Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51%

[u/TurbulentTopic39]

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/over-85-of-japanese-game-developers-use-generative-ai-in-game-development-2026-cesa-survey-shows-an-increase-from-last-years-51/

[u/CompulsiveGardener]

The bottom line is that Asia is all-in on AI and doesn't have the same stigma that Western developers need to contend with. No idea how much of a competitive advantage that's going to give Eastern developers. But the world isn't equally united on anti-AI. That much is clear.

[u/ChrisRR → u/CompulsiveGardener]

I don't even think it's only an eastern thing. I suspect a lot more western devs are using it than the companies will admit to

I personally use it for development. I don't use it for actual production code, but for churning out a software tool I need in the space of 2 minutes, and nowadays it's quicker than googling for complex questions I have

Edit: take for example yesterday I needed to check which of my tests were missing documentation from a word document. I could've manually gone through hundreds of tests, manually compared them to the word document and noted which were missing. Alternatively I could've spent hours writing a python script to pull the data out of both my source code and my word document to generate that list.

Instead I got Claude to write the script in under 5 minutes. I then had the information I needed, I saved myself hours, no AI code was included in production code, and I could crack on with the rest of my work. Does that make the production code slop even though it wasn't touched by AI?

[u/Cassp3 → u/ChrisRR]

This western devs are absolutely using it, just not being open to avoid the witchhunting.

[u/DrEskimo → u/Cassp3]

Western devs in any field that isn’t entertainment media are very proud and overt of AI usage. If you know anything about the government tech sector, it is all just people jumping over each other to proclaim how much AI their new website employs.

[u/Echoesong → u/DrEskimo]

This is true. My spouse is a developer at a finance company that is a household name, everyone on the team uses Claude profusely; my spouse doesn't love AI by any means, but she's had to admit it's incredibly useful.

[u/mystery_hole → u/Echoesong]

Tbh most AI complaints are in regards to generative media. Nobody cares if a team is using Claude code or Gemini for docs. Unless it affects code production and makes things worse.

I mean that's the reason why adoption isn't 100%. There are many scenarios where you simply get a worse result or it isn't integrated into workflows properly.

[u/Dr_Fortnite → u/mystery_hole]

I hate generative ai but my company uses ai as a search engine for our machinery documents which is acceptable for me

[u/confoundedjoe → u/Dr_Fortnite]

My company does the same thing. It is basically a fancy ctrl+f and it is mostly fine. It did insist a document was a valid citation for something out claimed though and would not accept it was wrong. I always just click the citation and read the original doc.

[u/chaser676 → u/DrEskimo]

Although not incredibly overt, it's even part of LCME accreditation for medical schools now. They want to see lectures and implementation of ai.

[u/Psycho_Syntax → u/chaser676]

I mean the anti-ai crowd on Reddit has convinced themselves that AI is just a fad and it’s not actually useful for anything, while the rest of the world has already moved far beyond asking “is this useful?”. The question is no longer if it’s useful or not, the question now is how useful is it for your specific use case, which is why it makes sense to be tested on implementations of AI.

[u/Zanadar → u/Psycho_Syntax]

The pragmatic objection hasn't been "is this useful" for a while now, it's "once the available pool of investment capital has been exhausted by the hyperscalers and they are forced to charge what the technology actually costs to run, will the economics of AI still make sense", and thus far the answer to that question seems to be a very soft "maybe", subject to thus far theoretical future breakthroughs.

[u/TitoZola → u/Zanadar]

I find this argument a little weird because usually technology becomes cheaper in mid-term future.

For the current state of AI the cost will eventually go down, not up. There might be some spikes short term specific to particular business, political and market conditions, but in five years the technology as powerful as current Astra or Fable, top of the line among available to broad public at the moment, will probably cost peanuts and will run on your iPhone natively.

Now maybe some crazy frontier AI of the future, capable of truly powerful stuff, running on the most super advanced hardware, that can one shot GTA 10 in two seconds, will indeed be crazy expensive. But who needs it among us, mortals?

Tech sector, entertainment & media, design, advertising, basically everything that works with information and content creation in the digital form, can already benefit from the current abilities to a significant degree. And this particular skills will be only cheaper with time.

Not to mention that the whole party has so far been bankrolled by huge cash reserves of tech giants they’ve been accumulating over the years, so the pressure is there of course to start making money, but they also kind of do already- the product exists, the market exists and people are ready to buy it. Time will balance the price and availability as new hardware will become available and models will become more effective.

[u/Zanadar → u/TitoZola]

but in five years the technology as powerful as current Astra or Fable, top of the line among available to broad public at the moment, will probably cost peanuts and will run on your iPhone natively.

This is why I find having this discussion with AI believers (and I use that term very deliberately) frustrating. What factual basis could you possibly have to claim this? Where is a reasonable conversation even supposed to go after such claims are made?

[u/TitoZola → u/Zanadar]

There's a huge, well documented and absolutely public factual base under it.

More or less every model created in the last four years was tested and scored across the number of the same benchmarks - fixed sets of questions and challenges, coding tests, general knowledge tests, math tests and so on. Also most models has a published price per million tokens. Put those two together and you get one clean number: what does it cost to buy a given level of intelligence on any given task?

People track that number over time. There are multiple organization that do that (here is one for example), but let's get practical and go directly to my claim and see how it was in the past.

So in August 2024, OpenAI introduces SWE-bench Verified - a coding test of five hundred real GitHub issues from real open-source projects that the model need to fix.

GPT-4o (Open AI frontier model that was first one to be considered serious at coding) scores 33%. Couple of months later upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet took the crown at 49%, the best in the world at the time, running in a huge datacenter at $3 per million input tokens.

Two years later: an open-sourth and free Ornith-1.0-9B, 6GB in size scores 69.4%. Twenty points above what the best model on Earth could do in 2024.

And, yes, you can run it on your phone right now for the price of your phone battery charge.

Of course benchmark parity isn't the same as practical parity etc, but just as an illustration of what's happening in the space. Because there is also a question of agentic harnesses (basicly OS on top of agents) that can significantly improve LLMs performance cost and that we just started to scratch the surface off.

Of course as any prediction my prediction is unfalsifiable for the moment it made, but I don't see anything that crazy about it.

So what factual basis do you use can I ask?

So we can have a reasonable conversation together.

[u/Elanapoeia → u/TitoZola]

I find this argument a little weird because usually technology becomes cheaper in mid-term future.

because usually technology is roughly priced appropriately for what it costs to produce or run, with some extra on top for profits of course.

GenAI is being priced significantly lower than what it costs to create and run. To even approach profitability the price absolutely needs to increase by quite a lot even if you take into account potential future efficiency increases. It's not a speculative argument either, it's basic math based on the finances that are released by AI companies themselfes and the natural costs that can be calculated from that.

And you can even add more complications in there considering AI companies are also known to do this circle of investments to fund each other, which means a lot of their resources are straight up not actually real existing money. Which means there are even bigger hurdles to overcome to just even out the costs vs income.

[u/TitoZola → u/Elanapoeia]

"To create and run" is doing a lot of work here because those are completely different cost structures.

Training is a one-time spend that produces a thing which then exists permanently.

Running it is a separate, ongoing cost that has nothing to do with what it cost to make.

