We’ve unfortunately gotten used to seeing layoffs in the gaming industry under the excuse of “make the company more effective”. The latest victim is the Czech-to-English translator in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Max H.
You would think this person is a pretty key player in a narrative-driven game, considering Max has worked on dialogues, item descriptions, DLCs, quest logs, item names, and everything that needed a translation from Czech to English, the language most people play the game in.
To quote Max, “if you’ve played KCD2 in English you’ve quite likely seen my work”, but it seems that’s the last we will see of his (or any human’s) work in future Warhorse localizations.
Human Goes Out, Machine Goes In
Yesterday, on March 26, Max was fired at the end of the workday, saying that he’d be replaced by AI to be more cost-effective. He had been previously asked by the company for his opinions about using AI for certain things when it comes to translation, and while he was very against it, Max says the company never made any specific moves that led him to believe that he was up for removal, and neither did he think that he would be replaced by AI entirely based on his performance or his comments.
Speaking out on a Reddit post, Max made sure to say that he will not break any NDA or any conditions about what he was working on, as he simply wanted to shed some light on Warhorse’s stance on AI and how they treated important employees.
While news about gaming layoffs is becoming more and more common, it’s hard to see any figment of long-term planning in the execution of such downsizings. As demonstrated by the chaos that engulfed many big names like Ubisoft, the loss of institutional knowledge always comes back to collect later down the line, and that’s without accounting for the costs of severance packages, hiring, and the reputational damage layoffs inflict on the company.
As demonstrated by the chaos that engulfed many big names like Ubisoft, the loss of institutional knowledge always comes back to collect later down the line
The Warhorse and Max H. situation is particularly unsavoury, as players invested in story-driven games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance are typically hostile to generative AI in creative works. Recent polling demonstrates increasing hostility towards AI in artistic fields, and it is hard to believe any potential savings (itself not a guarantee, as demonstrated recently) are worth the PR hit.
This is particularly true in a field like translation and localization, where the ability to carry over intangibles like regionalisms and nuance is crucial to making the creator’s intention felt, no matter where the customer is playing.
Video games are still an art form, and making memorable art requires a human touch. As things stand now, the industry seems firmly locked into a game of chicken to see whether AI-enthusiast executives or the player base blink first, with developers having to pay the price.
