After coming on the market with the free-to-play shooter The Finals, Embark Studios followed it up with a much bigger hit in Arc Raiders. The PvPvE game launched in October–squeezed between Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7–and it achieved enormous success critically and commercially. By one analyst’s count, the $40 game has sold close to 8 million copies thus far. At a time when people were openly questioning the viability of an extraction-type shooter like Arc Raiders, the game became one of 2025’s biggest breakout hits, but the game has also courted controversy.
Like The Finals before it, Arc Raiders uses AI for a text-to-speech (TTS) system for voice lines. The developers maintain that the real human actors who lent their voices to the studio for this were compensated and that the studio overall doesn’t plan to use AI to replace people. However, people expressed dismay and frustration over this, saying it may represent a slippery slope.
Arc Raiders is published by Nexon, whose CEO has maintained that “every game company is now using AI,” including Embark. After all, AI systems and tools are baked directly into popular game-development software and engines, including Epic’s Unreal Engine.
“First of all, I think it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI,” Junghun Lee said. “But if everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: How do you survive? I believe it’s important to choose a strategy that increases your competitiveness.”
To answer his own question of surviving in a competitive development market, Lee expressed that “human creativity” is what’ll push an OK game to a fabulous game. This sentiment mirrors what Embark Studios CCO Stefan Strandberg told Eurogamer in October 2025, that there are “no shortcuts to making great games” despite using AI to “assist in some content creation.”
The debate about AI in gaming propagated from a variety of sources. Strange Scaffold founder Xavier Nelson Jr. responded with condemnation on Bluesky, personally confirming that “a lot of other studios”–whether indie or AAA–are not using generative AI in their games. Tommy Thompson, founder of AI video game analysis company AI in Games, also disputed Lee’s argument, posting on Bluesky that “very few [studios] have gone all in” on AI.
Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney chimed in to defend the use of AI in gaming.
“This technology increases human productivity in some areas by integer multiples, and views on whether this is a net good and should be rewarded, or bad and should be fought against, are speculative and generally distributed along political lines,” Sweeney said. “Game developers compete to build the best games in order to attract gamers. When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people.”
Sweeney personally and professionally stands to benefit from AI becoming more and more popular, as he runs the company behind one of the world’s most popular and successful game engines. Sweeney has also said it “makes no sense” for platforms like Steam to demand that studios disclose the use of AI in their production. He has said such disclosures are nonsense because “AI will be involved in nearly all future production.”
Beyond the discussions tied to Arc Raiders, EA has said its workers should view the controversial technology as “thought partners” while demanding its employees train AI on their work. Krafton Inc. has announced plans to invest $70 million to become an “AI-first company.” Square Enix wants generative AI to automate at least 70% of game QA and debugging work. And even Sony has laid out plans for incorporating AI in its games going forward. This is not to mention the myriad developers who’ve recently said that AI should be embraced by the industry, or those who refuse to work with it will sell themselves short.
