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AI was everywhere at gaming’s big developer conference — except the games

The Verge / 3/22/2026

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Key Points

  • AI dominated the GDC Festival of Gaming, with vendors pitching generative AI tools for NPCs, game creation from a chat box, and QA automation.
  • A hands-on demo showcased a pixel-art fantasy world generated by Tencent's AI tools, illustrating practical content-creation AI.
  • Razer demonstrated an AI assistant that automatically logs issues in a shooter game, highlighting AI integration in quality assurance workflows.
  • Although AI talks were plentiful (including a DeepMind presentation on playable AI-generated spaces), the actual games themselves at the event were not AI-driven, underscoring a gap between tooling and gameplay.

AI was everywhere at the GDC Festival of Gaming this year. Vendors at the event pitched generative AI tools for things like making AI-driven NPCs and even entire games from a chat box. On the show floor, I spent 10 minutes playing a demo of a pixel-art fantasy world generated by Tencent's AI tools. In a briefing with Razer, I watched an AI assistant for QA automatically log issues in a shooter game. And there were many talks about AI, including a standing-room only presentation by Google DeepMind researchers about playable AI-generated spaces.

But there was one key place where AI was missing: the games themselves. Of the many developers I s …

Read the full story at The Verge.