How AI Is Removing the Junior Roles That Build Game Industry Leaders

The video game industry spent three years cutting jobs, and it is now using artificial intelligence to absorb the very work that produces its future leaders. 

I place the people who run game studios, so I read every layoff headline twice. Once for the human cost, and once for what it does to the bench I will be asked to fill in five years. In mobile Real Money Gaming, where I have spent significant time, that senior pool was already thin. What the rest of the industry is now doing to its junior ranks should worry anyone who will need a leader a decade from now. 

Executives talk about efficiency and bigger worlds. Underneath those announcements, the junior artist, the associate designer, and the QA tester are slowly disappearing from the org chart. Those positions were never only about output. They were the proving ground where a graduate became a lead, and a lead became a director. Remove that ground, and the route to senior creative and executive roles begins to close behind everyone already on it. 

This matters far beyond any single studio. The games business is heading into the most commercially loaded stretch in its history. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives in November 2026 as the most anticipated launch the medium has produced, a new console generation is turning over behind it, and development budgets have never run higher. The leaders who will carry all of it through were supposed to be learning their craft in the roles now being cut. 

Why Are Video Game Studios Losing Their Leadership Pipeline?

Let me level with you on the numbers first. The contraction has been brutal and sustained, and it is worth being clear up front that these layoffs were driven by business and financial pressures rather than by AI. The trade outlet Game Developer put the annual totals at roughly 10,500 jobs lost in 2023 and around 14,600 in 2024, the worst year of the wave, with thousands more before and since. The cuts ran across the biggest publishers. Microsoft eliminated around 9K roles across the company in mid-2025, with its Xbox division among the hardest hit. Sony cut about 900 people, 8% of PlayStation’s workforce, in early 2024 and closed its London studio, while Embracer shed more than 4.5K jobs and canceled around 80 games as it sold or shut dozens of studios. Riot let go about 530 staff, Ubisoft cut 185 people and closed a studio in one 2025 round before a wider reorganization, and Electronic Arts ran repeated rounds that shut Cliffhanger Games and reduced teams at Respawn, Codemasters, and BioWare. And the layoffs did not end there. In July 2026, Microsoft cut roughly 3.2K more roles from Xbox through FY27 and parted with four studios, in what Xbox’s CEO called the most significant restructure in the platform’s history.

The roots of this correction lie in the pandemic, when locked-down players spent heavily on games and investors poured in money, so studios hired and acquired faster than the market could later sustain. When spending returned to normal, companies were left carrying bloated headcounts and ballooning development costs, correcting through layoffs, closures, and canceling projects. Generative AI is a newer pressure layer on top rather than the root cause, although by 2025 some publishers had already begun tying cuts to AI-driven efficiency. Cost-driven layoffs and the spread of AI are now pressing people and the studios from two directions. 

The pain also landed unevenly. In the 2026 State of the Game Industry report from the Game Developers Conference, which surveyed more than 2.3K professionals, 28% of respondents said they had been laid off in the past two years, rising to 33% in the United States. Workers at large AAA studios were hit far harder than those at smaller independents, with two-thirds of AAA respondents reporting cuts at their company against one-third at indie studios. In many cases whole studios were closed rather than trimmed, and the roles inside them did not all carry equal risk. 

The cuts follow a predictable order. When a studio trims its workforce, the most expensive senior leaders are usually protected, and the experienced mid-level staff are retained through current project delivery. The roles that get squeezed first are the least proven and lower-salaried employees, which is to say the early-career talent. Over three years of cuts, that pattern quietly removes the bottom rungs of the ladder. Tomorrow’s art directors and game directors are the ones being told there is no seat for them now. Without the development pathway, now becomes never. 

How Is AI Removing Entry-Level Roles in Game Development? 

Those layoffs hollowed out the junior ranks, and generative AI is now adding a second, separate pressure by taking over the repetitive, entry-level work itself. Electronic Arts has been the most vocal of the big publishers about adopting generative AI, with its CEO saying he believes more than half of the company’s development processes can be affected by it, and similar tools are being built into the game engines and production pipelines that most studios use. I do not doubt the efficiency gains. My worry is what the cost will be, both three rungs down and into the future. 

The repetitive parts of the work are also where more junior personnel learn and develop. David Gaider, a former BioWare lead writer on Dragon Age, made this point in an interview, warning that studios should be careful about automating the tasks that train juniors and asking how the industry will “train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task.” Concept iteration, asset cleanup, bug reproduction, and first-pass level blocking are how new hires once learned the craft, and as tools absorb that work, the apprenticeship that turned juniors into seniors goes with it. 

Developers can see it coming. In the GDC research, the share of professionals who believe generative AI is having a negative effect on the industry climbed to 52%, up from 30% a year earlier and 18% the year before that. The sharpest concerns came from visual artists, designers, and programmers, the exact disciplines where entry-level headcount usually sits. The next generation is reading the same signals. Around three-quarters of surveyed students said they were concerned about their job prospects, citing a lack of entry-level openings and competition from both laid-off veterans and AI. Most educators expect graduate placements to suffer. 

Where Does AI Really Help Game Studios?

