Yesterday, an interview from Bloomberg went up where Larian CEO Swen Vincke was asked questions about the studios’ future ahead of last week’s Game Awards. While most of the discussion focused on how the company approaches development and what it has planned for the upcoming Divinity, a comment in the middle from Vincke mentioned that the studio is going all in on utilizing generative AI in the planning process. Expectedly, this angered a lot of people, but Vincke seemingly wasn’t having it.
In a lengthy post on Twitter, Vincke wrote:
“Holy f**k guys we’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI… I was asked explicitly about concept art and our use of Gen AI. I answered that we use it to explore things. I didn’t say we use it to develop concept art. The artists do that. And they are indeed world class artists.”
In a bit of damage control, Vincke gave a statement to IGN that read Larian is “neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are we looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI.” Furthermore, he said that AI is “something we are constantly discussing internally through the lens of making everyone’s working day better, not worse.” That sort of contradicts what the interview claimed, but it gets worse.
Following these comments, original reporter Jason Schreier released parts of his transcript from the interview with Vincke that gave extra context for his quote. In that, Vincke is seemingly uninterested in hearing people’s complaints about AI and insists that, being in a tech industry, his team simply has to use it. He also likened it to how automation is taking jobs away, but still wants to use it despite not seeing any productivity gains.
If I had known the two paragraphs about genAI in my article today would be so controversial, I would have expanded them a bit! Here’s a rough transcript of the relevant portion of my interview with Swen Vincke, so everyone has all the context. (Full article here: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet…)
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 5:52 PM
For the immediate future, it seems stories like this will become more common as CEOs and publishers look for ways to cut down on the cost of creating games. Eventually, there will be a turning point, and things will start to get better.
Check out more content about AI
Sega states it will use AI to assist in development, but only in ‘appropriate use cases’
Square Enix is looking to replace 70% of its QA team with generative AI by the end of 2027
Nintendo has stated that no AI-generated artwork was used to develop Mario Kart World
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