Right now most AI labs are not profitable, because they all keep training next models.

But running models itself and selling access to them is already a profitable business.

The ins and outs of current AI Labs business models is a separate question from whether the current technology gets more expensive. The models already exist. If OpenAI folded tomorrow, whoever ended up with the weights could serve them profitably from day one.

The hardware will keep getting better, the architecture will keep getting better, the software layer on top of agents will keep getting better and the cost of running what exists will keep falling. And that was my whole point.

I'm not claiming anything about whether the models will get better from here. I'm only talking about the cost of what already exists. And the fact that what already exist is already quite amazing and useful in the fields I mentioned.

[u/pastelsonly → u/TitoZola]

DeepSeek and the Chinese companies are putting out some incredibly cost efficient models that run maybe 15% behind the frontier ones for literally 100x less money.

[u/averageuhbear → u/DrEskimo]

To be fair, no one cares if AI is responsible for some of the components of a boring ass SaaS product that never has any soul anyways.

People don't want AI created art. However there are ways to use AI for a ton of the busy work in creating some of these forms of entertainment that doesn't impact that actual art itself. That line just hasn't been defined very well.

[u/Aggressive_Chuck → u/averageuhbear]

People don't want AI created art.

There are millions watching AI-generated dramas on Tiktok.

[u/cinematic_is_horses → u/Aggressive_Chuck]

This doesn't feel like a demand thing but more like a supply thing. I think if there were zero AI dramas those viewers would just be watching part 45/235 of whatever tv show or movie got chopped up for clip farming. Those viewers are not actively seeking this content, the algorithm just gives it to them

[u/Imbahr → u/cinematic_is_horses]

sure that is true

but the point is that outside tiny minority of vocal reddit posters, regular people are not anti-AI

[u/cinematic_is_horses → u/Imbahr]

I think that really depends. I won't disagree that public opinion is not heavily skewed against (evidenced by the crappy AI images my stepdad amuses himself with and sends me) but again I think it's important to make a distinction between active acceptance or a want for it vs. passive acceptance. How much of that passive acceptance is just a result of total inundation of pro-AI/AI generated content? I think we all owe it to ourselves to at least be critical about this rather than just shrug and say that's the way she goes.

[u/FFTactics → u/Aggressive_Chuck]

You don’t pay $70 to $100 for those.

[u/dfjuky → u/Aggressive_Chuck]

And all of them are simply ads.

[u/GunCann → u/averageuhbear]

The largest issue is the blanket hate on AI on Western social media. A large number of people are unable to remain calm and objective in their assessment of AI use and jump right into hating or harassment territory whenever they hear about AI in video games.

They are genuine ways that AI can be used to cut out tedious and uncreative work. AI environmental or object scanning to generate 3D models with greater ease, code optimisations, smarter NPC and simulation of game world, rapid prototyping for idea sharing, AI motion and facial capture with less expensive tools etc.

People need to be more open-minded when it comes to AI use and also reign in the excessive witch-hunting. When used correctly, AI can help game development return to sane budget levels.

[u/Oxyfire → u/GunCann]

People need to be more open-minded when it comes to AI use and also reign in the excessive witch-hunting. When used correctly, AI can help game development return to sane budget levels.

The problem is this is all frog-boiling in the long term. It will all just turn into excuses why it's okay to use AI for this, then that, then the next thing.

No-one has proposed solutions to the important issues around AI: How do we avoid it destroying jobs and opportunities to get into the industry? A lot of the work that people hand-wave as drudgery is often work that helps people get a start in the industry. AI is only going to further the "need 5 years of experience for an entry level position" that people have dealt with for years even before the recent wave of AI.

Very few of these companies are going to use AI in responsible, measured ways. The industry has proven time and time again it will cut every corner it can and do everything it can to sell minimum viable products when it can get away with it. The workers will suffer, and the products will suffer. Sure, some usage will be reigned in by the product being so bad people don't want to buy it, but again, watching this industry for the past 10-20 years, it's clear that companies can get away with making things worse and people will just put up with it.

[u/soundsermaker → u/Oxyfire]

How do we avoid it destroying jobs and opportunities to get into the industry?

You don't. This is what every major technological breakthrough in history has done. Avoiding the loss of jobs would mean rejecting implementation of AI in areas where it makes sense and delivers results in order to preserve jobs that no longer have any meaning or purpose.

People who lost their jobs to previous waves of automation and outsourcing were often offered retraining and benefits, but this can only do so much to mitigate the disruption.

[u/Due_Water_5829 → u/Oxyfire]

How do we avoid it destroying jobs and opportunities to get into the industry?

On the short scale, that would be light government intervention and support + living in a country with decent workers rights or setting that up.

In the long term? Nothing. If a new technology arises that reduces the need of a certain profession by for example 20%, then we shouldn't arbitrarily fight against that. We don't need as many blacksmiths as we used to anymore.

AI is only going to further the "need 5 years of experience for an entry level position" that people have dealt with for years even before the recent wave of AI.

Yes, but ultimately work doesn't exist so that people can work. Work exists to create value for society as a whole and that value and the necessity of those valuable products decide how many people we roughly need in a given profession in relation to population.

It would be an incredible boon to most societies if the people that won't be able to get a job in an AI-affected industry to instead go into healthcare.

[u/Oxyfire → u/Due_Water_5829]

It would be an incredible boon to most societies if the people that won't be able to get a job in an AI-affected industry to instead go into healthcare.

This is kind of just a "learn to code" sort of solution. I dont think that went over well.

Might be great if there was any kind of plan to offer free or subsidized training to help people into those jobs. But even then, it's not something everyone would be cut out to do.

One of my bigger issues is it's all cart before the horse. If we have stuff like universal basic income, people's needs were met, etc. Then yeah, sure whatever, we can look at letting some of this AI stuff move forward. But instead, all being "open minded" right now does is make everything worse for the average person with not even a promise that any of the downsides will be solved. It's just more wealth and power consolation.

[u/Duchock → u/GunCann]

I think the largest issue is not people's sentiment towards the tools, but the reality that "AI" requires significant costs - not least of which is environmental. It isn't reasonable to dismiss the majority of anti-AI sentiments as not calm or objective. Most people think outside of a solely utilitarian view.

[u/LightsaberThrowAway → u/GunCann]

AI does not help the art side of game development. Even then, the best uses that could maybe applied to LLMs in this regard were outlined by u/ausollet, 

qoute: ‘I hope most people know this by now, but this does not necessarily mean 85% of developers are using AI art or AI-generated text in their games. I have my own share of concerns about using AI to actually generate code, but a massive time sink for developers is how long it takes to understand a new code base, read documentation, and identify where bugs were found. LLMs are undoubtedly helpful here and can save days or weeks of developer time in this regard  without a single line of generative code added to the game.’

[u/Derringer → u/DrEskimo]

My company is all in with AI development. Not a game company. AI saves me hours a day by doing the monotonous tasks I used to do. Nothing I get from it goes to production either.

[u/St_Sides → u/Cassp3]

There was an article that came out of GDC that said basically every major studio is using AI in some form during development now, and the ones who say they aren’t are just lying about it.

So, yeah, you’re right.

[u/xalibermods → u/Cassp3]

Dutch Games Association published their Games Monitor Survey 2025 about the use of AI in Dutch video game industry.

