Over the weekend, Crimson Desert maker Pearl Abyss apologized for shipping the open-world blockbuster with AI-generated art in it and for not disclosing that fact to players. Ex-Blizzard president Mike Ybarra spent the weekend telling the studio it had nothing to be sorry about.
“Why apologize?” he wrote to the Crimson Desert social media account on X. “AI, in one form or another, will be in every single video game. I don’t get why devs feel the need to bend over for the few folks who can’t accept the reality that AI will be in every single thing – from video games to your fridge (it already is). Man up.”
The sentiment, delivered with all the bravado and self-awareness of Eastbound & Down‘s Kenny Powers, went over like a lead balloon. Ybarra was a nearly 20-year veteran of Microsoft and Xbox when he joined Blizzard in 2019 and was elevated to co-president in 2021 amid the studio’s workplace reckoning. But despite his penchant for posting things online, Microsoft ditched him after it took over following the Activision Blizzard acquisition in 2023. He now runs a sports betting startup called Prize Picks.
Why apologize? AI, in one form or another, will be in every single video game.
I don’t get why devs feel the need to bend over for the few folks who can’t accept the reality that AI will be in every single thing – from video games to your fridge (it already is).
Man up.
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) March 22, 2026
When one fan wrote back, “I’m so glad you’re not ruining Blizzard anymore,” Ybarra responded with, “Hope you enjoy co-pilot in WoW.”
Few mainstream gaming companies have taken Ybarra up on his “man up” defense of gaming AI so far. Even while developers and players speculate about a scourge of AI usage cropping up behind the scenes and slop continues to “accidentally” make it into finished games, no big studio has yet had the stones to just tell gamers something along the lines of “get used to it.”
The closest we’ve gotten so far was a live-event jab from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week when he accused the internet of being “completely wrong” about DLSS 5 superimposing generative AI over game visuals. It doesn’t appear to have worked.
