Few newcomers have received a colder welcome than artificial intelligence — loathed when players can see it, yet increasingly indispensable to the people making the games.
Korean game developer Shift Up posted a music video for one of its own titles on July 31. Within days, fans had a word for it: slop.
The clip for "Wanna Be in Love," from the soundtrack of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, leaned on AI-generated footage of protagonist Evie and even included a fabricated behind-the-scenes sequence. YouTube labeled it altered or synthetic content.
Shift Up said it had reconstructed existing game assets with AI used as a supporting tool and hoped the video would help fans reconnect with the character.
The comment section was not persuaded.
The episode exposed a divide now running through South Korea's game industry. Artificial intelligence has become deeply embedded in how games are made — and deeply unwelcome the moment players notice it.
Generative AI was used by 70 percent of Korean game companies in the fourth quarter of last year, the highest rate of any content sector and more than double the overall average of 32.1 percent, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency.
That was up from 41.7 percent in the first half of 2025. With industry surveys inevitably trailing adoption, actual usage is likely higher by now.
"Programming, planning, art, running the company — using AI across all of it is where the industry is," said Yeom Seong-ho, a professor of game graphic design at Tongmyong University.
"When it cuts a development cycle from a week to a day, there is no way not to use it."
The technology appears to work best where nobody is watching.
Krafton has operated an AI-powered anti-cheat system for more than a year across a service with more than 20 million users, the head of its AI for Game research unit said at a Seoul policy seminar on July 14.
Its "co-playable character" Ella, built on an on-device model using Nvidia's ACE toolkit, entered beta testing on PUBG's Sanhok map on June 17, speaking Korean, Chinese and English.
Streamers spent the next fortnight bombarding her with absurd questions. That was arguably part of the point: every exchange provided more interaction data.
Yet the people building games are considerably less relaxed about where all this leads.
A survey of 1,078 unionized workers at Nexon, NC and Netmarble found 77.3 percent anxious about the effect of AI on their jobs, even as 80.3 percent said the technology made them more productive.
"A user's day is still 24 hours," Nexon Korea co-chief executive Kang Dae-hyun told developers in June, arguing that attention rather than technology remains the industry's ultimate constraint.
The trouble begins when the seams show.
Pearl Abyss apologized on March 22 after players on Reddit and Bluesky spotted melted faces and anatomically impossible horses in decorative paintings inside Crimson Desert, two days after its launch.
The studio said experimental generative-AI tools had been used on some two-dimensional props early in development and that the assets were supposed to have been replaced. It acknowledged that this did not excuse the failure to disclose their use.
That is the line the industry keeps tripping over.
"AI output still reaches only about 90 percent of human quality," Jung Nae-hun, a professor at the Tech University of Korea, said earlier this year, noting that the remaining gap tends to appear exactly where players are looking.
"Design is still the problem," Yeom said. "In genres where character visuals carry the game, like Genshin Impact, demand is constant, but players simply do not like knowing AI was involved."
Shift Up chief executive Kim Hyung-tae has argued that Chinese studios can deploy 1,000 to 2,000 people on a single title and that "AI capabilities will determine industry competitiveness."
His fans offered a different verdict: competitiveness is not the same thing as watchability.
Developers counter that AI is often judged by its most conspicuous failures rather than the less visible work it already performs well.
A Varco business team leader at NC AI told the July seminar that internal resistance had faded as the tools spread and that time saved through AI "is spent making things better, not making more."
Player irritation, however, is becoming harder to dismiss as mere noise.
About 31 percent of nearly 4,000 core Steam users surveyed between June 25 and July 2 viewed AI use negatively, while 8 percent said they would refuse to buy a game if its use of AI were disclosed.
That stigma now sits on top of a legal requirement.
South Korea's Framework Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence, in force since January, requires disclosure of AI-generated content, while Valve has revised Steam's rules to exempt behind-the-scenes development tools and focus disclosure requirements on material players can see, hear or interact with.
Roughly one in five new Steam releases now carries an AI disclosure.
Exactly how Korean law should apply to games — where images, dialogue, code and player interaction can be generated or combined in real time — remains unsettled. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is drafting separate legislation for the content industry to clarify the rules.
None of the resistance has stopped the industry from moving faster.
OpenAI is set to hold its first Codex-based game development event anywhere in the world in Seoul on Aug. 31, backed by Com2uS, with 40 teams building games on the Hive backend.
The next phase of AI in games may be far less visible than synthetic artwork or dialogue.
An AI system capable of fully understanding a game's mechanics could eventually handle customer service, interpret player complaints and relay useful feedback directly to developers, Yeom said — effectively becoming a game master.
That may prove the industry's safest place for AI: everywhere inside the machine, and nowhere players can see it.
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