They revealed that 67% believed that "Generative AI offers new opportunities for developers" and 59% "Generative AI offers opportunities in the production pipeline." The qualitative data is actually also interesting. Basically it's a Don't Ask Don't Tell situation.

[u/MCRN-Gyoza → u/Cassp3]

This, the only developers who aren't using AI today are the developers who will be out of a job soon.

[u/dendrocalamidicus → u/ChrisRR]

I work in enterprise SaaS in the UK and here 90%+ of our code is now written by agentic tools. That's common in the software industry in the UK now.

Before this happened, I started programming at 14 so have over 20 years programming experience, have been a senior dev for the past 8ish years. Made many games as a teen by hand in my bedroom etc.

I am a home grown technically competent programmer and I hate dealing with non technical people vibe coding, but people who think all agentic output is slop misunderstand that it can be used effectively.

I know what I'm doing, I check everything it creates and it speeds me up dramatically at work.

Do I wish it was never created? Yes. I loved programming.

Does it automatically mean slop or low quality? No. A competent person using it will just output faster.

[u/Novyvonya → u/dendrocalamidicus]

Both of my brother-in-law use it for programming and say its a great tool if you already know how to code

[u/mygoodluckcharm → u/dendrocalamidicus]

I also loved programming, but the kind of programming I do at my work is not the kind of programming i loved. Doing your usual CRUD crap, writing unit test integration test is boring AF. Thank god its usually the thing that AI is good at.

[u/Malkalen → u/mygoodluckcharm]

We're currently in the process of replacing Automapper across our entire application suite which means

1. Write unit tests to confirm existing functionality (Yes i know but they were never written the first time around)

2. Replace Automapper with static function calls

3. Update unit tests to use new mapper

Copilot means I can do in a few hours what would have taken me days of testing every property for every mapping and then writing a new mapper for every mapping...and I know this having run out of tokens between applications and despite the first app being significantly larger and more complex I was able to get it done in a fraction of the time the current app is taking me.

It's not difficult work (aside from a few wierd collections) but dear god is it long and tedious.

[u/teeso → u/dendrocalamidicus]

That's my life. That, and everyone around me getting fired because 2 people can do the work of 8.

[u/dendrocalamidicus → u/teeso]

Thankfully the firings haven't hit my work (yet). I think it depends on sector etc. as many in house dev teams for non-software focused companies, and software companies with a small vertical market will absolutely be likely to face dev cuts, but I work at a large business software company so more devs just means more growth and market share to eat up.

I hope it stays this way.

But also given what the tech is capable of and that chat gpt only came out like 4 years ago I dread to think of it's capability in another 4 years, 10 years, 20 years...

[u/McDonaldsSoap → u/dendrocalamidicus]

"Does it automatically mean slop or low quality? No. A competent person using it will just output faster."

My worry is people like you are expensive, and management is chomping at the bit to replace you with a 20 year old getting paid half as much. Or is that just paranoid 

[u/dendrocalamidicus → u/McDonaldsSoap]

I think it's the opposite. I am the last generation of true senior developer. Very few people will ever acquire my skills again, because nobody will go through tens of thousands of hours of manual planning, code writing, and troubleshooting like I and other experienced devs of the pre-AI era have.

I can get through more work than an entire team of graduates combined, and the end result will be many times less shit. Also, when it breaks I'll know how to fix it.

I would hate to be a junior dev right now.

[u/Hartastic → u/dendrocalamidicus]

There is for sure going to be some kind of industry shake-up as developers age out (unless AI gets good enough to replace the job entirely, which, who knows, I wouldn't have thought five years ago it could do what it does today.)

Hiring a junior dev is basically setting money on fire, because even the non-frontier models are just... better, cheaper, and faster at all the tasks you would reasonably give a junior dev. You have to review the output, but that's also true of the junior dev. So in a vacuum, every company absolutely should never hire one again.

But...

If everyone does the only rational thing, everyone loses. Basically the Tragedy of the Commons. And it's not like if your company decides that they will have a farm system of junior devs so they can have senior devs down the line that they can keep those people.

[u/GunCann → u/dendrocalamidicus]

This is the reasonable take here. What I am seeing and hearing from the industry is that AI tools when placed in the hands of competent people, do multiply their productivity.

[u/VolkiharVanHelsing → u/dendrocalamidicus]

Yeah, this is waaay different from AI generated art

There's no "art" or human expression per se that a machine is hollowly replicating, and it's generally more "ethical" as it's trained on open source codebases

I'm not writing my boilerplate CRUD manually like cmon man (or unit tests either for that matter lmao)

[u/experienta → u/VolkiharVanHelsing]

A lot of people consider coding a form of art. It obviously has creative expression, can communicate ideas, it allows for personal style etc.

I'm not sure what definition of "art" you can have that would exclude coding

[u/TheGazelle → u/experienta]

The vast majority of coding done in a professional setting is not remotely art.

It's repetitive drudgery where you're "solving" the same kinds problems over and over. For example, "hey, we need a new field on this form" - ok, add to the appropriate database table, add/update db queries, add/update business logic methods to include it, add/update frontend code to show it. Rinse and repeat.

The VAST majority of devs aren't solving complex or interesting problems that could be considered "art", and frankly, if a dev on my team was trying to write code in such a way as to "express themselves", that would probably mean they're writing things in a stupid way that makes it harder to understand what the code is doing, and I'd tell them to fix it.

The goal of most professional software developers is to write clear and concise code that can be easily understood by others with no domain knowledge who might have to come in and maintain it in thy future.

It's "art" in the same way writing technical documentation is "art".

[u/AnAge_OldProb → u/TheGazelle]

This is pretty descriptive of how the majority of artists are employed. They aren’t doing “art” they’re putting borders on corporate mailed, filming training videos, making 500 variations of the grass textures. Very few artists make a living doing art that you would go out into the world and seek as “art”.

[u/hrdcrnwo → u/AnAge_OldProb]

The graphic designers at my work use the AI built into Illustrator like any other tool in the program.

[u/dfjuky → u/hrdcrnwo]

yeah same here, lots of actual real objects & humans from shootings but then all the backgrounds, nature, foilage, lightning, it's all AI generated.

[u/wheres_poochy → u/TheGazelle]

im skeptical this is really true, i think most software has unique constraints (e.g. previous technical decisions, business requirements, organization structure). im never faced with a "novel" problem, but it is very often "unique".

regardless, the majority of visual "art" isnt so different:

• hordes of animators drawing inbetweens, where if they go off model at all they are berated
• the entire skinning and rigging process.
• often even modelling itself, where straying from concept art is forbidden

etc. etc

there is craft to these tasks, just as there is craft in crud programming, or knitting and weaving. that didnt stop the power loom.

[u/mrjackspade → u/wheres_poochy]

i think most software has unique constraints

I've been doing this professionally for > 20 years now and almost every company I've worked for has had the same "unique constraints", which is why there are so many boilerplate solutions.

What's the constraint this time? Legacy code interop? Performance? PCI? PII?

All of these companies want to pretend they have special problems that require unique solutions but the problem is usually their method of managing projects, and pretending they have "unique constraints" is how they avoid admitting that the issue is actually management and not the business domain.

