Last year we saw the rise of AI slop in everything from YouTube to TV and even games in some places. It was annoying, certainly, but at the very least the impact still felt minimal. Well, unfortunately for us, it’s looking like the slop is going to keep flowing and to ever greater extents. Triple A publishers/studios are already going hard on AI integration, and now even the likes of Larian and Shift Up are arguing for even more extensive use. In other words, we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet.

The most recent comments in favor of greater AI integration come from Kim Hyung-tae, the CEO of Shift Up (the studio behind Stellar Blade). His claim is that using it is necessary to compete with China and USA, arguing that it is the only way that his and other Korean studios can hope to compete with the manpower of developers based in the larger countries. According to Kim, Korean studios need to become so efficient that one person will be able to do the work of 100. So naturally, as far as he’s concerned, relying on AI and AI mastery is a must.

I call shenanigans on this, since, as we all saw definitively in 2025 and have been seeing over the entire course of gaming history, that manpower and production value does not guarantee sales or even just recouping losses. Major western studios have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars and putting thousands of devs to work on giant projects only to have those games fizzle on release due to being, well, just plain bad products. 

Unless you’re Call of Duty or Madden (you know, the most long-running mainstream series with fans that will throw their money at anything), nobody is gonna buy your game if it’s not good, heck, they won’t even pay attention to it most of the time! Good games sell. Bad games don’t. Manpower, budget and efficiency don’t matter one lick.

Shift Up itself should be well aware of this, as it’s been enjoying great success in both the mobile and traditional market with Nikke: Goddess of Victory and Stellar Blade respectively. Did Chinese and American competition prevent those games from succeeding? Absolutely not. In both cases, Shift Up made games that were very good (to gamers in those markets) and thus enjoyed immense success.

It’s so strange how much of a mania AI has become in enterprise circles. They’re all so convinced that they need AI that they’ve forgotten how their businesses work. Yeah, maybe it’s (sort of) working for the biggest companies right now, but that’s only because those companies are big enough to take several massive failures in a row.

That can’t go on forever, though. Be it in TV, Film, Music, or Gaming, if the product is bad enough (or just shoddily made enough) for long enough, people are going to stop buying/engaging. It’s already starting to happen. Piracy is on the rise. More people are switching off of Windows and gamers are buying less games overall. As the AI situation gets worse, increasingly only good stuff is going to sell, stuff that actually has passion, skill, and vision put into it. Big budget, AI-powered slop, though? That’s going to get ignored, and deservedly so.

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Okay, that was a bit of a rant, but I just can’t stand the ridiculous excuses being made for AI. It can be a useful tool, but that’s all it should be. Not a replacement, and not a crutch. Anyway, what’s your take on the situation? Do you think AI is going to be developers’ key to success moving forward?

Image is promo art posted to the official Stellar Blade X account