Emirhan Gül once burned out fast at a Turkish mobile gaming startup. He helped design 23 games in five months. Budgets ran high. Teams hired anyone who showed up. Now the 24-year-old runs his own small studio with just two full-time staff. Claude Code handles much of the coding, design tweaks, social posts and even investment pitches.
“With Claude Code, I can do all that easily,” Gül told Rest of World. “It really sped things up and helped me a lot.”
His story captures a split in game development. Tools from OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft let one person or a tiny group produce what once took dozens. Yet that same power shrinks demand for juniors, writers, artists and entry-level coders. The pipeline that fed experienced talent for decades now looks broken.
Turkey offers a stark case study. The country boasted more than 800 active game studios at its peak. It ranked as Europe’s second-biggest hub after London. In 2021 more than half the top 10 mobile games on Apple’s App Store came from Turkish teams. Peak became the nation’s first unicorn. Dream Games followed as the second.
Those wins drew young developers like Gül. They studied game creation. They joined startups. Then the ground shifted. New gaming startups dropped from nearly 200 in 2021 to just 30 last year, according to a Turkish government report. Bigger firms stopped scooping up beginners. Nazım Adaklı lectures on AI in games at Istanbul’s Bahçeşehir University. He watches the change close up.
“Instead of hiring five junior programmers at the startup where he works, my developer friend does all the work himself with AI,” Adaklı said.
And. This pattern repeats beyond Turkey. The global games business tops $500 billion. Mobile accounts for roughly half. Sony, Microsoft and Tencent set the pace. They also cut staff. Microsoft Xbox announced the elimination of more than 3,200 jobs earlier this month. That equals about one-fifth of its workforce. The company also divested five development studios, Bloomberg reported.
A recent industry survey found more than a quarter of game workers laid off worldwide in the past two years. Many studios adopt generative AI while reducing headcount. The result leaves newcomers with few places to learn.
Ender Tınkır followed a classic path before he went solo. He worked on Toon Blast at Peak. He contributed to Royal Match and Royal Kingdom at Dream Games. ChatGPT’s arrival in late 2022 prompted his exit. He now runs Play On Studios. His toolkit includes Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI’s Codex and Claude Cowork.
“AI has become part of my daily work. I use it actively in many areas, from prototyping and visual variation to coding and iteration,” Tınkır told Rest of World. In two months he built Zen Mahjong with no traditional coding, design or product support. “Two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that I could make a game by myself.”
He released the title earlier this year. An investor later approached him to launch an AI-focused mobile game company. That venture employs two people. Tınkır sees bigger forces at play. “The barriers to turning people’s ideas into products are disappearing,” he said. “In the next few years, the number of products developed by individuals or very small teams will increase significantly.”
Yet success remains rare. Only one in five gaming titles turns a profit. AI also speeds up cloning. It displaces concept artists, writers and junior coders. Güven Çatak founded and directs Bahçeşehir University’s Game Lab. He sees the damage in his students.
Junior positions “have tanked” for them, Çatak told Rest of World. The old route of joining a big studio, gaining skills and advancing to senior roles “has become a thing of the past.”
Begüm Ceren Onar, a 34-year-old game designer, lost her job in December. Her Istanbul studio had spent years on a title that flopped. Managers turned to AI for fresh ideas. They cut 17 of 20 employees. Onar now feels the crowded field.
“More people are developing games on their own, but most are not making a living off of it,” she said. “Quantity doesn’t always mean success.”
Adaklı pushes students to act now. Big studios offer little stability. He urges them to build games in college, strike publisher deals and launch ventures. “Right now is the worst time to enter the game industry to find a stable job, but it’s the best time to start your own venture, to realize your own idea,” he said.
That advice lands amid broader skepticism. Many developers distrust generative AI, especially when layoffs continue. Digital Trends noted the tension last year. Studios embrace automation. Workers watch roles vanish.
Recent conversations on X echo the divide. One game industry veteran posted from a developer event. “Devs who were against AI were the ones out looking for jobs,” @Grummz wrote on July 20. “There is no future game dev job without AI.” The thread drew hundreds of replies. Some praised acceleration. Others mourned lost entry points.
Another post from early July highlighted Microsoft replacing artists at Bethesda and id Software with AI tools. “This sucks,” the user said. Layoff waves at Microsoft, Sony and others fuel the gloom. Yet AI-driven startups post openings for engineers, artists comfortable with machine learning and community managers. Overture Dynamics, builder of an AI-powered MMO, opened applications this month.
The pattern holds across regions. Solo creators gain speed and freedom. They prototype without massive funding. They ship experimental titles. They chase personal visions. The market, however, floods with releases. Steam’s Turkey-focused events saw applications from small studios jump from 67 in 2023 to 254 a year later. More games appear. Differentiation grows harder. Revenue stays elusive for most.
Analysts point to structural change. General-purpose AI boosts productivity for those who master it. It compresses timelines for coding, asset creation and iteration. It does not yet replace taste, narrative depth or player insight. Those qualities still separate hits from also-rans. Juniors once supplied fresh eyes and long hours on those elements. Their absence may create blind spots over time.
Universities adjust. Some add AI workflow courses. Others teach entrepreneurship alongside craft. Students learn to prompt models, curate outputs and integrate them into engines like Unity or Unreal. The bet is that hybrid skills will matter more than pure traditional expertise.
But. Questions linger about long-term talent development. Will mid-level and senior roles fill if entry positions stay scarce? Can AI-generated work train the next cohort when humans no longer perform the foundational tasks? Industry leaders offer few clear answers.
Microsoft’s recent overhaul drew particular notice. The company cited a desire to focus on high-performing areas. AI figured into the rationale. Similar moves appear at other publishers. Cost pressures, soft player spending in some segments and investor demands for efficiency all push toward smaller teams.
Gül, Tınkır and their peers prove the upside. One person can test ideas that boards once rejected. Small groups can iterate quickly without layers of approval. Personal games reach audiences that big marketing budgets once locked out. The creative range may widen even as headcount narrows.
Still the human cost shows. Onar watched colleagues lose livelihoods after years of effort. Young graduates scan shrinking job boards. Veterans retrain or exit. The boom in solo output masks contraction in stable careers.
Çatak put it plainly. The earlier career ladder broke. New rungs must form or the industry risks hollowing out its expertise base. Adaklı’s students already pivot. They ship small titles on Steam and mobile stores while finishing degrees. Some attract publishers. Others build portfolios that showcase AI collaboration rather than pure handcraft.
The coming years will test whether that model scales. More products from tiny teams could enrich libraries. They could also saturate platforms and depress prices. Only a fraction will sustain their creators. The rest may fade as hobbies or learning exercises.
One fact stands clear from the Turkish experience and global layoffs. AI does not just speed game making. It reshapes who gets to make them and how many get paid to do so. The tools hand superpowers to those already skilled or bold enough to strike out alone. They simultaneously raise the bar for everyone else hoping to break in.
Developers like Gül and Tınkır seized the moment. They traded big-studio security for independence and AI assistance. Their output proves the model’s potential. Whether enough such stories emerge to offset the lost junior roles will decide the health of game development for the next decade.
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