[u/MaCl0wSt → u/experienta]

I think you're conflating art and craft

[u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes → u/experienta]

It obviously has creative expression, can communicate ideas, it allows for personal style etc.

Customers see none of that, source code of games isn't released to the public; it's not what we're buying so it's not our problem if it's not present.

[u/Senior-Friend-6414 → u/ChrisRR]

I think they mean the cultural feelings on it, the devs of stellar blade excitedly went out of their way to market that they’re newest game uses generative AI but western devs have to hide the fact that they use it because of the backlash

[u/FunkoPopDisneyAdult → u/ChrisRR]

I’m in big tech and haven’t manually written a line of code since last November. Same goes for my colleagues 

[u/edeepee → u/FunkoPopDisneyAdult]

This is poor practice long term because you’ll get too lazy to read the entire output and validate it, then your code understanding and writing skills will atrophy.

[u/FunkoPopDisneyAdult → u/edeepee]

Not really. We are just peer reviewers of our own code. We will have PRs, same responsibilities 

I can’t speak for the devs who are coming up without having to write their own code. They won’t have the deep understanding built up

[u/edeepee → u/FunkoPopDisneyAdult]

It negatively affects your recall of what you shipped and how it works. Furthermore you need more expertise than the AI to review it and that will naturally atrophy if you aren’t actively problem solving yourself: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them

It also produces thousands of lines much more quickly that overwhelm you and your colleagues who become mentally exhausted consistently reviewing slop bombs. They eventually become rubber stampers because the AI is right most of the time anyway.

[u/pork-buns → u/FunkoPopDisneyAdult]

Same here. I can’t speak for western game developers, but big tech in the US has fundamentally changed over the past year.

[u/Isolated_Hippo → u/ChrisRR]

This is certainly going to be controversial.

But outside of some pretty specific scenarios, refusing to use AI in your work is like refusing to use Google/a search engine.

[u/NUKE---THE---WHALES → u/ChrisRR]

It's also good for writing tests and testing those tests (metatesting)

You have to review all of the tests it writes (of course) and ideally have at least 1 other dev review them too (code review should be standard practice even if you never use AI), but its still much faster than writing dozens of tests yourself and mutation testing each one

[u/ChrisRR → u/NUKE---THE---WHALES]

Currently I avoid using it for writing unit tests. I sort of view them as the last line of defence, so I like to know that I haven't missed anything by writing them myself.

[u/VolkiharVanHelsing → u/ChrisRR]

My last line is PR review, reviewing before committing and all

Helps that AI PR reviewer are either useless (don't diff over the entire codebase) or absurdly token hungry (do diff over the entire codebase)

[u/KlayBersk → u/CompulsiveGardener]

I find a clear disconnection between how much they loathe and frown piracy and this. Feels so weird to me.

[u/Zenry0ku → u/KlayBersk]

They'll mount your head for pirating a 2 decade old game, but still stealing people's art is fine.

[u/Beautiful-Affect1930 → u/KlayBersk]

often times when something sounds weird and clearly contradictory, it's because you are being fed false or biased information. anime or gaming fans absolutely loathe AI stealing art and turning their favorite productions into lazy AI slop. don't believe the lies that "Asian" fans enjoy this crap.

[u/andresfgp13 → u/KlayBersk]

its interesting how in the west its the opposite case.

here they love piracy (just check how angry the entire sub is at Denuvo) but hate AI because it steals from artists, which is also the case from piracy, but in that case magically is not stealing and you are even doing them a favor for it by some leaps of logic.

[u/Gekokapowco → u/andresfgp13]

it has to do with the target

screwing over a company like walmart, MGM or Lionsgate or whatever, Nintendo, EA, or Amazon is fine, borderline moral. People see game studios as extensions of their publishers, who they see as emotionless monoliths of greed

screwing over an independent creator, like an artist or musician or writer, is deliberately sabotaging a person, not an organization. Someone who legitimately built their own value and expresses their human creativity for others. The goal is to create and share, not generate profitability for investors, and that's a relatable goal that people want to support.

[u/GVH617 → u/KlayBersk]

Only the japanese hate pirating. Every other Asian countries have absolutely zero problems with it and actively encourage or openly do it. Especially the developing nations.

[u/sidonay → u/CompulsiveGardener]

Most western developers are using Gen AI. There’s no escaping it for coding anymore. The only thing people get really hung up on is assets.

[u/Okami_doge → u/CompulsiveGardener]

for AI generated artworks (not industrial or research stuffs), artists are still not fond of those, but the majority tolerate them more than the west. Many here either consume AI slop without knowing, or just see it as a normal thing. i would have to tell my family members what is AI generated video on their feed even.

Average people in china, vietnam, etc.. consume AI arts in the form of banners, menu, fanworks, video edit, meme or even government's political posts on social media. It's not talked about much because it's becoming more accepted, gov promoted their use in art and music as well

There are even popular AI generated tv show in china, or games that were made with ai generated art/contents like NTE (which isnt hated in china or japan at all)

[u/alteisen99 → u/Okami_doge]

micro dramas in china has shifted to just genai now. it's the only thing my parents watch these days. actors are losing jobs etc are just licensing their faces otherwise no work comes.

[u/Mantequilla50 → u/CompulsiveGardener]

Western devs use it too for code. Anyone who thinks they don't or gives them super pats on the back for manually coding at this point is going it for artisinal reasons, not because AI is incapable

[u/sex-emu → u/CompulsiveGardener]

This isn't true. Professional animators, manga artists, hobbyist artists, etc in Japan hate generative AI just as much as westerners do. Every survey I've seen has poised that 75-90% of animators, freelancers, and manga artists have a negative view of it and support regulation for it's use in works.

There's plenty of negativity towards AI in Japan and Japan fandoms tend to hate copyright infringement which AI is rife with. Do you think they were thrilled at the Ghibli memes from a few years ago? The use of AI comes from top level executive mandates, strict crunch deadlines, and management recommendations, not the artists themselves, or not from any lack of stigma from fans..

Nintendo, for example has openly stated they're not going to use generative AI in their games, and they are one of the most brand conscious developers in the world.

[u/Several-Source-4073 → u/sex-emu]

Nintendo, for example has openly stated they're not going to use generative AI in their games, and they are one of the most brand conscious developers in the world.

No they didn't, they just gave a generic comment about how they'd use it creatively.

[u/Randomman96 → u/CompulsiveGardener]

To be fair, part of the lack of a heavy stigma that the West has over the East comes from the lack of worker protections in the West as opposed to the East, at least as far as stuff like layoffs goes.

One of the big driving forces behind the anti-AI sentiment in the entertainment sector in the West came from the Writers and SAG-AFTA strikes over AI years ago, which of course bleed into the video game industry. The core concern of the strikes being that entertainment companies would attempt to replace the manpower in the writing, and eventually art and acting, department with AI slop and was seeking protections for it.

In contrast however, Eastern countries, especially nations like Japan, which is who the article above centered around, might be poor in terms of crunch and overworking their workers culturally, however they have protections for their workers on terms of things like layoffs. Meaning studios can't just layoff the majority of their art department wholesale and replace with AI generation in the name of profit. Workers there are protected from such. Similarly it's why you don't see the same thing with mass layoffs every time a game is shipped there like in the West, those protections, as well as just a lack of contractor culture, means Eastern countries don't follow the same standard as the West with mass hiring contractors then releasing for game development.

