Is your favorite video game being written by a human with a soul, or a server farm crunching probabilities? The industry loves to sell us on the "efficiency" of artificial intelligence, but it turns out that when you try to replace human craftsmanship with an algorithm, your customers are more than happy to hold you accountable.
The real story here isn’t the technical capability of machine translation — it’s the massive chasm between corporate PR and the community’s demand for human labor. At the end of March, Max Hejtmánek, the English editor and voiceover director of Warhorse Studios’ Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, announced on Reddit that his position had been made obsolete "in favor of using AI for all translations going forward." This claim sparked a firestorm that the studio was clearly unprepared to manage when they stepped into the lion's den of the r/gaming subreddit yesterday.
When Corporate PR Meets Reddit Reality
The recent AMA (Ask Me Anything) session, as spotted by IGN, was a disaster by any standard metric. The Q&A was hosted by five senior staff members, including creative directors Viktor Bocan and Prokop Jirsa. Rather than discussing the artistic merits of their upcoming title, the team spent the session fending off a barrage of pointed inquiries regarding Hejtmánek’s March disclosure.
The studio’s previous attempts at damage control were remarkably thin. On March 30, a spokesperson told Kotaku that the company is "talent-driven" and "deeply values the people who shape our work." That kind of boilerplate statement might work in a press release, but it does nothing to satisfy players who see the displacement of a professional editor as a direct threat to the quality of the games they love.
The Cost of Ignoring the Human Element
The gaming community has a very low tolerance for what many call "AI slop," and the developers at Warhorse Studios learned this the hard way. The Reddit thread was so thoroughly derailed by questions about the studio’s translation practices that a subreddit moderator eventually intervened to post a locked statement from the developers. The team attempted to pivot, stating, "We do not use AI-generated content in the final game and we have no plans to change this in the future."
This is a complete reversal of the narrative that triggered the initial outcry. When one user asked, "I always dreamt of working as a translator for Warhorse Studios, do you think I have a chance?" Jirsa responded with a sharp, public commitment: "Definitely. We are currently in the process of hiring new translators. Yes, actual humans. Plural."
The Future of Translation in Gaming
This episode is a stark reminder that consumers are hyper-aware of the labor behind their entertainment. When companies treat their staff as disposable assets to be swapped out for a "Gemini premium subscription"—a suggestion that remained unanswered during the AMA—they shouldn't be surprised when their audience rebels. For the ordinary user, the question is no longer just about whether a game is "good," but whether the studio behind it respects the human effort required to create a world worth playing in.
The next reading of the studio’s hiring board and the eventual launch of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II will show whether this commitment to human translators is a genuine change in direction or just a temporary retreat from bad press.
