'More Efficient' Is Gaming's Favorite AI Euphemism

"The goal is to make us more efficient." That was Epic's Stephanie Arnette at Gamescom Latam this week, as reported by GamesRadar, talking about AI tooling in Fortnite's development pipeline. Within the same 24-hour window, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino used his company's corporate strategy presentation to promise a "more efficient production environment," and Kingdom Come: Deliverance studio Warhorse's creative director Prokop Jirsa told PC Gamer that AI is "really helpful" for speeding up internal workflows.

Three studios. Three separate events. The same word: efficient. I wrote about this convergence earlier this week, but the sheer uniformity of the messaging deserves a closer look, because "efficiency" is doing an enormous amount of work as a euphemism right now. When a corporation tells you a tool makes workers more efficient, the follow-up question should always be: efficient enough to need fewer of them? None of these three companies answered that directly.

Arnette acknowledged the fear head-on, saying "I know everyone's biggest fear is, 'Oh my god, AI is going to take all our jobs,'" before assuring that "that's not our goal." Nishino went further, claiming AI is "lowering barriers to creation" and will result in more games, not fewer people making them. Jirsa, meanwhile, framed AI as a communication and prototyping aid, useful for quick concept art and small coding tasks. All three framings sound reasonable in isolation. Stacked together, they read like a shared script.

The tell is in what none of them said. Nobody committed to maintaining current headcounts. Nobody said AI adoption wouldn't factor into future staffing decisions. Nishino's own company laid off roughly 900 people across PlayStation in early 2024, and Sony just wrote off $800 million on Bungie as Marathon struggles. Warhorse was recently accused of firing a translator to cut costs. Epic conducted significant layoffs in 2023. "Efficiency" sounds a lot less benign when the companies saying it have recent track records of cutting staff.

I'm not arguing AI has zero legitimate use in game development. Sony's Mockingbird tool, which Nishino detailed in the same presentation, automates facial animation processing from performance capture data. That's a real, specific application, and I covered it separately. But there's a difference between naming a specific tool and what it does versus repeating the word "efficient" like an incantation that wards off layoff questions. When three major companies land on identical language in the same week, that's not coincidence. It's coordinated framing, and the people it's meant to reassure are investors, not developers.