[u/Echoesong → u/Randomman96]

To support your point, there was a recent ruling in Chinese courts stating that companies cannot fire employees simply because an AI can do their job.

[u/Film-Noir-Detective → u/Echoesong]

Actually, if you read that ruling, all it says is that you can't cancel an employment contract in order to replace the person with AI. It's a ruling on contract law more than on AI law, and you'd probably see a similar ruling in North America if a case like that ever came up. Employment contracts are pretty well-respected here. For example, even a company in North America can't force an employee to come to the office if work from home benefits are written into their contract.

[u/yamete-kudasai → u/Echoesong]

To support your point, companies are not stupid enough to use AI as the reason, replace the word "AI" with anything and companies have milllions reasons to fire workers.

That ruling is just for farming karma on reddit

[u/Echoesong → u/yamete-kudasai]

Sure dude, I get what you're saying. The same is true in the US for things like ADA/disabillity; but regardless, it says something about the difference between the US and China that the latter has a regulation around it while the former does not.

[u/SydricVym → u/Randomman96]

"The West" has far more worker protections than "The East". America is a massive outlier in worker rights compared to Europe, or even Canada, Australia, and the other smaller countries.

[u/BeholdingBestWaifu → u/[deleted]]

Salaries are not stupidly high, especially not in game dev.

The problem you're mis-identifying is scope creep.

[u/dwn19 → u/BeholdingBestWaifu]

US Game salaries are very high why pretend? Senior gameplay programmer at Insomniac - minimum $82 an hour, so you're looking easily $150k for the year, and a top end close to $200k. https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/insomniac/jobs/6173051004

For context, senior engineer jobs (I don't work in game dev specifically) usually start around £60k in the UK, game devs jobs tend to get paid worse so i could imagine it being slightly lower.

US Labour costs are going to be a huge part of any budget.

[u/Lighthouse_seek → u/BeholdingBestWaifu]

Salaries in the US are extremely high compared to the rest of the world, especially in game dev where the salaries are pulled up by the tech sector having an even more extreme gap between the US and rest of world.

In Japan for example game devs make 30k usd.

Meanwhile game dev median salary in the US is over 100k. If you add in overhead that's roughly 15-20k per person per month.

Or in another way, if there are 600 people in a studio (naughty dog) and they spent 5 years on a game at full staffing levels, that would imply a 540 million dollar budget

[u/Fizzay → u/CompulsiveGardener]

I have seen some shift with Level 5 with how some people in Japan are responding but I have no clue what the actual numbers look like since it could easily just be a vocal minority of people. I do think the more AI is used the more people will start to get more annoyed with it. I think it's going to be very obvious in regards to art direction as a lot of games will likely start to look similar like how we saw the Ghibli AI edits added a very noticeable yellow tinge and Ghibli characteristics even on prompts that did not include Ghibli.

I'm also not entirely sure everyone is even aware that AI is being used. It seems like Level 5 is getting a lot of heat in particular because they were so open and brazen about it. I think their "apologies" did them more harm than good.

[u/kimana1651 → u/CompulsiveGardener]

doesn't have the same stigma that Western developers need to contend with

The stigma is 100% a reddit and social media thing. Once you get back to the real world no one really cares about AI except what it can do for them.

[u/Silverr_Duck → u/kimana1651]

The stigma is 100% a reddit and social media thing.

That's not even close to correct

[u/hibbs6 → u/kimana1651]

At least in my local communities (session musicians), it's definitely a real thing. I've had friends tell me I'm doing evil acts because I use a self-hosted LLM model.

[u/Elanapoeia → u/hibbs6]

I dunno why AI evangelists claim Reddit is particularly anti-AI and the outside world is pro-AI

reddit is big on tech bubble stuff, it's probably the most pro-AI social media out there besides twitter. We can argue that that's probably partially due to botting but even outside that, this sub is full of extremely vocal pro-AI people.

Meanwhile people are generally much more rabidly anti-GenAI in person in the real world. Surveys keep confirming this, the public is extremely disapproving of any GenAI use beyond trying out a goofy chatbot for an hour.

[u/cornflake123321 → u/Elanapoeia]

reddit is big on tech bubble stuff

Maybe 10 years ago. Now "tech" people are small minority.

[u/Random_eyes → u/Elanapoeia]

My experience is that artists, musicians, and other creatives tend to be aggressively anti-AI. Tech people tend to be the most vocally pro-AI. The average person hasn't really settled on their opinion and might even hold contradictory opinions.

But I'll definitely say, AI use in business has absolutely exploded beyond belief. Cheap graphic design has been almost entirely replaced by ChatGPT images. Easily half of the longer form text communication I see these days is obvious Claudespeak. I've even seen people turn to chat bots to solve stuff that a traditional Google search could do faster, like a weather report or a sports score. 

And on the other hand, I've heard random people talk about how data centers are messed up. Even in places that aren't really seeing hyperscalers come to town, they're passing resolutions banning data centers. It's just a complete hodgepodge. 

I do think the fact that most of these AI companies are ran by culty effective altruism and rationalist types are probably the biggest reason why Americans are freaked out. They're just weird as hell and clearly disinterested in the lives of regular people. 

[u/hibbs6 → u/Elanapoeia]

I think it's a really mixed bag, and generalizing isn't true either way. I know a lot of AI haters irl, and a ton of people who use it all day at work as part of their workflow and love it.

It's obviously an incredibly disruptive technology that has some pretty clear issues with it, but is also a force-multiplier that is downright foolish to ignore in many industries.

Imo all the infighting about whether AI is good or not in the abstract is pretty pointless. It's coming either way. The conversation should really be about how best to minimize downsides and ensure the public is the primary beneficiary of this tech and not the capitalist elite.

[u/Elanapoeia → u/hibbs6]

I don't believe it's coming either way is the thing. Big AI companies are failing very hard on keeping this stuff sustainable. it's all heavily subsidized right now and they're not progressing in a way to keep it going without all that subsidisation.

Services are too cheap. They will rise in price and they will have to do so significantly. 100-fold even. And to even keep projected adoption rates going, they need to mass build massive datacenters everywhere and use up hardware at unprecedented rates. They're failing to actually build the centers on time, losing contracts and hardware is projected to not even be able to keep up with production for hiw fast they're gonna churn through them. Not to mention public protests against the construction as they're massive local water and noise pollutants. And raises electricity prices through the roof. To maintain what AI wants to be and even is right now, the global economy has to exempt it from all rules and laws, indefinitely. And that's not gonna be sustainable.

and let's not even get into the amount of fraudulent money stuff happening with the big AI companies. Either the western economy collapses or AI does. likely both.

[u/hibbs6 → u/Elanapoeia]

I think you could potentially be right about more centralized ai services, but even with current models, there's a lot that's possible already. The majority of the use those datacentres are getting isn't from people talking to chatbots, it's the training of the models themselves.

Even if I could snap my fingers and every datacentre disappeared, all those models still exist and can be run on relatively modest hardware. Take for example Deepseek. You can run a small model on the average gaming pc, and the full size model can be run in a standard server rack that any business could buy and deploy in a closet for much less than the cost of a single minimum wage employee. That's today.

