Take-Two Cuts AI Team Supporting Ghost Story Games and 31st Union

A current hot post on r/Games points to a Eurogamer report that Take-Two has laid off members of a central AI team. Based on the report and LinkedIn posts from former staff, this was not a unit tied to one publicly named game. It appears to have been a shared technology group that supported multiple studios, including Ghost Story Games and 31st Union, with AI and machine learning work.

The most widely circulated post came from team lead Luke Dicken, who said the entire AI team was affected. He described spending roughly seven years building AI systems and internal tools for game development. What remains unclear is the exact headcount, whether the cuts were part of a broader restructuring, and how much ongoing work will now be redistributed inside Take-Two. Eurogamer said the publisher declined to comment on the layoffs.

Why It Matters

The story carries extra weight because it arrives soon after Strauss Zelnick said Take-Two was actively embracing generative AI. Public strategy and internal staffing are not the same thing, but the contrast is important. A company can still pursue AI features while deciding that a centralized research-and-support team is too expensive, too early, or too broad for the projects currently in production.

Shared technology groups are valuable in game publishing because they prevent multiple studios from solving the same technical problems in parallel. If a support team is reduced, the usual outcomes are decentralization, heavier reliance on third-party tools, or a narrower set of experiments attached to fewer games. None of that automatically signals project cancellations or delays, and no such outcome has been confirmed here, but it does suggest that Take-Two is rethinking how it wants AI work organized.

The practical takeaway is that this looks less like an abandonment of AI altogether and more like a decision about where AI investment should live. The next useful signal will be whether Ghost Story Games and 31st Union continue that work with smaller internal teams, outside partners, or a more limited scope.