CDPR Co-CEO: Fully AI-Generated Games Are Coming, But That's Not the Path Forward
There’s a quiet tension running through the games industry right now, one that every major studio is grappling with behind closed doors. Generative AI can accelerate development pipelines in ways that would have seemed fanciful just a few years ago — prototyping, asset generation, dialogue scripting — but the question that keeps coming up is whether it can ever do more than assist. Most developers agree it can’t replicate the human spark. What’s less settled is what happens when someone tries anyway.
Amid that debate, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has now confirmed what many in the industry have suspected: fully AI-generated games are not a distant hypothetical. In an interview with Edge magazine’s newsletter, Nowakowski revealed that he’s spoken with several studios focused exclusively on AI-driven development, and they all tell the same story — pure AI games are imminent.
IT-NEWS has learned that one studio head told Nowakowski directly that their team can produce forty game prototypes in a single week. Not rough sketches or design documents, but actual playable builds. The same studio claims it can ship a complete game within a week, and one such title is set to launch soon.
To his credit, the CDPR co-CEO doesn’t dismiss the output out of hand. He acknowledges that these AI-produced games might even turn out “decent,” but he draws a firm line: this isn’t the direction the industry should follow. The argument isn’t about capability — it’s about what gets lost when you optimize for speed over craft. Human-developed games take time precisely because that time is what produces the ineffable quality that players connect with, something Nowakowski believes AI cannot replicate no matter how sophisticated it becomes.
His scepticism is grounded in what players already notice today. Even when studios use AI to generate placeholder assets during production, players can spot it — there’s something off in the visuals, a stiffness in the logic, a subtle wrongness that breaks immersion. That gap, he suggests, isn’t going to close just because the entire game was produced by a machine. If anything, a fully AI-authored experience would only amplify those uncanny-valley tells.
The industry already has a nickname for generative AI output: “AI slop.” It’s a dismissal that’s become widespread enough to function as a consumer verdict. For Nowakowski, that label captures the real risk. Players will tolerate AI as a behind-the-scenes accelerator, a tool that helps human creators ship faster without cutting corners. But a game that wears its machine origins on its sleeve is a different proposition entirely. The co-CEO’s position is clear-eyed rather than alarmist — pure AI games are coming whether anyone wants them or not, but the audience has already shown it knows the difference.