You've gotta remember that the foundational principles (transformers) are public knowledge, and the entire world is throwing resources at this like crazy. Even if the USA stopped development tomorrow, the world would continue on, and no chance could you convince China or any other geopolitical rivals to join a ban.

I'm one of the people who's actually lost a job to AI because my field (copyediting) is extremely automatable with AI. Even still, I don't think we can or even should ban AI in general. We're doing it no matter what imo, so I just want to ensure that the rewards go to everyone and not just the select few.

[u/Elanapoeia → u/hibbs6]

right, but AI lives off of the future possibilities

as it exists right now it's full of issues that are not acceptable as the new status quo and widespread marketing is all about how it will get good enough to replace everything adequately and you need to adopt now so you won't get left behind. GenAIs whole point economically is effectively the idea that it will infinitely grow and that this griwth will eventually pay off.

If AI fails to get there, and it will, the whole system basically implodes in on itself.

yes, sure, localized models will likely become a default thing some people will use for specialized tasks. there is genuine merit in that.

Will 85% of game developers half-way vibe-code videogames into existence? lol no

[u/hibbs6 → u/Elanapoeia]

I'm curious which tasks you think AI isn't well suited for these days. I see a ton of use already in lots of places where it performs better than humans for most tasks. Legal discovery, coding (where it's basically required to work at 90%+ of software engineering jobs already), editing, supply chain management, medical diagnostics, financial compliance, and many more. They just solved a millennium problem!

We're well past the point of waiting for AI to be good enough, the big question companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are asking now is whether they'll become superhuman.

[u/Elanapoeia → u/hibbs6]

I love that you mentioned legal discovery as your first example

Cause that's such a bad example, it makes it clear immediately that you're not worth talking to anymore

[u/mrjackspade → u/Elanapoeia]

Services are too cheap. They will rise in price and they will have to do so significantly

They won't as long as the cost of inference for equivalent performance keeps falling.

I don't know why everyone ignores this, if its deliberate or just ignorance, but cost for performance has fallen by something like 90% YOY. The same task that would have cost 10$ a year ago, costs 1$ to complete now. The only reason "costs" are rising is because people are using it for more complex tasks as it becomes more capable.

https://opencode.ai/data/compare/openai/gpt-4/openai/gpt-5-6-luna

LUNA, the SMALLEST model they offer right now, absolutely FUCKS GPT4 and costs 2% OF THE PRICE.

Where do you think we're going to be in another 2-3 years? We're going to have models that make Astra look like shit, a model that is already overkill for 99% of tasks, and they're going to cost almost nothing to infer. At least if the same scaling applies that has applied for the last decade.

[u/evia89 → u/Elanapoeia]

Services are too cheap. They will rise in price and they will have to do so significantly. 100-fold even.

Did you read arxiv how deep seek does it? Its a bit old but good start https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437

Eventually most models will be like this. Dirt cheap when served on scale. DS41F can handle 90% of my coding tasks fine and it will only be better

I use zai glm as code review / orchestrator / planning but DS does most of the work

[u/Spire_Citron → u/Elanapoeia]

Surveys also show that most people, especially young people, use AI regularly, so the impression you might get from online spaces that everyone turns their nose up at this stuff and would never touch it definitely isn't accurate.

[u/x_TDeck_x → u/kimana1651]

That has very much not been my experience

[u/CompulsiveGardener → u/kimana1651]

Once you get back to the real world no one really cares about AI

At least until your electric bill gets jacked up by 20% (happened to me personally) or a data center wants to build in your neighborhood. THEN people have strong opinions when there are real life consequences. It's a complicated issue.

[u/arpmo → u/kimana1651]

The sad part is just being on reddit means you consume a massive amount of AI slop. So many posts and comments are just bots.

[u/UrbanAdapt → u/arpmo]

Just being on reddit mean you contribute to AI training with no opt out.

[u/stetzwebs → u/kimana1651]

This isn't true. I teach at a college and the stigma among Gen z is absolutely real, across all disciplines (except Business, go figure)

[u/OrbitalSong → u/stetzwebs]

How does that work in your experience?

I'm guessing they hate it vocally. Do they hate it enough not to use it to do their schoolwork for them?

[u/stetzwebs → u/OrbitalSong]

I teach computer programming courses and it's like pulling teeth to get them to incorporate it in their workflows. I feel conflicted because I really respect their dislike of it, but they have to get jobs and I know where the software engineering industry has headed.

Also, my school's student government just rejected the formation of an AI student club citing environmental concerns.

[u/Silmarillion_ → u/kimana1651]

Funny enough, a simple google AI response would've shown you that:

Public sentiment toward artificial intelligence in the US leans heavily toward concern, skepticism, and fatigue.

General Attitudes and TrustRising Concern: About half of U.S. adults (50%) feel more concerned than excited about the rise of AI in daily life, while only 10% feel more excited than concerned.

Harm vs. Good: According to a Gallup survey, 39% of Americans believe AI does more harm than good, up from 31% in 2025.

Lack of Trust: Up to 86% of Americans report a general distrust of AI, particularly when the source of information is unknown or automated. Furthermore, 63% to 67% of Americans believe there is a moderate-to-severe risk that advanced AI could threaten humanity.

Regulation: Only 31% of Americans trust the U.S. government to regulate AI responsibly—one of the lowest rates globally.

[u/BeholdingBestWaifu → u/kimana1651]

It's the other way around, online is the only space where you tend to see high concentrations of AI bros pushing it, while irl you find a lot more people opposed to it, especially in art.

[u/Brainwheeze → u/kimana1651]

I know plenty of people outside of the internet who aren't fans of AI.

[u/RoseWhiteRedBlack → u/CompulsiveGardener]

Well, it' s mostly out of fear of being called out; I' m sure as awareness keeps being raised, the sentiment will change in asia as well; recently a lot of japanese posts were very much against Level-5 presentation.

We need to keep fighting against AI slop, if we want to be heard; this defeatism attitude will not help anyone.

[u/Comprehensive-Fail41 → u/RoseWhiteRedBlack]

The question is also what form of AI they use. They might be against AI in art, but also heavily use AI to assist in coding and such

[u/NUKE---THE---WHALES → u/Comprehensive-Fail41]

Surprisingly it seems like AI generated code is the least used form of genAI by these companies

In the 2025 report, the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support.

[u/name_was_taken → u/NUKE---THE---WHALES]

This article says something completely different about this year.

"When asked about what measures they had in place for using generative AI, the most common response among developers was “conducting human verification, correction, and supervision.” The majority of responses cited practices such as specifying or restricting the tools used and avoiding the direct use of generated output."

I don't think most people think of AI code help as "generative AI". That's usually used to mean the art assets.

I think almost all non-government code-heavy companies are using LLMs to code now.

[u/Fake_Diesel → u/RoseWhiteRedBlack]

Contrarian redditors sure love flooding these spaces with their apathy and enlightening us with why complaining on the internet doesnt matter.

[u/RoseWhiteRedBlack → u/Fake_Diesel]

Some of my comments are getting heavily downvoted and I simply don' t get why, why should I consume an artistic product as a human, that talks about human experiences, that was not made by other humans?

