Candy Crush Studio Reportedly Plans To Replace Laid Off Staff With AI Tools

The positions that are going to be cut include level designers, user research staff, UX writers, and narrative writers. These teams had been training generative AI to help streamline their jobs, making it easier to build levels and generate text. Those within the company have said these teams are now being targeted for cuts because King leadership plans to replace them with this AI.

“Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they’ve spent months building tools to craft levels quicker,” said an anonymous source to MobileGamer.Biz. “Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams. Similarly the copywriting team is completely removing people since we now have AI tools that those individuals have been creating. The fact AI tools are replacing people is absolutely disgusting but it’s all about efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall.”

The report paints a dismal picture of office morale at King even before the cuts were announced, with many teams in a constant state of attrition that contributed to brutal internal survey results. Employees were particularly dissatisfied with the company’s HR department, with a source in the article stating, “King HR is an absolute shitshow and has been for years. An extreme example of an HR department whose role it is to protect the company, not the staff.”

This news of King replacing its workers with AI comes weeks after Microsoft announced it plans to invest $80 billion in data centers for training AI models. Company President Brad Smith has suggested that AI will entirely reshape what it’s like to work at the company, as it invests $4 billion into a program called Microsoft Elevate, which aims to train millions of people how to work with AI. Microsoft is also a significant shareholder in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and is currently attempting to push its own AI chatbot, Copilot. With AI having an increasing role in an already tumultuous video game industry, it’s increasingly unclear how developers are supposed to earn a stable living in the field.