Here's an uncomfortable truth about the gaming industry's AI debate: it was never really about capability. It has always been about cost.
Nick Apostolides, the voice actor behind one of gaming's most iconic characters, Leon S. Kennedy in Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem, put it plainly in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "AI is here, there's no turning it off, there's no dialling it back," Apostolides told PC Gamer's video producer Midas Whittaker. "I think it's coming at us full speed ahead, and it's going to have effects on the creative industry, on every industry, a lot for good, but when it comes to art — that is human-born."
That last phrase carries more weight than it might appear to. Apostolides is not a luddite raging against the machine. He accepts the technology's inevitability. His objection is narrower, and frankly more damning: for studios to feel the need to replace actors "when a game can sell 15 million copies or so, as Arc Raiders did, to pay for an actor's voice session is not that big of a deal."
The Arc Raiders controversy is what prompted this conversation. The subject of AI being used to replace voice actors became a recurring flashpoint last October when Arc Raiders was released, after it became clear that Embark Studios had used AI to pad out voice lines. According to the studio, the game's voice acting was initially performed by humans, then used to "train" AI so that it could speak in the actors' voices across any possible circumstance.
Embark claimed this approach allows it to implement new dialogue quickly, creating voice lines in hours instead of scheduling recording sessions, and that the actors were reportedly paid and gave their consent. On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, critics have pointed out that Arc Raiders' entire premise is humankind fighting back against machines, with players ascending into a world where lifeless robots have driven people underground and forced survivors to fight for scrap. The whole thematic core of the game is human resilience in the face of mechanical replacement. The irony is almost too neat.
To be fair to Embark, its co-founder Stefan Strandberg has been relatively candid. He acknowledged that "there's something fantastical that happens when you bring real actors in," that Arc Raiders blends AI text-to-speech with genuine human recordings, and that "there's no end goal in replacing any actors." Whether that reassurance holds as the technology matures is another question entirely.
Apostolides goes further: "I think what people love about games today is that they are so human. The stories are so real, the emotions are real, you get so invested in these characters, and I don't believe AI can do that. AI can speak lines, but there's nothing human behind it."
He's not alone in that view. Neil Newbon, who voiced Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, called AI voice substitution "dull as hell," while the developers of Demonschool said they would rather "cut off our own arms" than use AI in their games. These are not fringe positions. They represent a genuine cultural resistance forming within the craft itself.
The counter-argument from industry executives is essentially one of inevitability. Nexon's CEO has stated that it is "important to assume that every game company is now using AI." Ubisoft has announced it is using an AI tool to assist in writing its games. The logic is competitive: if your rivals are cutting costs with synthesis tools, not doing so is a strategic disadvantage.
Strip away the rhetoric and ask the simple question: does that argument hold when a game is generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue? The economics of a $40 game with battle passes and cosmetic stores are very different from a struggling indie studio. Apostolides is pointing at something real. The cost of a voice session, relative to a blockbuster game's budget, is negligible. The decision to use AI in those cases is a choice, not a necessity.
What the debate ultimately reveals is a values question dressed up as a technology question. Apostolides is an Emmy-nominated performer who won IGN's Best Actor in a Horror Game award, and his perspective carries the weight of someone who has seen what skilled performance adds to a narrative. The games that endure culturally tend to be the ones where performance and story are treated as inseparable from product.
Reasonable people can disagree about where the line sits. Consent matters. Compensation matters. Context matters: an AI-generated bark from a shop NPC is not the same creative loss as replacing a lead character's voice. But the industry would do well to resist the slide toward treating all of those cases as equivalent. A game selling 15 million copies can afford to pay a human being. The question is whether it wants to. That answer tells you a great deal about what the studio actually values, and it is a question Fair Work regulators and consumer protection bodies in Australia and elsewhere may eventually have to help answer.