[STEAM] Kingdom Come Deliverance translator allegedly fired amid AI push to ‘save finances’: ‘My position at the company would become obsolete in favour of using AI for all translations’

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AI is slowly crawling over the gaming industry, aiming first at those areas of game development that are "easiest" to replace, or rather, those where AI can produce results that would be "good enough" to a corporate suit and much cheaper than hiring an actual human to perform heavily contextualized work.

And while I expected this to happen sooner rather than later, I never thought I'd see studios that have built up a lot of goodwill and reputation in the industry be the first ones to jump on this horrible wagon. In a

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post verified by moderators, a former employee of Warhorse Studios, the developers of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, alleged they were made "obsolete" in their role as a translator as the company aims to replace all localization work with artificial intelligence.

"Yesterday, March 27th, 2026, with no forewarning, I was invited to a meeting and promptly told that, in an effort to 'make the company more effective' and 'save finances,' as of next month, my position at the company would become 'obsolete' in favor of using AI for all translations going forward," the employee, identifying themself as Max H, said.

They supposedly worked at the company for around four years and were "vocally" opposed to using AI in translation, but never to the degree that'd make them a target for a potential layoff.

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Max H's firing is especially worrying as they were in what's perhaps the most important localization team in Warhorse Studios, the one translating Kingdom Come: Deliverance from its native Czech into the most-spoken language in the world—English. Getting a Slavic language, such as Czech, into a Germanic one like English can be a painstaking process where a lot of contextual knowledge of both languages and their related cultures is necessary to make the translation feel natural.

I myself occasionally do translation work from a Slavic language (Montenegrin) to English, and I can't even begin to describe how challenging it often is to successfully produce a high-quality localization that retains the original meaning and poetry of the language while feeling natural in a new cultural environment.

Using AI in such cases, especially since game writing oftentimes involves literary and poetic language, will undoubtedly produce poor results, as it can perform literal translations well but rarely localizes in a meaningful way. Instead, it averages the translation out and produces the closest result in meaning, but rarely retains either the style or the flair the original text might have had.

Warhorse Studios had built up an incredible reputation in the gaming industry, having put out the two Kingdom Come: Deliverance games to massive success and praise, especially due to the studio's adherence to historical accuracy and presenting things in an uncompromised manner. However, this move, if true, is a sure-fire way to compromise everything the studio might be working on and will only result in the overall reduction in quality of subsequent releases.

And all of that to save a few dozen grand on projects that already cost tens of millions of dollars.

Such is our reality in 2026.

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