A Games Industry Translator Got Fired and Replaced With AI. The Reaction Tells You Where the Business Story Actually Is.

A translator who worked on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 posted this week that he'd been let go, replaced by AI, and wanted the people celebrating the game's success to understand something: the growing use of AI is costing real people real work. The post — amplified by Dexerto with 174 likes and 18 retweets in the first hours — landed with the particular weight of specificity. Not "AI is disrupting the games industry" but "I translated this game you love and now I don't have a job." The response on Bluesky was less sympathetic than resigned. One post with 97 likes linked to a piece about developers being forced to use AI tools against their will, describing the experience as "an overwhelmingly negative and demoralizing force" — and the framing wasn't outrage, it was exhaustion. This is the emotional register that the {{beat:ai-job-displacement|job displacement}} conversation has settled into lately: not protest, not denial, but the flat affect of people watching something happen that they were told wasn't happening yet. A separate Bluesky post, at 256 likes, cut even shorter: "The Big AI industry writ large did very much bring this PR clusterfuck upon themselves." No argument, no proposed solution — just the verdict. What makes this particular moment worth watching is the gap it exposes between the two simultaneous AI business stories running in parallel. The news feed this week was full of {{entity:chatgpt|ChatGPT}} hitting 800 million weekly users, {{entity:gemini|Gemini}} growing fastest among AI platforms, {{entity:anthropic|Anthropic}}'s Super Bowl ad paying off in App Store rankings. These are real numbers, and the coverage treats them as the business story. But the translator in Prague who localized dialogue for a game that sold millions of copies — his story is also a business story. It's just one that doesn't appear in the investor deck. As we've tracked {{story:games-industry-translator-got-fired-replaced-ai-e242|in our earlier coverage}}, this isn't an isolated incident; it's a pattern the {{beat:ai-creative-industries|creative industries}} have been absorbing for months while the financial press calls it disruption and moves on. The uncomfortable arithmetic is this: every localization contract that goes to an AI pipeline instead of a human translator is a data point that doesn't show up as a negative in {{entity:openai|OpenAI}}'s revenue figures or {{entity:google|Google}}'s usage stats. It shows up in a post that gets 174 likes and then disappears. The industry has gotten very good at making sure those two ledgers never appear on the same page.