Games Company Org Design in the Age of AI
And Why I’m Not Building One
We all recall, back in the 2010s, especially in mobile games, how popular the concept of “independent teams make all the decisions” was. Inside larger studios, the prevailing belief was that if you just gave teams enough autonomy, enough ownership, enough trust, the results would take care of themselves. And to be fair, in many cases that model worked quite well.
Lately I’ve been thinking that we are again at the cusp of a new era of team-led game development inside larger studios, but with a very different definition of what a “team” actually is. The idea I keep coming back to is an AI-native games company organized around product managers running what are effectively solo teams, supported by AI agents. Each PM would own a game, end to end, and work directly with the agents to design, build, iterate, and operate the game. True independence by default, not just in theory but in practice.
We are probably still early for this to work perfectly, but we are much closer than people seem to realize.
On the coding side, I honestly think we are already there. Over the last six months of using Claude Code to build mobile apps, the progress has been staggering. Every month the capabilities take a meaningful step forward. Things that used to require a full team and a long timeline are now realistic weekend projects, projects I could never have imagined even attempting before. Having coders at your fingertips, constantly building, refactoring, and reasoning through problems while you watch, fundamentally changes your sense of what is possible.
On the graphics side, we are getting there as well. Recently I’ve been creating game assets with ChatGPT by simply asking for them and explicitly asking for transparent PNG backgrounds so that the assets are immediately usable inside a game. That alone removes a surprising amount of friction. Sprite sheets are almost there too. There are still clear challenges, especially in getting each frame to contain exactly what I want it to contain, but the trajectory is obvious. And this is not limited to one model either. Grok and Gemini are very close as well. Scenario and Layer have been at it for years already.
So the question becomes: what is actually hard now?
The challenge is not execution anymore. The real challenge is ideas, specifically great game concepts that are grounded in a kind of 80/20 mindset where proven patterns are combined with just enough innovation. There is a lot of talk right now about this being the age of the idea person who can quickly build lots of cool things, and that is true to an extent. As I wrote in my previous piece, it has never been as cheap or as fast to generate software and content as it is right now. You can build multiple games at once, spin up prototypes effortlessly, and move lightning fast.
But that abundance shifts the bottleneck rather than removing it. The hard part becomes validation. Knowing which ideas deserve a place in the pipeline. Developing a gut sense for what makes sense to pursue and what should be killed early. That kind of judgment has competitive value, and it has not been automated away. In many cases, you know nothing until you have ample cohorts of users, repeat spenders, etc. and AI can’t make that part faster.
Then there is marketing, which is an entirely different beast. I can imagine a future where marketing AI agents exist that can take over most of the process of launching and scaling a mobile game, but we are not there yet. The difference compared to coding is striking. Claude Code works so well because it is essentially everything in one place. A year ago, people were wiring together MCP tools and open source projects just to make these systems usable. Now most of that is becoming redundant, and the functionality is converging inside a single tool.
It naturally makes me wonder when we get the equivalent of Claude for marketing, because that is something I am very much looking forward to.
My route
This brings me to the second part of the article, and the more personal question of why I am not starting an AI-native games company organized this way.
The honest answer is that it would still require a lot of humans, and I do not see a strong enough competitive advantage for myself to get into that kind of a business. In games, I would still be competing with extremely sharp, fast-moving operators, including the kind of genius hustlers coming out of places like Turkey. They can adopt the same AI-native approaches just as quickly as I can, if not faster. In that environment, simply having access to the same tools does not create a meaningful edge.
This is why I keep coming back to the one-person app studio model instead. On the app side, the dynamics are different. I can make myself the user. I can take something that already exists and that I already use, and make it significantly better for a very specific niche. I can make it more AI-native, more optimized and more closely aligned with my own needs. From there, it is possible to scale outward. In games, that personal wedge is much harder to establish.
Final words
The AI-native games company will exist. I am convinced of that. But for now, it is not the thing I feel compelled to build myself, and being honest about that distinction feels important.
What you’re describing was already happening before AI: as tools made it cheaper and faster to build games, the bottleneck stopped being production and became getting the game anchored in players’ minds (positioning) and getting it in front of them (distribution). AI just accelerates that shift.
Great thoughts Joakim and mirrors my own experience, though I think it's more the distribution than ideas that are the bottle neck. Ideas may seem like a bottle neck without distribution because you need a good enough product to fight through the noise, but if you have your own following, the quality/innovation/80-20 threshold is lower. Add to that creators tend to know their audience pretty well and I think solo creator with a following or the creator^pm pairing will be winning here. As a pm, the only catch is that the bigger the following the harder these creators are to work with 😂 so building your own following and becoming a creator first and then a developer second is what I arrived at. You don't need to build a product to validate your ideas - just see if your IG or TikTok grows organically!