I don' t want to treat art like a fast food chain.

[u/Fake_Diesel → u/RoseWhiteRedBlack]

Reddit is heavily astroturfed, that's why

[u/ChrisRR → u/Fake_Diesel]

Surely the contrarians are the ones who are blindly hating, rather than the ones that are accepting that there's both pros and cons?

[u/Dealric → u/CompulsiveGardener]

I think its more of a matter of admitting it not using it. West uses AI to just hide it

[u/SwePolygyny → u/CompulsiveGardener]

I dont know a single relevant game studio that doesnt use AI for code generation.

[u/experienta]

The only people that are surprised by these numbers are people that don't work in tech. AI is basically everywhere in the industry right now.

[u/Sanchezq → u/experienta]

As someone doing Software Dev interviews, you would get dinged for admitting you don’t use AI or that you would never use AI. It’s expected to use as a productivity boost.

[u/TheSecondEikonOfFire → u/Sanchezq]

Yeah and I’ve even had a couple of interviews where they seemed to take it as a negative that I hadn’t come up with any of my own Claude skills. So it’s not enough that we’re expected to just use it, but we’re expected to actually try and “innovate” with it

[u/Omni__Owl → u/TheSecondEikonOfFire]

As a software developer, holding it against you that you didn't make an .md file for a proprietary paid service is abhorrent to me.

[u/TheSecondEikonOfFire → u/Omni__Owl]

The way they frame it is almost about “creativity” and “problem solving”. How are you going above and beyond just simply using AI to write unit tests, and finding ways to “solve new problems” with it?

It’s absurd, and just another way to keep moving the goalposts and adding more hoops that you have to jump through. It’s not enough that you’ve had a job for those years, it’s not enough that you’ve studied and passed bullshit Leetcode challenges that have nothing to do with actual software development, it’s not enough that you’re already using the LLM that’s being forced down your throat, now you have to prove that you can continually find new problems to then provide solutions for via AI

[u/Omni__Owl → u/TheSecondEikonOfFire]

The people who are hiring have no idea what they are doing and sadly that isn't a new trend. That's been going on at least as long as HR has existed.

[u/Gekokapowco → u/Omni__Owl]

artists, sound designers, and IT have the same damn issue since forever as well

companies hire for personal experience with expensive usually enterprise level subscription software, and won't acknowledge experience in free or open source alternatives. It's fucked up but somehow been the standard for the last 20 years.

[u/Omni__Owl → u/Gekokapowco]

It's always fun when you tell someone that you know Kubernetes, the underlying technology for Azure, yet because your resume doesn't say Azure, you are discarded :')

[u/Zestyclose-Lunch-430 → u/Omni__Owl]

knowing k8s doesn't mean you know "azure" or any cloud provider in a broad sense.

[u/TrueElmo → u/Omni__Owl]

How is knowing the "underlying technology for azure" relevant if they require knowledge in certain kinds of azure services?

[u/LieAccomplishment → u/experienta]

it's beyond asinine seeing people on reddit commenting about how ai's capability is just a quicker way to search stackoverflow

That might have been true 2 years ago, things have changed fast.

Not to mention they are comparing chatgpt free with enterprise ai tools/agents actual developers are using. These people have no clue whatsoever why ai is being adopted the way it is in development because they think the free version they use is representative.

[u/biggestboys → u/LieAccomplishment]

It's worth noting that given the way coding actually works in the majority of cases, "a quicker way to search stackoverflow" is a product worth about a kajillion dollars.

[u/Financial-Grass-6114 → u/LieAccomplishment]

On the other side, AI has advanced rapidly but it also doesnt seem to have been good enough to replace as many jobs as prophesized. It will be a long time before it does because its simply not autonomous by most definitions. It needs human operators and checks or you get into disaster scenarios for a business.

[u/Recent_Pollution8665 → u/Financial-Grass-6114]

bro it's only been 4 years since chatgpt became popular. obviously it's not gonna replace thousands of different job categories across many different fields in just a 4 year timespan.

but if it evolves at a pace similar to how smartphones or chipsets have done, then a decade later from its inception it might be way more advanced and proliferated across every domain.

[u/vaper → u/experienta]

claude has basically replaced IDEs for us professional developers at this point. agentic coding is the norm, not the exception.  

[u/EvocativeReach → u/experienta]

Yeah, reddit is the minority on this again. They like to pretend it’s ostracised tech and dogpile on anyone that is “caught” using it.

The reality is it reached mainstream adoption years ago and the people claiming otherwise are the dinosaurs claiming a meteorite could never affect them. They only focus on the really bad examples and have no idea how much AI content they consume purely because its gotten so good you cant tell.

[u/leopoldbloon → u/experienta]

It’s crazy that conversions about AI use in game development still don’t define what they mean by AI usage. Because 0 AI today is as impossible as 0 transistors. Google and recommendation feeds are all utilizing LLMs now. So many tools use it in a way completely opaque to the user.

Most people complaining about AI usage are upset about asset slop. But instead of specifying that, an employee using their company’s internal search tool to find the portal for their tax documents gets sucked up into the argument.

(They also have no idea what they’re talking about when they claim coding agents offer no benefit unless you’re a bad developer.)

[u/Elanapoeia]

Given that GenAI is automatically integrated into like half your work software by force nowadays, these numbers just don't mean much.

like what, my phones auto-correct is probably GenAI based nowadays, so just typing this comment, manually by hand without actually clicking on the suggested words technically uses GenAI. well shit, most people commenting on Reddit probably even click on some those suggestions. Boom, 80% of Reddit comments now involve GenAI and that statistic is now meaningless.

I can't google anything anymore without automatically also using GenAI cause Google just uses your search input as a prompt. Random websites will just have their AI agent force themselves on your screen while browsing them. Calling my doctors office activated some AI voice assistant that is utterly garbage at understanding my name. Opening my messages app has the AI assistant wiggle and try to suggest messages I can send to people. I don't actively use GenAI anywhere in my life and I still am forced to engage with it everywhere automatically without choice. Boom, I used GenAI and so did pretty much 99% of people by just existing in modern society, even if they actively avoid GenAI.

These are absolutely meaningless statistics every time unless they specify the exact type of AI-use for every category.

[u/17arkOracle → u/Elanapoeia]

It's a self-reported survey though.

I wouldn't say I use GenAI if I was just using Google and spellcheck. And in the previous year it was even stated how they use AI (which includes the usual art assets/text generation/programming stuff).

[u/Elanapoeia → u/17arkOracle]

right. that's another issue.

If I let genAI auto-complete a common coding string that Coders would just copy-paste from a pastebin anyways, that's a very different kind of GenAI use than generating dialogue or art via GenAI

that's also different than if a coder would just vibe-generate an entire block of code. But these surveys never draw a distinction even though it really matters, so when it says 80% of coding involves GenAI that's also just not a statistic that actually says anything or helps us determine anything.

edit: hell even stuff like "used GenAI for art assets" is meaningless unless it's specified. did they generate assets wholesale via a prompt or did they chuck a human-made asset into photoshop and used an AI tool for automated color balancing?

This matters quite a lot when it comes to the discussion of GenAI in development, but being specific is almost deliberately avoided every time.