Let me be clear about where I stand. I am not anti-AI. I use these tools every day, and so does my team. None of this means AI is bad for game development. The same tools that threaten entry-level work also remove a great deal of drudgery that nobody enjoyed. EA’s entertainment president has described a real rise of creativity that comes from taking tedious tasks off developers’ plates, and the company says generative AI expanded the run cycles in EA Sports FC 24 from 12 to 1,200. The bigger prize is scale. Through its partnership with Stability AI, EA is building tools that can pre-visualize whole 3D environments from a handful of prompts, and Epic’s Unreal Engine 6 folds AI into scene generation and content authoring, the sort of work that points toward larger, denser open worlds than teams could hand-build before. 

For smaller teams the upside is larger still. Procedural tools, automated testing, and machine translation let an indie studio of ten ship something that once needed forty, which lowers the cost of trying a new idea and widens who gets to make games at all. New roles are forming around this work too, from AI tooling specialists to technical directors who design the pipelines the tools run inside. I believe AI raises a studio’s ceiling on what it can create and deliver. The risk is that the floor, the entry-level layer, is being removed faster than anything is built to replace it. 

What Does Stanton Chase’s Survey Say About Leadership Readiness?

The pattern is not unique to gaming. Stanton Chase’s AI in the C-Suite survey gathered responses from 214 senior leaders across every major sector rather than gaming alone. Those patterns, though, map closely onto what gaming companies and their boards are living through, which makes the findings worth reading. 

The majority of leaders surveyed expect AI to materially change who works for them. The most common estimate was that 6% – 15% of their current workforce will need to exit or move into fundamentally different roles within five years, and another fifth of respondents put that figure at 16% – 30%. Few leaders think the disruption stops at the front line. 

The succession signal is the one that should worry anyone running a studio or publisher. Only about one-tenth of executives said their potential successors were much better prepared for AI than the executives themselves had been, while roughly one in six said potential successors were less prepared, despite AI being everywhere. At the same time, leaders told us they want to build capability from within rather than buy it, with internal development favored over external hiring by a wide margin. That preference collides with the layoffs. A company cannot promote from a bench it has stopped filling. 

Two more results stand out. When asked which leadership capabilities their organization most lacked, 35% of executives named workforce planning and talent pipeline expertise, and 62% pointed to vision beyond day-to-day AI implementation. Both gaps describe a leadership group that is good at deploying technology and far less sure about who will run things once it has changed how work gets done. Adding to the risk, 43% of leaders admitted they had not yet communicated with their staff about how AI might change or remove jobs, which leaves early-career employees in the dark about their future. 

Scarcity at the Top Starts at the Bottom

The games that define the sector are built by people who spent fifteen or twenty years climbing through the roles being cut today, and the scale of that human investment is easy to underestimate. Public UK filings for Rockstar North, the lead studio on Grand Theft Auto VI, show more than $2B in staff costs between 2019 and 2025, and although that figure covers the studio’s other projects too, it captures the scale of skilled people a game of this size demands. Work at that level depends on directors, leads, and producers who have shipped before, and those people do not appear out of nowhere. They are developed over years spent in junior and mid-level roles that teach them how a game comes together. 

A studio that stops hiring and developing juniors in 2026 will feel nothing for a few years. The bill arrives near the end of the decade, when the directors it failed to grow are simply not there, and the only way to fill a creative or executive seat is to compete for the small pool of people who came up before the funnel closed. I see it in the searches I run today: when a board finally needs a studio head, the shortlist of people who have actually shipped at that level gets shorter every year. Scarcity at the top is the predictable result of neglect at the bottom. 

How Should Gaming Companies Protect Their Leadership Bench?

Here is where I start when a client calls. Internal development alone will not cover the gap, because the roles that fed it are thinner than they were. That puts three things on every gaming company’s strategic agenda: 

• Real succession planning that maps where the next directors and studio heads will come from, rather than assuming they will emerge. 
• Rigorous leadership assessment of mid-career talent, so the people who do remain are identified and developed deliberately while there is still time. 
• Targeted executive search to bring in proven leaders where the bench has thinned past the point of repair. 

This is the work Stanton Chase does for gaming companies. As a global executive search and leadership advisory firm, our consultants help studios and publishers find executives who can lead through technical change, and our board and CEO advisory work helps gaming leaders plan succession before a gap becomes a crisis. We also bring assessment tools that tell a board which of its existing leaders are ready to grow, which is exactly the question a thinning pipeline forces. 

AI will keep changing how games are made, and much of that change will be welcome. The danger is the studio that automates the bottom of the ladder, forgets to build the top, and finds itself short of leaders in the years it needs them most. Unlike the characters in their own games, a leadership bench does not respawn. The studios that protect their pipeline and plan their succession now will be the ones with someone ready to lead when it counts. 

About the Author

Sam Selker is a Director at Stanton Chase and its Global Subsector Leader for Gaming. He helps studios and publishers find the senior leaders who will run them next, drawing on executive search, succession planning, board advisory, leadership assessment, and executive onboarding. He is also a lifelong gamer, and his son is following him into it. If your studio is weighing its next senior leadership hire, he would like to hear about it.