The leadership of Playamp, the newly rebranded midcore gaming collective under the Modern Times Group (MTG) umbrella, has confirmed that artificial intelligence has moved beyond the experimental phase to become a foundational element of its global operations. According to Playamp CEO Oliver Bulloss, AI tools are now deeply embedded across the development, artistic, marketing, and business intelligence pipelines of its diverse portfolio of studios. This group includes high-profile developers such as Plarium, InnoGames, Hutch, Snowprint, Ninja Kiwi, and Futureplay. The strategic shift represents one of the most comprehensive adoptions of generative and predictive AI within the mobile gaming sector to date, signaling a move toward "AI-first" development environments that prioritize rapid iteration and internal resource optimization.
The transition to an AI-integrated workflow is framed by Bulloss not as a measure for workforce reduction, but as a strategic "amplifier" for existing human talent. By automating repetitive or labor-intensive tasks, Playamp intends to allow its developers and creatives to focus on high-level design and new intellectual property. This approach seeks to address the perennial challenge of the "content treadmill" in live-service gaming, where the demand for new levels, characters, and events often outpaces the capacity of traditional development cycles.
The Rebranding of MTG’s Midcore Powerhouse
The announcement coincides with the formal rebranding of MTG’s midcore group as Playamp. Modern Times Group, a Swedish-based gaming venture, has spent the last several years acquiring a formidable array of studios specializing in midcore titles—games that offer more depth than casual titles but are more accessible than hardcore PC or console simulations. The Playamp umbrella now covers some of the industry’s most successful mobile franchises, including Plarium’s Raid: Shadow Legends, InnoGames’ Forge of Empires, and Ninja Kiwi’s Bloons TD series.
By consolidating these studios under the Playamp identity, MTG aims to foster greater cross-studio collaboration and technological sharing. The deployment of AI tools is the first major initiative under this new banner, demonstrating a unified technological front. The goal is to leverage the collective data and engineering expertise of the group to build proprietary tools that provide a competitive edge in an increasingly crowded mobile marketplace.
Case Study: InnoGames and the Revitalization of Sunrise Village
One of the most striking examples of Playamp’s AI strategy is found at InnoGames, the Hamburg-based developer known for long-running strategy titles. The studio recently faced a crossroads with its live-service title Sunrise Village, a game that was underperforming relative to its operational costs. Under traditional circumstances, such a title might have faced sunsetting—a total shutdown of services to save resources.
Instead, a lean team of two developers spent approximately eight weeks constructing a custom "AI Stage Designer." This proprietary tool was designed to automate the most time-consuming aspects of level creation, including story scripting, quest generation, game balancing, asset labeling, and the layout of cutscenes. The results were transformative for the project’s economics. Development time for new stages was slashed from ten weeks to just three. Furthermore, a team of three individuals is now capable of producing content at the same frequency and quality level that previously required a staff of 25.
Critically, the efficiency gains did not result in redundancies. Bulloss emphasized that the 22 staff members freed from the Sunrise Village pipeline were immediately redeployed to InnoGames’ newest project, Cozy Coast. This reallocation of talent underscores the "amplifier" philosophy, where AI efficiency is used to increase the number of "shots on goal" a studio can take by supporting multiple projects simultaneously without a linear increase in headcount.
Impact on Artistic Production and External Outsourcing
The economic implications of AI integration are perhaps most visible in the realm of artistic production. InnoGames has rolled out AI-assisted workflows across its entire active portfolio, including Forge of Empires, Elvenar, Heroes of History, and the aforementioned Cozy Coast. These tools assist in the creation of concept art, final illustrations, user interface (UI) sprites, icons, and textures.
The studio reports that these advancements have allowed it to reduce its planned 2025 external art outsourcing budget by 60%. For decades, game studios have relied on third-party vendors in regions with lower labor costs to handle the "heavy lifting" of asset production. By bringing this capability back in-house through AI assistance, Playamp studios gain greater creative control and significant cost savings. This shift suggests a potential disruption for the global art outsourcing industry, as major publishers find they can generate high-quality assets internally with minimal human intervention.
Plarium’s Technical Infrastructure: VizOps, Nexus, and Chronicle
While InnoGames has focused heavily on content production, the Israel-based studio Plarium—the developer behind the global phenomenon Raid: Shadow Legends—has focused its AI efforts on data science and internal infrastructure. Plarium’s data team has developed three primary internal tools: VizOps, Nexus, and Chronicle.
