How generative AI is really getting into games, minus the hype

The conversation about generative AI in games lives at two extremes. On one side, stage demos of NPCs that "think." On the other, players hunting for warped hands on loading screens to prove a studio cut corners with AI. The truth sits in the middle, and it's finally measurable. Steam now forces studios to disclose when they use AI, and that rule accidentally became the best thermometer we have for what's happening. Spoiler: plenty is happening, but almost none of it looks like the glossy future from the trailers.

The number that reframes the debate

According to a Totally Human Media report covered by Tom's Hardware, 7,818 titles released on Steam in 2025 disclosed generative AI in at least one asset. That's roughly 1 in 5 games that year, and a jump of nearly 700% over 2024, when the count was just over a thousand.¹ "Asset" here is broad: around 60% of disclosures are image generation (textures, backgrounds, 2D/3D art), and most come from indie studios, not the giants.¹

That data only exists because of a Valve decision. In January 2024, Steam made AI disclosure mandatory, splitting "pre-generated" content (AI-made assets baked into the game during development) from "live-generated" (produced on the fly while you play).² In January 2026 Valve "significantly" rewrote the rules: the focus shifted to player-facing content, and internal dev tools like coding assistants no longer require a disclosure.²³ Players can also flag AI content through the Steam overlay.²

The most symbolic case came from Activision. The store page for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 now admits "our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in-game assets." It was a confession the Steam policy forced out, not a voluntary one, and it doesn't say where.⁴ Before that, players had already spotted a loading screen featuring a six-fingered zombie Santa during the game's Season 1 holiday event.⁴⁵

What the big players are actually building

Behind the hype, serious tech is leaving the labs. NVIDIA ACE is a bundle of microservices (speech recognition, facial animation via Audio2Face) that gives NPCs voice and expression. At CES 2025 the company raised the bar to "autonomous characters" that perceive, plan, and act, and the PUBG franchise announced PUBG Ally, a playable companion built on ACE.⁶ Partners include Tencent, NetEase, miHoYo, and Ubisoft.⁶

Microsoft went further on scientific rigor. Muse (technical name: WHAM, for "World and Human Action Model") is the first model that generates both a game's visuals and its controller actions, and it was published in Nature.⁷ It was trained solely on the game Bleeding Edge, on more than 1 billion images and controller actions (roughly 7 years of nonstop human play); the largest version has 1.6 billion parameters.⁷ Microsoft is careful to frame Muse as an ideation tool, meant to help invent rather than replace the people who create.⁷⁸

Ubisoft has NEO NPC (2024) and a playable prototype called "Teammates" (2025), with an in-game AI named Jaspar that responds to voice commands.⁹ EA was the loudest believer on the call: at its 2024 Investor Day, CEO Andrew Wilson placed generative AI at the "very core" of the business and estimated that more than half of development processes would be affected.¹⁰ On the other side, Nintendo said no. In July 2024, president Shuntaro Furukawa cited intellectual-property risks, and Miyamoto told the NYT the company prefers to "go in a different direction."¹¹

The most tangible use today came from no studio at all

Want to see playable generative AI working right now? It isn't in a AAA. It's Mantella, an open-source mod that stitches together three pieces (voice transcription with Whisper, an LLM, and speech synthesis) to make Skyrim and Fallout 4 NPCs talk in real time, with memory of past conversations and awareness of in-game events.¹²¹³ It lives on Nexus Mods and GitHub. It's the most concrete example of playable generative AI that actually works, and it came from the community, not an official release.

What the community is saying

The dominant mood among players isn't hype. It's skepticism. The words that keep surfacing are "slop," "soulless," and "cash grab," and Steam's AI tag has become, in practice, an avoid-list. The aggregate read on r/pcgaming is that the label works as an inverted status signal: instead of selling, it repels. "If it's got the AI tag, that's already a no for me." On r/Steam, the most-upvoted thread on the topic (Feb 2025) doesn't ask to ban AI. It asks for a filter to hide these games, like the one for adult content. The message: "I don't want to ban anyone, I just don't want to see it."

But there's an enthusiast pocket, and it's telling. On r/skyrimmods, people running Mantella describe talking to an NPC dynamically as the most exciting thing to happen to RPGs in years. Here's the journalistic detail: the same tech (generative NPCs) is "slop" when it comes from a AAA studio cutting costs and "epic" when it comes from a free mod by the community itself. For them the difference isn't the technology. It's who controls it and with what intent. And the skepticism isn't player-only: the GDC survey (data, not opinion) found 52% of developers think generative AI has a negative impact on the industry, up from 30% the year before.¹⁴

There's a strong counterpoint on the pro side. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said in November 2025 that labeling a game "made with AI" makes no sense, because "AI will be involved in nearly all future production." He compared it to labeling a game "made with electricity."¹⁵ AI upscaling and anti-aliasing are already everywhere, and nobody complains.

