Sources suggest that staff laid off at King will be replaced by AI tools they helped to create

Anonymous sources within the mobile developer King have said that staff who have been laid off as part of Microsoft’s recent round of redundancies will be replaced by the AI tools that they helped to train.

Speaking to Mobilegamer.biz, one staff member at the Candy Crush Saga maker said that many of the level designers had been let go after spending months creating tools that would build levels more quickly.

“Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams,” the anonymous staffer said. “Similarly the copywriting team is completely removing people since we now have AI tools that those individuals have been creating.”

Around 200 people are thought to have been laid off from King as part of Microsoft’s sweeping cuts, but the same source quoted above suggested that the actual figure could be higher.

Mobilegamer.biz reports that a recent internal employee survey found that morale within King was already low. An anonymous source quoted by the site said that since the cuts, morale is now “in the gutter”.

The report suggests that the cuts at King are mostly in middle management, user experience and narrative copywriting, noting that around half of the Farm Heroes Saga team in London will be leaving, equating to roughly 50 people.

It also suggests that some senior staff have been put on gardening leave until September, when a new organisational chart will be announced.

GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to King for comment on the report.

King has been experimenting with AI tools for a while now, and purchased the AI firm Peltarion in 2022. Last year in June, the head of King’s AI Labs, Sahar Asadi, told GamesIndustry.biz that King was using AI to playtest Candy Crush Saga.

“The playtesting bot we’ve developed gives designers, prior to releasing a level, an understanding of the game experience for the players,” she explained. “They can see whether the level they’ve created is providing the desired experience or not, and if not they can go back and refine it.”

The bots could recommend tweaks to levels that designers could then accept, which led GamesIndustry.biz to ask how long it would be before such tools were building the levels in the first place.

“Absolutely we need designers,” Asadi responded at the time. “We see this as a co-pilot for designers. It’s an assistive tool. What the playtesting tool provides is insights about the gameplay before releasing it.”