Ron Libend, Zynga’s senior vice president and head of its mobile studios, says artificial intelligence is already making game development and marketing faster, cheaper and more efficient, but has not yet produced a true breakthrough in gameplay. In an interview with Calcalist, the senior Israeli executive at Zynga, which was acquired in 2022 by Take-Two, argued that AI is a "force multiplier" rather than a "game changer" for the industry.
Libend said AI should be judged in two ways, whether it helps teams work faster and whether it enables content that was previously impossible. On the first point, he said the industry is already seeing benefits across marketing, design, analysis, product and engineering. On the second, he said, "no one has done with AI something that was not possible before without AI."
He gave an example from a Turkey-based studio making a niche game for the Turkish market, where AI-generated creative made it possible to target Turkish speakers in Germany. Before AI, he said, spending $200,000 on that effort would not have made business sense. He added that AI is also being used internally to create prototypes quickly and test core gameplay ideas, even if the resulting code is not production-ready.
Libend said the most important question in development is still the risk-reward balance. For a major franchise like Words With Friends, Zynga prioritizes stability and preserving the experience. For a new title, the company is more willing to change and iterate quickly with AI to find the most fun version. He also stressed that social features remain central to mobile games, citing Empires & Puzzles, because games without alliances, groups and player interaction lose much of their value. Even if AI can generate a solo game, he said, it cannot recreate the social ecosystem around it.
