Nick Apostolides Says AI Cannot Replace Human Voice Acting, Points to Arc Raiders' 15 Million Sales As Proof Studios Can Afford Actors

Nick Apostolides, the voice of Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil 4 Remake and the recently released Resident Evil Requiem, addressed the ongoing debate around AI voice acting in a recent interview with PC Gamer's video producer Midas Whittaker, arguing that studios behind commercially successful games have no financial justification for replacing actors with generated audio.

His comments arrive in the wake of Arc Raiders, released last October, where developer Embark Studios used AI to fill out voice lines — a decision that drew sustained criticism from the industry. Baldur's Gate 3 actor Neil Newbon previously called the practice "dull as hell," questioning why studios don't simply re-record lines with actors once a game finds success. The Demonschool developers stated they would rather "cut off our own arms" than use AI in their work.

Apostolides put the financial argument plainly.

"AI generates a lot of content, yes, it can do that, it's a tool. But for to feel the need to replace actors when a game can sell 15 million copies or so, as Arc Raiders did, to pay for an actor's voice session is not that big of a deal."

— Nick Apostolides

Arc Raiders sold 15 million copies. At that scale, Apostolides's position is difficult to argue against on purely economic grounds — a voice recording session represents a fraction of the revenue a release at that tier generates.

His broader case rests not on cost, but on what human performance actually delivers.

"I think what people love about games today is that they are so human. The stories are so real, the emotions are real, you get so invested in these characters, and I don't believe AI can do that. AI can speak lines, but there's nothing human behind it."

— Nick Apostolides

I think the sharpest version of this argument applies specifically to narrative-driven RPGs — Larian's games being a clear example — where an actor's breath, identity, and interpretive choices build the character as much as the writing does. AI can approximate those qualities with enough engineering, but at a resource cost that would likely exceed what studios spend on casting real performers. The economics flip entirely once the complexity scales up.

Apostolides acknowledged that AI's presence in the industry is permanent, regardless of where individual actors or developers stand on it.

"AI is here, there's no turning it off, there's no dialling it back. I think it's coming at us full speed ahead, and it's going to have effects on the creative industry, on every industry, a lot for good, but when it comes to art — that is human-born."

— Nick Apostolides

"We're going to have to learn how to evolve with it. And I think things are inevitably going to change in the next few years, but we're just going to have to navigate this together and roll with it."

— Nick Apostolides

Apostolides made these comments having just finished work on Resident Evil Requiem, where he reprises Leon Kennedy alongside Angela Sant-Albano as Grace and Antony Byrne as Victor Gideon. The contrast between human-performed games like Requiem and AI-assisted titles like Arc Raiders is not simply a matter of quality — it reflects fundamentally different design priorities. Arc Raiders centers social gameplay and third-person shooting; its story functions as background scaffolding. Requiem treats performance as a primary feature. Both approaches exist, but I see no version of the argument where generated audio outperforms Byrne's Victor or Sant-Albano's Grace within a story-driven context — those performances carry a specific human texture that current AI tools cannot replicate at comparable cost or quality.

Read also, a Resident Evil lore guide covering thirty years of the series — from the 1996 original through to Requiem as the ninth mainline installment — breaks down the pharmaceutical conspiracies, recurring characters, competing organizations, and viral strains that form the connective tissue leading into Requiem's story.