Candy Crush maker, King, which Microsoft acquired along with Activision Blizzard back in 2023, was the first hit when mass layoffs were announced across the company earlier this month. Now some impacted staff say morale is at an all time low, as AI they’ve been training for years is potentially used to replace them.
“Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they’ve spent months building tools to craft levels quicker,” a member of King’s Farm Heroes Saga team reportedly told Mobilegamer.biz. “Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams. Similarly the copywriting team is completely removing people since we now have AI tools that those individuals have been creating.”
200 were laid off across King, though many impacted staff are reportedly in limbo until union negotiations wrap up in September. According to Mobilegamer.biz, improving morale at King was a top priority following poor internal survey results and ongoing attrition. Instead, one employee said “it’s now in the gutter” ever since the layoffs were announced.
King has not been secretive of its use of AI tools to make games like Candy Crush, which players’ spent an estimated $9 million on every week, even harder to stop playing. “Before we release a level, we let the bots play that level and we get insights–are there any shuffles? How difficult was this level? And there are many more metrics that give designers an insight into the gameplay–we run them thousands of times so we have good accuracy,” King’s director of AI Labs Sahar Asadi told Mobilegamer.biz at GDC in 2024.
“Then the designers decide if that is an intended experience that they wanted – yes or no–and they go back and refine the level,” she continued. “We also have built a tool on top of this playtesting that does automatic tweaking by AI.”
AI’s been a reoccurring backdrop to Microsoft’s decision to fire roughly 9,000 employees, including many across Xbox and its related gaming divisions. Developers were invited to an AI roundtable at Gamescom 2025 on the same day the layoffs were announced. A senior Xbox publishing producer encouraged impacted staff to us AI to redo their resumes and apply to new jobs. And over the weekend, one of Xbox’s principle development leads put out a hiring post that used apparent AI slop for its image of someone coding at a computer.
The cuts across Microsoft comes as it commits to invest $80 billion in AI technology, more than the total cost of all its recent gaming acquisitions, in the current fiscal year alone. “The fact AI tools are replacing people is absolutely disgusting but it’s all about efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall,” one King staffer told Mobilegamer.biz . “If we’re introducing more feedback loops then it’s crazy to remove the developers themselves, we need more hands and less leadership.”
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