MTG Playamp goes all-in on AI across its studios
Key takeaways
- InnoGames built AI Stage Designer in ~2 months, cutting stage time from 10 weeks to 3
- InnoGames moved staff from Sunrise Village to Cozy Coast; no layoffs reported
- Plarium cut iteration time ~10x with VizOps, Nexus and Chronicle (no hand-written code)
- Plarium says planned 2025 external art outsourcing spend fell by 60%
MTG’s Playamp division is embedding AI across development, art, marketing and business intelligence, CEO Oliver Bulloss told MobileGamer.biz. The newly rebranded group — which now groups Plarium, InnoGames, Hutch, Snowprint, Ninja Kiwi and Futureplay — says AI tools are present across “practically all” pipelines at its studios, and Bulloss describes the tech as an amplifier for existing teams rather than a staff replacement.
At InnoGames a two-person team spent roughly two months building a custom “AI Stage Designer” that automates stage story, quests, balancing, asset labelling, layout and cutscenes. That system cut stage development time from ten weeks to three, and a team of three now produces what previously required about 25 people “at the same frequency and quality level as before,” Bulloss said. No layoffs followed: staff freed by the tool were moved from the underperforming live service title Sunrise Village onto InnoGames’ newer project, Cozy Coast. InnoGames has also rolled AI-assisted art production across Forge of Empires, Cozy Coast, Elvenar and Heroes of History for concepts, illustrations, UI sprites, icons and texturing, and says this lowered its planned 2025 external art outsourcing spend by 60%.
Plarium’s data team built three internal production tools — VizOps, Nexus and Chronicle — without hand-written code, cutting iteration time roughly tenfold, the company reports. VizOps handles business intelligence and data report lifecycles with automated testing and AI code review. Nexus continuously scans datasets for anomalies before they reach dashboards or models, and Chronicle assembles a full player action timeline from raw event data for support and QA teams. Plarium also added two LLM agents to BigQuery so staff can query company data in plain language, and created an AI-first development framework inside VS Code with native Claude Code integration. That framework is used for prototypes and playable ads today and is being extended toward larger 3D productions for early market testing. The studio’s Artmaker platform is designed to keep company IP safe while giving artists an in-house alternative to public tools for asset experimentation and production.
AI is used beyond engineering and art. Plarium says AI-assisted, character-led video campaigns have shortened marketing production from months to weeks, and that AI-assisted trailers now perform on par with traditionally produced ones. InnoGames ran its first AI static ad in May 2023 and its first AI video ad in October 2024; it now involves AI in the majority of ad production and reports creative output up threefold versus the same period in 2023. Bulloss added that time saved by AI is being reinvested into more projects rather than used for cost-cutting.
Why it matters
Takeaway: Playamp’s numbers and moves are concrete — a two-month build that slashed stage production from ten weeks to three, a 60% cut to planned art outsourcing for 2025, and staff reallocated onto Cozy Coast — which together point to more internal capacity and faster prototype-to-live cycles across the group.
Original source
MobileGamer.biz
