Take-Two Reshuffles Its AI Team: ‘It’s Truly Disappointing’

The pinnacle of Take-Two Interactive‘s AI workforce has seemingly been laid off, together with an undisclosed variety of different workers engaged on leveraging AI on the firm that owns Rockstar Video games, 2K, and Zynga. The reorg comes regardless of CEO Strauss Zelnick saying the parent-publisher is “actively embracing generative AI.”

“It’s really disappointing that I’ve to share with you that my time with T2 – and that of my workforce – has come to an finish,” Luke Dicken, who turned Take-Two’s head of AI in early 2025 after a decade at Zynga, wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday. He added, “We’ve been creating leading edge expertise to help sport improvement now for 7 years. These of us know tips on how to match innovation and novel drawback fixing approaches with sturdy product design chops to create techniques that empower individuals all through the event workflow.”

A lot of Take-Two’s AI workforce seems to have been established out of Zynga’s present utilized AI division. Take-Two acquired the cellular gaming firm in 2022 for $12.7 billion however the partnership has struggled to generate new hits. Many trade colleagues of Dicken’s shared their shock on the information of the layoffs.

Take-Two declined to remark.

Final month, the corporate tried to distance itself from instruments like Google’s Genie after its inventory worth took successful from buyers involved that generative AI would permit anybody to make world-class video games with out huge improvement groups. “Genie is early in its iteration at this level and attempting to make a comparability to a sport engine is simply actually—they’re not even in the identical ballpark. Genie is just not a sport engine,” Take-Two president Karl Slatoff said at the time.

Whereas CEO Straus Zelnick has repeatedly poured cold water on the idea that genAI may make the subsequent Grand Theft Auto, he just lately confirmed the corporate is all-in on exploring tips on how to incorporate the expertise into sport improvement. “Because it occurs now, we’re actively embracing generative AI,” he mentioned during a recent investor call. “Now we have a whole bunch of pilots and implementations throughout our firm, together with with our studios, and we’re seeing alternatives to drive efficiencies, scale back prices, and create the chance to do what digital expertise has at all times allowed, which is, mundane duties grow to be simpler and fewer related, which frees up our creators to do the extra attention-grabbing duties of constructing excellent leisure.”

However the trade’s embrace of AI has additionally sparked a backlash amongst gamers. Nvidia took an enormous hit in March when it revealed how its upcoming DLSS 5 graphics tech would sloppify NPCs in in style video games. Even Arc Raiders, which bought thousands and thousands of copies and gained crucial acclaim regardless of NPCs voiced by genAI, just lately began changing these artificial voices with real human recordings.