I Have Never Seen a Game Fail Because the Artists Were Too Slow

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I Have Never Seen a Game Fail Because the Artists Were Too Slow<br>AI is optimising the cheapest part of production

Rob Sandberg<br>Aug 03, 2026

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Rework consumes 30 to 50 per cent of software development effort, and reworked code costs around 2.5 times first pass development

Skull and Bones burned eight years and a reported 200 million dollars on unstable direction rather than slow execution

Faster generation increases the volume of work in flight when a pivot lands, which increases the write off

Producers should measure rework rate, decision latency and decision durability before measuring tool speed

Read the first few chapters. No strings.

Every studio I have worked in could tell you the cost of an artist day. None of them could tell me the cost of a decision that got reversed six months later.<br>That gap explains most of what is currently happening with AI in game production.<br>Luke Dicken spent a decade at Zynga and finished up as Head of AI at Take-Two before his entire team was laid off earlier this year. He gave a long interview to 80 Level last week, and one passage has been rattling around my head since. Asked whether AI is a realistic answer to ballooning AAA budgets, he turns the question round and asks where the ballooning actually happened. How many projects went through repeated resets. How much of the money was spent building the thing that eventually shipped. Then he lands it: “No amount of automated asset generation is going to fix a broken steering wheel.”<br>I would push it a step further. The steering wheel is the one component nobody has bothered to instrument.<br>If this is useful, there's more where it came from. Multiple free posts a week on game production, applied AI, leadership and how the sausage actually gets made.

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The money did not go where the tools are pointed

Software has numbers on this, and they are ugly. ScopeMaster’s summary of the research puts rework at 30 to 50 per cent of total effort on a typical project, and notes that reworking existing code runs at roughly 2.5 times the cost of writing it the first time. The NIST work from 2002 is older and blunter, putting around 80 per cent of development cost into finding and fixing defects against 20 per cent on preventing them.<br>Games are worse than the software baseline, because we carry content on top of code. When a design direction changes, the code churn is the small part. The animation set built against the old locomotion model goes. The level blockouts sized for the old encounter pacing go. The VFX authored against a colour language that has since been rewritten goes. The tools team’s export pipeline, tuned for a content shape that no longer exists, goes.<br>Which brings me to the exhibit I keep coming back to.<br>Kotaku’s investigation into Skull and Bones drew on more than twenty current and former Ubisoft developers. The core premise of the game changed at least four times. Three creative directors passed through, each rewriting the design in their own direction. Headcount grew from roughly 100 people in 2015 to around 400 by 2019, while basic questions about what the game was remained open. One developer’s summary of the experience: “Instead of adding layers of value we kept running around in a loop.” By 2021 the reported spend was 120 million dollars. By launch, Insider Gaming’s reporting put it nearer 200 million.<br>Nowhere in eight years of reporting does anyone suggest the problem was that the artists were too slow.<br>Four hundred people executing against a brief that keeps moving is a production failure with an enormous payroll attached. Nothing about it gets cheaper when the payroll works faster.

Skull and Bones is the extreme case, which is why it makes a useful exhibit. The ordinary version happens everywhere and gets no coverage at all. Embracer quietly cancelled 29 unannounced games in six months between July and December 2023. Nobody wrote a twenty-source investigation into those. Each one had a team, a set of decisions, and a moment when someone at the top of the chain changed their mind.<br>The part I have avoided writing

I have wanted to write this post for years and kept finding reasons to write something else, because I intend to keep working in this business. That hesitation is worth sitting with for a second, because it is the whole problem in miniature. The decision layer goes unmeasured because the people best placed to measure it report to it.<br>So, carefully, and without naming anyone.<br>For most of my career I have been the monkey in the middle. The gyration comes down from the C-suite as a sentence in a meeting. It reaches the team as two quarters of work. My job was to stand between those two facts and translate one into the other, usually while being asked why the date had not moved.<br>It is very easy, in a room with good coffee and no build running, to say that we will just make this one small change. It is...