Remarkably, these tools were built entirely without hand-written code, utilizing AI-driven development environments to accelerate the build process.
- VizOps: Manages the lifecycle of business intelligence and data reports, featuring automated testing and AI-driven code reviews to ensure data integrity.
- Nexus: Acts as a continuous monitoring system, scanning massive datasets for anomalies before they reach executive dashboards or machine learning models.
- Chronicle: Provides customer support and quality assurance (QA) teams with a comprehensive, plain-language timeline of player actions derived from raw event data, allowing for faster resolution of player issues.
Plarium has also integrated Large Language Model (LLM) agents into BigQuery, allowing staff across all departments to query complex company data using natural language. This removes the "data bottleneck," where non-technical staff previously had to wait for data analysts to build custom dashboards to answer simple business questions.
Advancements in Coding and Prototyping
The evolution of the development environment at Plarium also includes a move toward "AI-first" coding. The studio has implemented a framework within VS Code that features native integration with Claude Code. This setup is designed to be accessible to both seasoned developers and non-technical staff.
To date, this framework has been utilized to create rapid prototypes and playable advertisements. However, Playamp has confirmed that the use of these tools is being expanded into larger 3D productions. By using AI to handle the foundational architecture of a game, studios can move from a concept to a playable "grey-box" prototype in a fraction of the time previously required. This allows for early market testing, enabling Playamp to kill unpromising projects early and double down on those that show high player engagement metrics.
To protect its intellectual property, Plarium also launched "Artmaker," an internal art generation platform. Unlike public tools like Midjourney or DALL-E, Artmaker is a closed system designed to prevent company assets from leaking into public training sets while providing artists with a purpose-built environment for asset experimentation.
Marketing and Creative Output Expansion
Beyond game development, Playamp is leveraging AI to transform its marketing strategies. In the highly competitive mobile market, the cost of user acquisition (UA) is a primary concern. Plarium reports that AI-assisted, character-led video campaigns have reduced marketing production timelines from several months to a few weeks. Crucially, internal data suggests that these AI-augmented trailers are performing on par with, or in some cases better than, traditionally produced cinematic trailers.
InnoGames has shown a similar trajectory in its marketing department. The studio ran its first AI-generated static advertisement in May 2023, followed by its first AI-produced video ad in October 2024. Currently, AI is involved in the majority of InnoGames’ advertising production. This has resulted in a three-fold increase in creative output compared to the same period in 2023, allowing the marketing team to "A/B test" a much wider variety of creatives to find the most effective messaging for different player demographics.
Timeline of AI Integration at Playamp
The adoption of AI within the MTG midcore group has followed an accelerated chronology:
- Early 2023: Initial experimentation with LLMs for internal documentation and static ad generation at InnoGames.
- May 2023: Launch of the first consumer-facing AI-generated static advertisements.
- Late 2023: Plarium begins development of the VizOps and Nexus data tools using no-code AI environments.
- Early 2024: Development of the "AI Stage Designer" for Sunrise Village, marking the first deep integration of AI into live-service level design.
- Mid-2024: Implementation of Claude Code integration within Plarium’s VS Code environment and the rollout of Artmaker.
- October 2024: Launch of the first fully AI-assisted video marketing campaigns.
- Late 2024: Formal rebranding to Playamp and the announcement of a 60% reduction in external art outsourcing for the 2025 fiscal year.
Analysis: Implications for the Mobile Gaming Industry
The strategy outlined by Oliver Bulloss and Playamp serves as a blueprint for the "middle class" of game development. While massive AAA publishers and tiny indie teams have different relationships with AI, mid-sized groups like Playamp face the unique pressure of maintaining high production values across multiple titles simultaneously.
The decision to reinvest time savings into new projects rather than workforce reductions is a notable stance in an industry that has seen tens of thousands of layoffs over the past 24 months. If Playamp’s "amplifier" model succeeds, it may provide a more sustainable path forward for the industry—one where AI handles the "grunt work" of asset labeling and data cleaning, while humans focus on the creative "spark" that defines successful games.
However, the 60% reduction in external outsourcing spend highlights a looming shift in the global labor market. As internal AI tools become more sophisticated, the economic moat for outsourcing firms is shrinking. For the broader industry, Playamp’s aggressive integration suggests that the "AI revolution" in gaming is no longer about what might happen in the future, but about how games are being built, marketed, and managed today. The ability to produce content three times faster and with significantly lower overhead may soon become the baseline requirement for survival in the mobile gaming ecosystem.
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