This article was originally published on November 28, 2025 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Last week's inaugural Knowledge Live event in London presented a candid discussion on one of the most fraught topics in today's game industry: whether generative AI can meaningfully contribute to sustainable game development.

As budgets are tightened, funding is evaporating, headcounts are being cut and developers are facing mounting pressure to deliver "cheaper games faster," the question of using generative AI in development in the name of efficiency is becoming increasingly less abstract.

The panel brought together Gareth Damian Martin (developer of the Citizen Sleeper series), Hannah Flynn (communications director of Failbetter Games), Jörg Tittel (founder and creative lead of RapidEyeMovers) and Agostino Simonetta (CCO of S.T.AL.K.E.R. developer GSC Game World). Despite coming from very different studio environments, each offered a sharply drawn view on whether AI aligns with a future in which game-making is not only commercially viable, but creatively sustainable.

"The cost is your humanity"

Failbetter Games has long championed humane working culture and slow-burn creative craft, two values in direct tension with the current industry obsession with "efficiency." Asked how AI fits within that pressure, Flynn didn't hold back.

"How do I feel about AI? Oh my God, I hate it so much," she said. For Flynn, generative tools extract value at a hidden cost: "The cost of your point of view is the reason why nobody would want to even buy that game. The cost is your humanity, is our humanity, and we should not be doing it."

For Failbetter, sustainability is rooted in preserving the voice, texture and eccentricity that defines the company's cultural value. "We are a handwritten, hand-drawn studio," she said. "It's us. It's where we're from."

In other words, sustainability is not only economic, but also creative, cultural and moral. Generative AI, in Flynn's view, undermines the unique qualities that allow indie studios to survive.

A craft built on practice, not "the average of a thousand things"

Gareth Damian Martin echoed that sentiment. Known for personal games built with unusual efficiency (and resolutely without AI), they rejected the idea that generative tools meaningfully support long-term creative practices.

"AI is not going to help me," they said. "What it's going to do is actively stop me developing a practice."

In a market currently defined by volatility, Martin argued that personal creative identity is the one sustainable asset on which a developer can rely: "The only thing that I can hold on to is that those instincts that helped me make games so far are the instincts that are going to carry me to the next one."

Generative AI, they argued, erodes that foundation.

"It's a tool based on the idea that you can't do something, so the computer should do it for you," they said. Worse, its outputs are fundamentally derivative: "I can't think of a worse starting point for a project than just taking the average of a thousand things."

For Martin, sustainability is synonymous with building and evolving your own creative practice. AI, they believe, is antithetical to that.

AI for admin, not art: a pragmatic middle ground

RapidEyeMovers' Jörg Tittel represented a more nuanced position. While he rejected AI for creative ideation ("I don't use AI"), he said it could have limited use as an administrative aid: "I once used AI to summarise [a pitch deck] to help a lazy ass read a shorter thing. That wasn't art, that wasn't my creation."

Tittel pointed to a design studio that has trained an internal model exclusively on its own output to support stylistic consistency and speed. "I can see a point to that," he said, noting that internal-only models can protect IP and avoid the ethical issues of scraping external work.

On a broader scale, however, Flynn warned of generative AI engendering cultural stagnation.

"This is a self-defeating downward cycle of retreading and perpetuating stuff… We are starving for things that come out of nowhere," she added. Sustainability, from her perspective, requires not only efficient production but the protection of novelty and surprise, qualities she believes generative AI is ill-equipped to deliver.

The big-studio view: regulate AI, don't fear it

GSC Game World's Agostino Simonetta brought a large-scale production perspective shaped by blockbuster development. While acknowledging ethical and creative concerns, he argued that outright rejection of AI could become unsustainable for studios competing in an increasingly demanding market.

"The frame of the conversation on AI and gen-AI is the first step in the wrong direction," he said, adding that fixating solely on generative AI ignores the wider field of AI-driven tooling. For Simonetta, sustainability in relation to AI means making ethical, regulated use of the technology to reduce onerous work without replacing human creativity.

He highlighted practical cases where AI can support staff retention and wellbeing: "Instead of doing the thing they don't like to do, [by incorporating AI] the same person can do one and a half of what they do now, and the half on top is stuff they like more. Is that negative?"

But, crucially, Simonetta stressed that GSC's flagship worlds remain handcrafted. "We're crazy enough to have a 64km2 game that's been populated by hand," he said, talking of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.

Ignoring AI entirely is, in his view, commercially unrealistic: "That doesn't mean that we can't see a world in which AI can be useful."

He added: "It's like the industrial revolution, right? It needs to be regulated and it needs to be used in the right way. It cannot replace human intuition, human creativity, 100 per cent. But if we say as an industry that we're not touching AI, then fine. But the people around us will… Would I like people to replace my artists who do the beautiful things in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? No. But we need to be careful. This is a very complicated topic."

For him, long-term sustainability requires industry-wide definitions of ethical AI usage – not avoidance.

An industry searching its sustainable future

Despite tensions across the panel, the speakers were united in the view that, despite current economic pressures demanding new tools and efficiencies, the game industry relies on a cultural and creative sustainability that AI cannot replicate.

As studios fight to survive in a climate defined by consolidation, layoffs and spiralling production costs, sustainability will depend on more than technology. It will depend on how the industry defines value, protects creators, and maintains a space for genuine innovation.

The discussion on the subject at Knowledge Live's first outing made one thing clear: the future of sustainable game development will not be shaped by AI alone, but the choices developers make about if, how and why they use it will undoubtedly remain a factor.

Read more from our panel in last week's issue.

This article was originally published on November 28, 2025 - read the full issue