AI controversy, trust, and the post-AI economy for games
By Oleg Sidorkin, CTO and Co-Founder of Cinevva
AI in games became a contested subject around mid-2024. Jobs are disappearing and people are convinced they're next. The copyright questions are still open, the aesthetic debates loop back on themselves, and Steam is filling with releases nobody asked for. Underneath all of it sits a worry every creator now carries: whether they're making something or just typing prompts.
We run a platform, and one lesson arrives fast when you do. Nobody likes feeling tricked.
The numbers
We expected AI adoption to grow, but the shape of the 2025 numbers still surprised us.
| What we tracked | 2024 | 2025 | The shift |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam games disclosing AI | ~1,000 | 7,818 | 7x jump |
| New Steam releases using AI | ~3% | ~20% | One in five |
| Devs who think AI hurts quality | 34% | 47% | Thirteen points higher |
| Devs who think AI helps quality | n/a | 11% | Not many |
| Revenue from AI-disclosed games | n/a | $660M | Twelve games broke 8 figures |
Sources: Tom's Hardware / Totally Human Media analysis, GDC 2025 Developer Survey, Unity 2025 Gaming Report
What happened to make players this skeptical
The skepticism has specific causes, and people remember them.
Voice actors found out they'd been cloned on launch day
Tomb Raider 4-6 Remastered shipped with AI-generated versions of the original voice performances. The actors learned about it on launch day, at the same time as everyone else. The publisher eventually patched the voices out after legal pressure built up. The eleven-month SAG-AFTRA strike was driven by exactly this scenario.
"AI slop" became a phrase
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 added AI disclosure to its Steam page after the game was already out. Players had noticed visual glitches scattered through it, including a loading screen character with six fingers. "AI slop" turned into shorthand for anything that looks hollow, as if nobody cared enough to check.
An award nomination vanished
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had its Game of the Year nomination pulled at the Indie Game Awards. The shipped game didn't use AI. The problem was AI placeholders during development, internal material that never reached players, and the final assets were entirely human-made. That didn't matter, and the argument about where the line should be ran for weeks.
Teams that never touched AI had to prove it
Chessplus and Peak were both accused of using AI. Neither had, and both were award nominees. Both teams ended up digging through old screenshots and layer files to demonstrate that their work was handmade. The Peak team put it best: "We might be slop, but we're human-made, locally-sourced artisanal slop."
Studios went in opposite directions
SNK's Discord moderators walked out after AI-looking visuals appeared in a Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer. Games Workshop banned AI entirely across all Warhammer properties. Larian Studios said it used AI only for very early concept sketches on Baldur's Gate 3, with nothing in the final game. Tim Sweeney declared Steam's AI labels worthless and said to scrap them, and Valve replied that developers complaining about AI labels usually worry their work looks "low effort."
Finding games turned into a trust problem
Games are now made faster than anyone can properly evaluate them, and the questions a player asks have changed. What am I looking at, who made it, will I regret the time I spend on it, and does any of it match what the trailer promised?
We don't expect a grand resolution or a definitive ruling on AI versus human-made. What's more likely is filters, real transparency, and incentive structures that reward honesty.
Small studios in the middle
Indie developers landed in a strange spot.
The upside is hard to dismiss. You iterate faster, costs drop when four people are making everything, solo developers can finish things, and localization stops eating the budget.
The downside is just as real. Output can feel generic. Training data and IP concerns are unresolved. Teams ship systems they don't fully understand, which some people call comprehension debt. And everyone gets grouped in with the flood of low-effort releases. Nearly half of surveyed developers think AI makes games worse overall.
Unity's 2025 report says 79% of developers feel positive about AI tools, which sounds definitive. The reality is messier. Teams doing this well tend to use AI for the tedious parts, rough passes and QA, and keep creative direction human.
Where Cinevva lands: neutral on AI, strict on honesty
We don't turn games away for using AI, and we don't give them special treatment either. The rule is simple: if AI was involved, say so. Players decide what they care about, and filters work once the labels are truthful. Our AI-generated content policy spells it out.
Filters work better than arguments
The AI debate in games isn't heading for consensus, and it may never get there. Individual preferences are clear enough, though. Some players specifically want human-directed art, writing that came from a person, and visible craft. Others don't mind at all. Filters let both groups find what they're looking for, and nobody has to win the argument.
Payment models matter more than opinions
When revenue is tied to playtime instead of unit sales, you make money by getting players engaged quickly, keeping their attention, and delivering what your marketing promised. Quality becomes the obvious path and how you made the game matters less. A trailer that overpromises loses players immediately and retention drops. A trailer that shows exactly what players are getting keeps them, playtime builds, and revenue follows.
What 2026 probably brings
More rules, as the EU AI Act keeps expanding and US protections for voice and likeness grow after SAG-AFTRA. Specialized tools built for small teams and designed to keep humans steering. Smarter labels, because "Made with AI" is too crude and the useful distinction is between AI-assisted workflows and AI-generated final assets. Audiences splitting, with some players seeking out traditionally-made games and others not giving it a thought, both groups large enough to build for. And platform competition, where how storefronts handle transparency and discovery becomes a real differentiator.
What moves things forward
Arguing won't settle the AI question. Players picking based on what matters to them will, along with creators being open about how they work and platforms building tools that help both groups find each other. That's the post-AI economy: trust holding the whole thing together rather than warring camps.
Related:
- AI-generated content policy
- For game creators
- FAQ
- Frontier Open-Source Gen AI Models: the specific models and how they work
- Open source has an AI pollution problem: what happens when AI output floods open-source projects