CD Projekt was asked on its latest earnings call how it uses AI in development. Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski gave the answer most large studios now give — and the load-bearing word in it is “predominantly.”
The statement, as delivered:
- “AI is definitely becoming a thing in the games development as well”
- The studio is “still predominantly using people,” and that is the plan
- AI is “a tool like many others,” helping in places that may become more helpful later
- But CDPR is “not planning to rely on AI making complete games”
The r/gamedev thread’s reaction, where the substance is:
- Refusing to ship fully AI-generated games “isn’t a particularly hot take” — no major studio will say otherwise on the record
- “Predominantly” describes the balance of effort, not which pipeline stages the tools touch, so the claim can’t be checked from outside the studio
- Best fit for AI, per practitioners: the work no one wants to do — the optional polish that “would be nice” but never gets scheduled, like prop variety so the same crate doesn’t appear dozens of times
- Where it underperforms: AI “doesn’t have taste, or maybe it has the most generic taste possible,” and different models merely offer different flavours of blandness
- The slow cost: studios leaning on AI workflows for code stop turning juniors into seniors, and younger devs are often the ones who break rules that veterans treat as fixed
Two claims here are worth keeping, because neither will be settled on the next earnings call. One is that AI assistance erodes the junior-to-senior pipeline — a cost that surfaces in a studio’s output years later. The other is that AI output is tasteless by construction: useful exactly where there is no aesthetic stake, hazardous where judgment is the product.
The rest is proportion-talk. “Predominantly” is unfalsifiable from outside, which is the same gap that makes the disclosure fights at the small-studio end so bitter — the label describes presence, the defence describes proportion, and neither answers the other.