Artificial intelligence has become a convenient explanation for every change in the games industry. Yet the layoffs started earlier, and studios themselves use AI in far more varied ways than the headlines suggest. Digitalk spoke to three studios with a presence in Bulgaria: Black Sea Games, Imperia Online and Ubisoft. The picture that emerges is more nuanced than "the robots are taking the jobs".
The crisis didn't start with AI
Veselin Handzhiev, founder of Black Sea Games and one of the creators of Tzar: Burden of the Crown (1999), describes the industry as having been in crisis for 2-3 years. By his estimate, between 150,000 and 200,000 people worldwide have lost their jobs over the past two years, with AI a factor but not the main cause.
Three studios, three different approaches
Imperia Online: AI in the processes, not in the games
The company has released more than 70 titles, has more than 170 million players and around 80 employees, 20 of them programmers. It has been part of Stillfront Group since 2018. Iliyan Iliev, AI and Training Manager, offers an interesting breakdown: around 90% of the time goes into defining tasks for the AI agents, around 5% into running them and roughly the same into checking the results. The studio is developing AI to categorise player enquiries and route them by priority and tone.
Ubisoft: AI as a tool for scale
Ubisoft has more than 16,000 employees, around 250 of them in Sofia, and is restructuring after a record operating loss of EUR 1.3 billion for the financial year that ended in March 2026. There, AI is used to generate environment elements, process audio for hundreds of thousands of voice lines, compress textures and moderate content.
Black Sea Games: caution
Both Black Sea Games and Imperia Online say they currently don't use AI inside the games themselves.
What is changing in the market
Handzhiev warns that the market is flooded with low-quality, mostly hobby games, and expects AI-generated content to add to that flood. The result is a split between big titles with huge budgets and independent projects that have to stand out through ideas and quality.
A parallel with web development
The same is happening with websites. AI speeds up the production of copy, images and templates, but that is exactly why generic content is losing value. Imperia Online's breakdown is useful for us too: most of the time goes into defining the goal clearly, not into the generation itself. When we build web projects, the most valuable parts remain the structure, copy grounded in real information, and checking the results.
If you're interested in the broader picture, see our analysis of how AI gets from idea to measurable results.
Source: Digitalk: Games with variables (in Bulgarian). This article is an independent analysis by Penkov Studio.
