ideas, and then they’re talking to Gemini to actually go through those ideas and curate them… and of these thousands of things, here are the ones that are probably most interesting to you as the art director.”

“And then the art director takes that and then gets the art team going on these items. The AI has already prefiltered and preselected the probably really good looking pebbles on the side of the road – and then all of their creative energy gets focused towards the high value creative tasks – the main character, the big enemies, the main scene, objects, that kind of stuff.”

In mobile specifically, Buser pointed to AI’s impact on marketing asset generation. Many clients feed a brand bible into Google Cloud’s tools, which then produce imagery and assets for the next live op, season, or social media push “without endless art reviews and countless people sitting there and all the red tape and bureaucracy.”

Despite these sensible and useful applications, the games industry sees an AIrelated controversy almost weekly. Asked why there is such vocal resistance, Buser responded: “When there are technological revolutions in this industry, oftentimes you have a reaction from the player that’s like, hold on, I know what my favourite games are, and I’m worried about change – am I going to like the games of the future? Because I sure like the games I’m playing now. And I totally get that reaction.”

He continued: “I think what players don’t realise is that their favourite games right now were already built with AI. Those games have shipped. We did a survey around Gamescom last summer with studios all over the world. Roughly nine out of 10 game developers told us, yeah, we’re using it.”

“Now you’ll see other surveys from other organisations that have that more around like 4050%. And you might ask yourself, well, that’s still a large number. It’s still almost half of the developers out there. What’s that gap? That gap is basically the developers’ willingness to tell you whether the fact of the matter is it’s being used.”

Buser believes player sentiment will change over time – once the tangible benefits of faster, more efficient production reach players. “They’ll start to realise, like, this is actually helping me get my favourite games faster,” he said. “And I’m also getting more innovation in the industry because there’s more room to take risks, and now it’s not seven years waiting for one game, but that studio can make five games, and maybe they understand that only two of those five games will be a hit but that’s okay because these three other games are really interesting and cool and would have never been made with the old model…”

“Once that stuff starts happening, and it’s already happening now, you’ll start to see sentiment change.”

It’s worth noting that although Buser explicitly cited Capcom as an example of a studio using AI tools, Capcom has previously told shareholders that it does not plan to implement generative AI assets in its games. The company said last month that it intends to use AI technology to “improve efficiency and productivity in game development,” adding: “That is why we are currently testing out various methods of usage across our departments, including graphics, sound, and programming.”

Meanwhile, wellknown games journalist and insider Jason Schreier has echoed this trend. On Bluesky, he stated: “I mean it’s also true that almost every big studio is using genAI tools (particularly Claude) right now.” He added that although developers like Pearl Abyss and Sandfall Interactive have faced serious backlash after AIgenerated assets were discovered in their games, the widespread adoption of AI in game development is already a reality – and will only become more common.

In short: A Google Cloud executive says you are already playing games built with AI. Most developers just aren’t telling you.