A Future Where AI is Building, But No One is Buying | The Take 22/10/25

As gaming becomes an increasingly specialist market, saving money is only one side of the coin.

Greetings to The Take, our editorial issues of the AI and Games Newsletter where we dig into the bigger issues impacting artificial intelligence in the video games industry. Issues of The Take are exclusive to premium subscribers of AI and Games.

Hello one and all, and welcome to this edition of The Take. We’re but a couple of weeks away from running our very own AI and Games Conference, and I had originally planned a Researcher’s Digest issue for this week, but the recent conversation surrounding gaming purchase patterns paints an interesting picture. Of a games industry largely propped up by hyper enthusiast buyers, where fewer players are buying new games, and it got me thinking about the narratives surrounding generative AI, and how it will help speed up production.

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As we’ve been told in various creative industries, the untapped potential of using (generative) AI is that it will yield all sorts of value for creators. It will allow us to make games faster, it will allow us to build richer and more complex experiences, that it will give even increase the number of jobs in these sectors. All of this leading to an implication that by bringing product to market faster, those products are yielding a greater return on investment due to the cost-savings AI can provide.

While I have a lot of grievances with these narratives - I agree with parts of it, while the rest is naïve posturing and speculation - that isn’t really my focus right now. If anything it’s the part I emphasised in the paragraph above. That this AI-powered nirvana will lead to more profit, given we’re making games more cheaply, and they’re going out to consumers faster.

Just how many games are these guys picking up on the regular?

But the recent data shared by market research firm Circana, suggests that the consumer market isn’t there for this kind of explosion of production. The games industry is already in a difficult space right now courtesy of global economics and other factors. If anything it only cements that AI is not the solution to these market trends. AI is often held aloft as this silver bullet that will make game development ‘cheaper’, creating “more games studios which should, therefore, mean more jobs” in the process. But that’s only one side of the coin, and it strikes me that lessons have not been learned from recent years of collective failure.

So in this episode of The Take, let’s get into:

• How the ‘hyper enthusiast’ market props up the entire games industry.

• How data from market research continues to paint an ugly picture of the health of the industry.

• A failure to acknowledge the growing rate of production exceeds consumer habits.

• AI being proposed as the silver bullet for game dev costs has no empirical basis.

• The real risk that AI brings in escalating the race to the bottom.

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Consumer’s Gaming Habits

If you’re sitting there rather confused, let me build up a short primer for you. A couple weeks back the gaming press got worked up a bit by results from a research survey by Mat Piscatella and his team at Circana on video game purchase habits - all of which is part of Circana’s quarterly ‘future of games’ reporting.

The long and short of it, is “approximately a third of video game players purchase a new videogame less often than once per year, while about 36% of purchase a new game once a quarter or with higher frequency”.