The Most Honest AI Adoption Story in Gaming

biz ran a story about InnoGames using AI to keep Sunrise Village alive.  What came out was more useful, more honest, and in a few places, a direct contradiction of the article that started the conversation. Listen to the full conversation with Thimas Lehr The decision wasn't a pivot.

It was a forced bet. Drop the “win-win” framing. Sunrise Village had hit a ceiling.

Lehr was upfront that the revenue numbers in the original piece, sourced from SensorTower, undercounted reality since they miss direct-to-consumer and browser revenue. But the actual number doesn't change the structural problem: a 25-person team on a game that had plateaued for years, with no path back to growth. The options on the table were 1) a skeleton crew, 2) outsourcing, or 3) AI.

Lehr killed the first two fast. A skeleton crew without tooling just slow-bleeds a game to death; you can't produce enough content to retain players, so you're choosing a slower version of the same outcome. Space Ape sold us the “Lean Live Ops” narrative back in 2018 .

That story didn’t last the test of time. Outsourcing brought management overhead and a loss of ownership that InnoGames wasn't willing to trade for. AI was the only option that didn't involve managing the decline.

Key takeaway #1: If you’re sitting on a plateaued title, the AI question only gets interesting once you've ruled out the boring alternatives. Most studios never get that far. They jump straight to the AI pitch deck without doing the elimination work first.

25 people became 3. Nobody got laid off. Three people now run Sunrise Village.

And the other 22 didn't leave the company; they moved to a new title, Cozy Coast. In real life, revenue didn't hold flat either, despite what the article implied. It kept declining, just much more slowly than before the AI transition.

“At least it slowed the decline drastically,” Thomas Lehr said, on what AI actually did to the revenue curve Sunrise Village is not an AI growth story. Downloads have halved. Revenue is down by a fifth.

But it is a tale of profitability. The team size went from 25 to 3. The game went from deep red to green.

And that green is what allows InnoGames to invest in new games. This is the honest version of the InnoGames story: a 90% headcount reduction on one title that slowed, but didn't stop, an existing decline. ” Both things can be true, and the second one is the better business decision.