Verdict

Generative AI is already inside games, just in a far less glamorous way than the keynotes sell. In 2025-2026 practice, it's mostly 2D image generation in indie titles and cost-cutting in a few AAAs, with little genuinely good player-facing work. The interesting leap, NPCs that truly converse, is happening faster in open-source modding than in any big-studio release. And there's a clear lesson in the numbers: the industry isn't split between "pro-AI" and "anti-AI." It's split between AI imposed from the top to cut costs and AI chosen from the bottom by people who want to experiment. That's the no-hype version of the story. Next time someone shows you a magical NPC demo, the right question isn't "is this impressive?" It's "who does this replace, and does the game get better?"

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Sources

1. "1 in 5 Steam games released in 2025 use generative AI, up nearly 700% year-on-year" · Tom's Hardware · https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/1-in-5-steam-games-released-in-2025-use-generative-ai-up-nearly-700-percent-year-on-year-7-818-titles-disclose-genai-asset-usage-7-percent-of-entire-steam-library · 2025
2. "Valve has 'significantly' rewritten Steam's rules for how developers must disclose AI use" · Video Games Chronicle · https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/valve-has-significantly-rewritten-steams-rules-for-how-developers-much-disclose-ai-use/ · Jan 2026
3. "Valve Clarifies Steam's AI Disclosure Rules: Focus Shifts to Player-Facing Content, Not Dev Tools" · BigGo News · https://biggo.com/news/202601171220_Steam_AI_Disclosure_Update_Focuses_on_Player_Content · 17 Jan 2026
4. "Call Of Duty Uses Generative AI For Some Content, Activision Admits" · GameSpot · https://www.gamespot.com/articles/call-of-duty-uses-generative-ai-for-some-content-activision-admits/1100-6529691/ · Feb 2025
5. "Activision is forced to confirm the use of AI in Call of Duty due to Steam's disclosure policy" · Windows Central · https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/activision-is-forced-to-confirm-the-use-of-ai-in-call-of-duty-due-to-steams-disclosure-policy · Feb 2025
6. "NVIDIA Redefines Game AI With ACE Autonomous Game Characters" · NVIDIA GeForce News · https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-ace-autonomous-ai-companions-pubg-naraka-bladepoint/ · Jan 2025 (CES 2025)
7. "World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideation" · Nature, vol. 638, pp. 656–663 · https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08600-3 · 19 Feb 2025 · DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08600-3
8. "Empowering Creators and Players With Muse, a Generative AI Model for Gameplay" · Xbox Wire (Microsoft) · https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2025/02/19/muse-ai-xbox-empowering-creators-and-players/ · 19 Feb 2025
9. "Ubisoft Reveals Teammates – An AI Experiment to Change the Game" · Ubisoft News · https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/3mWlITIuWuu0MoVuR6o8ps/ubisoft-reveals-teammates-an-ai-experiment-to-change-the-game · 2025
10. "EA desperately wants investors to know it's on the generative AI bandwagon" · Game Developer · https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/ea-desperately-wants-investors-to-know-it-s-on-the-generative-ai-bandwagon · 2024
11. "Mario Creator Shigeru Miyamoto Talks AI, Says Nintendo Wants To 'Go In A Different Direction'" · GameSpot · https://www.gamespot.com/articles/mario-creator-shigeru-miyamoto-talks-ai-says-nintendo-wants-to-go-in-a-different-direction/1100-6526727/ · 2024
12. "Mantella - Bring NPCs to Life with AI" · Nexus Mods (Skyrim Special Edition) · https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631 · accessed 19 Jun 2026
13. "Bring Skyrim and Fallout 4 NPCs to life with AI" · GitHub / art-from-the-machine · https://github.com/art-from-the-machine/Mantella · accessed 19 Jun 2026
14. "The 2025 Game Industry Survey..." · BusinessWire (official GDC State of the Game Industry release) · https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250121745145/en/ · 21 Jan 2025
15. "Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI" · PC Gamer · https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/epic-boss-tim-sweeney-thinks-stores-like-steam-should-stop-labelling-games-as-being-made-with-ai-it-makes-no-sense.../ · 26 Nov 2025

The "What the community is saying" section reflects forum sentiment (r/pcgaming, r/Steam, r/skyrimmods), treated as opinion, not fact.

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