A quick date note upfront since we're pulling together a few threads here: some of this material is a few months old, some closer to three weeks. But put together, it tells a more complete story than any single piece did on its own, and it's one worth laying out plainly.

What Bloomberg's Jason Schreier Actually Said

Back in April, veteran games journalist Jason Schreier made a pointed claim in a Bluesky reply: generative AI has become an industry standard, and almost every major studio is now using these tools somewhere in production. He specifically named Claude as the most commonly used tool among developers he's spoken with. That's a notable claim coming from someone with Schreier's track record of sourcing inside studios, and it lines up with separate comments from Jack Buser, Google Cloud's global director of games, who said in a later interview that studios are widely using tools like Gemini during development, but staying quiet about it out of fear of backlash.

Games journalist Keza MacDonald has described the resulting discourse as an impossible conversation, one where the meaningful difference between older machine learning techniques, the kind we covered in Capcom's own navigation AI systems, and newer generative tools keeps getting flattened, sometimes deliberately, making the whole topic harder to discuss honestly than it needs to be.

Two Named Examples Worth Sitting With

Reporting has specifically named Sandfall Interactive, the studio behind the critically loved Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Larian Studios, working on the new Divinity, as having used generative AI tools during development. Both are studios with real critical and commercial credibility, not corner-cutting outfits chasing a quick cash-in. That's worth holding onto, because a lot of the public anxiety around AI in games assumes its use is inherently a sign of low effort or declining quality, and these are two of the most respected names in the industry right now, using it anyway.

The Indies Taking the Opposite Bet

A separate GamesRadar piece went the other direction, interviewing 25 indie developers who've deliberately avoided generative AI in their own work. Strange Scaffold producer Manda Farough described the studio's strict anti-AI policy as rooted in a belief that artists shouldn't feel pressured to conform to standards from outside their own craft. Morsels developers Sam Webster and Toby Dixon made a similar point from a different angle, describing indie games as closer to homemade goods than mass-produced ones, and arguing that the actual human process of sitting with a creative decision leaves a mark on the finished game that AI-generated shortcuts don't replicate.

Why Both Groups Are Making a Legitimate Choice

It's worth being genuinely even-handed here rather than picking a side. Sandfall and Larian using AI tools doesn't make them less serious about craft, plenty of tools throughout game development history started controversial and became standard, and using AI to speed through production bottlenecks while still making creative decisions by hand is a defensible, increasingly common workflow. At the same time, Strange Scaffold and Morsels choosing to avoid AI entirely isn't backwards-looking stubbornness either, it's a deliberate creative stance about what they want their specific process to feel like, and players who value that homemade quality are a real, legitimate audience.

What's actually the problem here isn't AI use on either side. It's the gap Buser pointed to directly: studios using these tools but staying silent about it because they're afraid of exactly the kind of backlash we covered with Cygames. That fear-driven silence is worse for everyone than either honest disclosure or honest refusal would be. A studio that's upfront about using AI as one tool among many, the way Sandfall and Larian's situation suggests, gives players accurate information to make their own choice. A studio staying quiet out of fear just guarantees the eventual reveal lands as a bigger story than the actual practice ever warranted.

The Actual Takeaway

AI in game development isn't a binary between studios secretly cutting corners and indies nobly refusing to. It's a genuinely wide spectrum of legitimate approaches, and the industry's current instinct to hide AI use rather than explain it clearly is making the whole conversation more toxic than it needs to be. More transparency, not less AI, is probably the actual fix here.

Sourcing note: Schreier's comments come from a Bluesky thread as reported by Notebookcheck, Buser's quotes come from a separate interview reported by MP1st, and the indie developer interviews come from GamesRadar's own original reporting, three different outlets covering related but distinct parts of this story rather than one single source.

Would you rather a studio you love stayed quiet about using AI, or told you upfront even if it changed how you felt about the game? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. And if you've got a game you'd like us to review, send it over to editor@gamevibe.io.