Candy Crush developer King is reportedly replacing laid off staff with AI tools they helped to build.
At the start of the month, Microsoft announced around 9000 employees would be laid off. This included roughly 200 staff from King.
Now, in a report from MobileGamer.biz, sources stated they’ve spent the last few years building and training AI tools, which will now be replacing them.
“Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they’ve spent months building tools to craft levels quicker,” said one source from the company. “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.”
They added replacing people with AI tools was “absolutely disgusting”, but the focus is “all about efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall”.
“If we’re introducing more feedback loops then it’s crazy to remove the developers themselves, we need more hands and less leadership,” they said.
Further, some programmers have been laid off for “arbitrary reasons”, said the source, claiming staff may have been removed after expressing “dissatisfaction with the company or processes”.
Another source described King’s HR department as “an absolute shitshow and has been for years”, adding it’s an “extreme example of an HR department whose role it is to protect the company, not the staff”.
Back at the Game Developer Conference in May 2023, King’s chief technology officer Steve Collins described to Eurogamer the ambition for King to pivot to an “AI-first company”, after it acquired Swedish AI company Peltarion in 2022.
AI is a “tool” that’s “in the hands of our level designers and our level testers, so they use that to augment what they’re able to do in those spaces,” said Collins. When asked if this might mean a shift from human workers to a reliance on AI, Collins replied: “I think we still have a large number of human beings, that’s the thing! What we’re trying to do is: how do we scale? How do we scale or create thousands of new levels?”
Discussing further, Collins added: “The reality is, this sort of technology can be leveraged. What it does is, it can move people up the stack, it can move people to the point where they’re being more creative, they have more agency to bring to the content creation pipeline or whatever.”
Now, it appears to have moved people out of the company.
Eurogamer has contacted Microsoft for comment on this report and the claims staff will be replaced by AI.
ZeniMax Online Studios was also impacted by layoffs at Microsoft. Now its union has spoken out, stating those impacted will “depart with dignity”.