In a gold rush, the ones who profit most are often not the miners, but the people selling shovels. Google is currently trying to become the biggest supplier of AI tools to the video game industry, and Jack Buser is the executive tasked with selling those shovels. As Global Director for Games at Google Cloud, Buser sits at the intersection of the company’s generative AI ambitions and an industry that is struggling to survive.

A career spent chasing gaming’s biggest bets

Buser has spent decades chasing technologies that transformed gaming. Early in his career, he worked on Dolby sound support on consoles like PlayStation 2 and Xbox. At Sony, he helped shape PlayStation Home, an early attempt at a virtual world, and was involved in PlayStation Plus as a subscription service. Later he moved to Google to work on Stadia, the cloud gaming platform that was shut down in 2022 and finally ended in 2023. Now he is responsible for promoting AI to the games industry.

In his own words, he goes around Google, finds the best tools built for Google’s platforms, and makes them available to game companies. He describes the modern games industry as no longer a consumer packaged goods business, but a collection of live services. In his broad definition, live services include anything that connects online, collects telemetry, or builds a player network. The shift to AI, he believes, will be even bigger than any previous transition.

An industry in crisis

The urgency behind Google’s pitch is obvious. The games industry is going through a painful period. High-profile cancellations, studio closures, and massive budget overruns have become regular news. Buser points to two main factors driving the turmoil. First, most playtime globally is still concentrated in games more than six years old, a trend that was highlighted in 2024 data from Newzoo and has continued since. New games are not just competing with other new releases; they are trying to pull players away from live-service titles that have been running for years.

Second, the cost to build a new game has nearly doubled since 2017. That means companies are spending twice as much to make games, while competing for a much smaller share of players’ attention. For many studios, one failure is enough to put the entire company at risk. That is why Google Cloud is positioning AI not as a luxury, but as a way out of the quagmire.

Google’s three-part pitch

Buser breaks down Google’s AI pitch into three parts. First is the development pipeline. Google works with developers to identify points of friction, then applies AI to those bottlenecks. The most cited example is Capcom, which worked with Google to build a multi-agent system that handles heavy debugging. AI agents continuously try to break the game, identify problems, and propose solutions. According to Buser, this effectively adds tens of thousands of hours of human labor to the team. The development team’s size remains the same, but the human employees can focus on creative work rather than tedious bug hunting.

The second part is the rest of the company: publishing, marketing, live operations, and business development. Buser says these departments can also be accelerated by removing high-toil, low-creative-value tasks. If development is moving faster, the rest of the organization needs to keep up. The third part is the one that excites him most: the player experience. AI that can understand context during gameplay opens up new design possibilities. He mentions that generative and world models like Genie, Veo, and Gemini are part of Google’s broader toolbox, but the focus is on what they enable in live games.

Real-world AI uses in games today

Many players assume AI is only being used to generate art or dialogue, but Buser says one of the broadest areas of adoption is anti-toxicity moderation. Google’s Gemini can be trained to detect harmful images and toxic behavior in real time. Because toxicity drives player churn, the return on investment is measurable.

Another growing area is natural-language NPCs. Characters no longer have to follow a dialogue tree. They can understand context and hold conversations with players. Buser acknowledged early experiments have been rough, but he pointed to examples like the Darth Vader conversations in Fortnite, which have been widely shared online. He also highlighted an announcement with Square Enix for Dragon Quest X, in which Google’s Gemini powers a companion blue slime that guides new players through the game. The slime, wearing a little cloak in Google’s colors, responds to player questions and adapts to their skill level.

Klang Games’ Seed was cited as a new title with AI at its core. It is a life simulator with many systems running under the hood, representing a departure from traditional game design. For Buser, this is just the beginning. Entire genres could be transformed, and entirely new ones could emerge when AI operates in real time during gameplay.

Player backlash and the culture gap

Despite these examples, player reactions to AI in games remain openly hostile. The developers behind 1666: Amsterdam had to respond after players discovered AI-generated assets in preview trailers. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was criticized for AI images that cheapened the experience. Even the indie darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 faced negative attention for leaving AI assets in the game. Buser acknowledges the backlash but frames AI adoption as existential for developers. Without the efficiencies AI offers, many studios may not be able to sustain their business.

He says the Western conversation is becoming more nuanced. A year ago, the question was binary: did you use AI or not? Now the question is more specific: did you use AI for creative, player-facing content like art, music, and story assets? Buser has seen more companies publish statements saying their pipelines rely on AI for automation and heavy lifting, but their final creative assets are still handmade. That nuance, however, is not universal. In Japan and the Asia-Pacific region, the conversation around AI is very different. Buser says his customers in those regions are, almost as a rule, very advanced in their AI adoption. He does not try to explain why, but he is clear that players ultimately decide what entertainment experiences they want.

The economics of AI and game budgets

One pressing question is whether Google is subsidizing its AI tools to lock developers into its cloud ecosystem. Buser acknowledges that developers have many models to choose from and many ways to deploy them. Google offers a range of options, including Gemini, the open-source Gemma, and partner models. For each use case, Google tries to find the right fit. He pushes back on the idea that AI replaces people, comparing it to an Iron Man suit: it is useless without a human inside. He says he cannot think of a single example where AI made a team smaller. Instead, it gets bolted onto the existing team, allowing the same number of people to produce more and move closer to a sustainable business model.

Buser does not pretend AI is the only solution to the industry’s cost problem. But he is clear about the scale of the problem. Game development budgets now regularly reach hundreds of millions of dollars before marketing. GTA VI, for example, has been estimated to cost more than a billion dollars to make. Games routinely take five, seven, or even ten years to create. When a studio invests that much time and money, every release has to be a cultural phenomenon. One bad game can be enough to sink a team. That, in his view, is not sustainable.

A return to smaller bets

Buser hopes the industry can return to a model where games cost tens of millions of dollars to make, rather than hundreds of millions. In that world, publishers could take three or four shots on goal instead of betting everything on one title. He points to the PS2 era as a favorite example, when big publishers could release several games, experiment with new genres, and invent new IP. It was still a hits-driven business, but it was not a make-or-break bet on a single game.

He also predicts that the coming wave of AI will produce forms of interactive entertainment that are unrecognizable today. New genres will emerge, new platforms will appear, and existing genres will be reinvented. He does not offer a roadmap for how the industry gets from its current crisis to that future, but he is convinced that AI will be a central part of the journey. For a skeptical industry, that is both the promise and the threat.

Source: Gizmodo News