AI may make games cheaper to build, but that doesn’t make studios worth more, says Strategic Alternatives partner Rhys Dekle.

Speaking on the Global Trends track at PGC Summit Montréal, Dekle said his talk was “the money conversation, not the creative-AI debate.”

Dekle is a certified M&A advisor who works only in games. His sell-side deals include Spry Fox to Netflix, System Era to Devolver and PeopleFun to AppLovin. Before that, he spent 11 years in business development at Microsoft, where he helped set up ID@Xbox.

Dekle said AI has come in two waves. First came generative tools that make single assets like art or dialogue. Now there are agentic tools that can handle whole jobs like QA. Square Enix, for example, wants AI doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027.

Saving time on one job doesn’t do much to the overall budget, and someone still has to check everything AI makes, Dekle mentions. In triple-A, any time saved usually just goes into making the game bigger. Dekle thinks some studios are calling layoffs “AI efficiency” when they’re really just cutting costs after the boom.

His take was that the savings are real for indie devs, mixed in mobile and “mostly a mirage” in triple-A.

“The saving is realest exactly where there’s least to buy, and thinnest where the money is,” he said.

Dekle compared AI to a new oven that lets every bakery bake twice as fast. Bread gets cheaper for everyone, but no bakery gets richer unless it owns something the others don’t.

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