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From budget strain to AI gain: Watch how studios are building smarter with AI

  • August 25, 2025
  • 2 min read
From budget strain to AI gain: Watch how studios are building smarter with AI

Game development is in a pressure cooker. Budgets are ballooning, infrastructure and labor costs are rising, and players expect more complexity and polish with every release. All studios, from the major AAAs to smaller indies, are feeling the strain.

But there is a way forward. In a recent webinar, Sean Hammond, Territory Manager for the UK and Nordics at Gcore, explained how AI is reshaping game development workflows and how the right infrastructure strategy can reduce costs, speed up production, and create better player experiences.

Scroll on to watch key moments from Sean's talk and explore how studios can make AI work for them.

Rising costs are threatening game development

Game revenue has slowed, but development costs continue to rise. Some AAA titles now surpass $100 million in development budgets. The complexity of modern games demands more powerful servers, scalable infrastructure, and larger teams, making the industry increasingly unsustainable.

Personnel and infrastructure costs are also climbing. Developers, artists, and QA testers with specialized skills are in high demand, as are technologies like VR, AR, and AI. Studios are also having to invest more in cybersecurity to protect player data, detect cheating, and safeguard in-game economies.

AI is revolutionizing GameDev, even without a perfect use case

While the perfect use case for AI in gaming may not have been found yet, it’s already transforming how games are built, tested, and personalized.

Sean highlighted emerging applications, including:

  • Smarter QA testing
  • AI-driven player personalization
  • Real-time motion and animation
  • Accelerated environment and character design
  • Multilingual localization
  • Adaptive game balancing

Studios are already applying these technologies to reduce production timelines and improve immersion.

The challenge of secure, scalable AI adoption

Of course, AI adoption doesn’t come without its challenges. Chief among them is security. Public models pose risks: no studio wants their proprietary assets to end up training a competitor’s model.

The solution? Deploy AI models on infrastructure you trust so you’re in complete control. That’s where Gcore comes in.

Gcore Everywhere Inference reduces compute costs and infrastructure bloat by allowing you to deploy only what you need, where you need it.

The future of gaming is AI at scale

To power real-time player experiences, your studio needs to deploy AI globally, close to your users.

Gcore Everywhere Inference lets you deploy models worldwide at the edge with minimal latency because data is not routed back to central servers. This means fast, responsive gameplay and a new generation of real-time, AI-driven features.

As a company originally built by gamers, we’ve developed AI solutions with gaming studios in mind. Here’s what we offer:

  • Global edge inference for real-time gameplay: Deploy your AI models close to players worldwide, enabling fast, responsive player experiences without routing data to central servers.
  • Full control over AI model deployment and IP protection: Avoid public APIs and retain full ownership of your assets with on-prem options, preventing your proprietary data from being available to competitors.
  • Scalable, cost-efficient infrastructure tailored to gaming workloads: Deploy only what you need to avoid overprovisioning and reduce compute costs without sacrificing performance.
  • Enhanced player retention through AI-driven personalization and matchmaking: Real-time inference powers smarter NPCs and dynamic matchmaking, improving engagement and keeping players coming back for more.
  • Deploy models in 3 clicks and under 10 seconds: Our developer-friendly platform lets you go from trained model to global deployment in seconds. No complex DevOps setup required.

Final takeaway

AI is advancing game development fast, but only if it’s deployed right. Gcore offers scalable, secure, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure that helps studios create smarter, faster, and more immersive games.

Want to see how it works? Deploy your first model in just a few clicks.

Check out our blog on how AI is transforming gaming in 2025

Try Gcore AI

Gcore all-in-one platform: cloud, AI, CDN, security, and other infrastructure services.

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