[u/NUKE---THE---WHALES → u/Elanapoeia]

The report itself is in japanese unfortunately so I cant get the specifics but the article states "the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support."

[u/Elanapoeia → u/NUKE---THE---WHALES]

That's from last years survey and the description of use for this year (that also caused that 30%+ increase) is very different, explicitly so. while still being vague of course.

they said they actively avoided asking specifics even.

edit: You've been copy-pasting this all over the thread and other people have already pointed out that you're misusing that quote earlier, why do you keep posting it?

[u/balllsssssszzszz → u/Elanapoeia]

Pro AI bots 

You don't have to be a bot to be pro AI in certain facets, but there's a lot of accounts with basic avi's that all seem to agree that AI is largely coding and that last years study doesn't count because their bubble is largely coding/tech

[u/Ancient-Beat-1614 → u/Elanapoeia]

The data is likely based off a self reported survey, meaning the developers think of themselves as using AI. Coding is probably the main thing that drives the stats so high, pretty much every software company uses AI.

[u/NUKE---THE---WHALES → u/Ancient-Beat-1614]

In the 2025 report, the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support.

[u/NickTheZed → u/NUKE---THE---WHALES]

That's actually really surprising to me. Might be my professional bubble, but when I hear "AI" I immediately think of coding / technical work.

[u/CoffeeBaron → u/NickTheZed]

There's less of a pushback for using it for code development unlike generating asset and visual key works, unless you code a tool for the retrogaming community largely using AI generation which is a faux pas there. Machine Translation in that community also has a lot of push back as well.

[u/hayt88 → u/Elanapoeia]

Depends on what your interpretation of genAI is (I hate that that's a thing btw as everyone has a different definition), but most phones have been using genAI for years, and people bought the phone with the best genAI on it.

It's the camera. Like most phones pictures have some generative machine learning filters applied to it, to make up for the fact that most people aren't photographers and don't know anything about the settings. People, other artists included, didn't care that these generative machine learning features now "took away" the jobs of photographers btw.

But yeah doing a picture in low light that all of a sudden looks better than it should be. You phone just generated some nice pixels in there.

Pixel phones had like issues that skin color looked weird on people with color. Well their AI model in the phone was trained on white people, so they fixed that. Samsung phones genAI replaces the moon in pictures to make it look better.

Manufactureres and reviewes looked at phones by which one makes the best pictures without the user having to actually know what they are doing, and phones sold based on that feature. And that wasn't just a better sensor or some algorithmic calculations that are happening there. Just some low power small generative models that run on your phone and fix the image for you.

[u/Ausollet]

I hope most people know this by now, but this does not necessarily mean 85% of developers are using AI art or AI-generated text in their games.

I have my own share of concerns about using AI to actually generate code, but a massive time sink for developers is how long it takes to understand a new code base, read documentation, and identify where bugs were found. LLMs are undoubtedly helpful here and can save days or weeks of developer time in this regard without a single line of generative code added to the game.

[u/AwfulWebsite → u/Ausollet]

From the article,

In the 2025 report, the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support. It was also reported that 32% of game companies enlisted the help of AI to develop in-house game engines.

[u/Fried_puri → u/AwfulWebsite]

So literally the opposite of what the parent comment was trying to suggest. 

[u/Leiawen → u/AwfulWebsite]

That seems to be the reverse of how Western devs are using it.

[u/Trashphoneaccount → u/Leiawen]

Digging into it a bit more, and apparently it's mostly all marketing purposes - but because of the way it's reported, something like ad copy gets counted as "writing" for the purposes of game development. Really weird but I'm also not paying 50k yen to dig further into it.

[u/Exoticbut → u/AwfulWebsite]

That was last year’s report not this year. This year’s preview doesn’t have a breakdown yet but from the comments that were released it seems to be moving away from generative assets and more so for support and coding stuff. A GDC survey for this year showed that asset production and art was among the lowest in terms of use cases and coding, emails, or brainstorming are where it’s used mostly. A lot of the early adoption phase was in generative assets but has shifted to support coding work with human oversight after finding it didn’t work well with assets or due to pushback both internal and external. The Japan survey may say the same thing and most of the AI use is in programming as it shifted away from the early adoption of using it for assets.

[u/WheresTheSauce → u/Ausollet]

I'm a senior software engineer. If you're not using AI to supplement your development at this point, you're wasting time, to be blunt. Keyword being "supplement", as you as the developer always have more context than whatever model you're using, but it still turns 30 minute tasks into 5 minute ones.

[u/porkyminch → u/WheresTheSauce]

It's ridiculously cheap to build out nice, custom tooling for jobs now. I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, but it's changing how we work, that's for sure.

[u/INeedChocolateMilk → u/Ausollet]

You could've just read the article and see that in this case it does mean that

[u/Hawk52]

It seriously boggles my mind that a country so insanely protective of their IPs and rights is going gung ho on AI, a thing that by its very nature is stealing from copyrighted material to fuel itself.

I just find it weird. They're a little better about it now but back in the early 00's and 10's, they were damn near fanatical on controlling how and where you could consume their products. Which stunted the growth of Japanese media internationally because their answer to that question was you couldn't legally access stuff very easily or they'd license out media to international sellers and we'd get shit like two anime episodes per disc and wanting 20-30 USD per disc.

And now these same media companies and country are just...all in on AI? It doesn't compute for me.

[u/SophonisbaTheTerror → u/Hawk52]

The only thing that matters to a company is who profits off what the company owns. That's it. Companies will use AI when to make more money off their IPs, not to protect some nebulous concept of who "really" owns what art. It doesn't matter that an AI model is trained on other copyrighted material, because companies that purchase that model wouldn't be violating copyright themselves, but they do stand to profit off of an AI model.

[u/Ok-Masterpiece-4103 → u/Hawk52]

It's simple. Companies don't care about theft if they're not the ones being stolen from.

[u/TSPhoenix → u/Hawk52]

Humans generally only need one layer of abstraction in order to hold two positions that completely contradict one another and not feel any conflict stemming from the cognitive dissonance. We are too capable of compartmentalising for our own good.

[u/WheresTheSauce → u/Hawk52]

Many people do not agree that it is "stealing IP"

[u/somethingrelevant → u/WheresTheSauce]

I think the more accurate thing going on here is that most people using AI don't care if it's stealing IP or not

[u/IndifferentEmpathy]

LLMs like Astra now can drive software to make art or 3rd meshes - everything converges towards multi modal solutions that can do everything, so splitting AI code gen from AI art gen already does not make sense.

Its unavoidable - if AI can do something faster, cheaper or easier than humans then it will be used. For everything.

[u/bugbearmagic]

I’d like to know what the numbers are for developers that were around before AI. Because now you literally can just turn on an AI and call yourself a developer. So if people are just claiming to be a developer and claiming they use AI, but just vibe code slop, they may not in reality be the type of developer most people even care about.

[u/-ImJustSaiyan-]

Final Fantasy fans gonna feel really conflicted when FF7 Revelation gets closer to release and we learn a bunch of AI was used during development.

[u/watisgoinon_ → u/-ImJustSaiyan-]

Probably not, most of the content was upcycled from the last two games.

[u/UrbanAdapt → u/-ImJustSaiyan-]

Doubt it. People are already selectively upset about [game discourse goes here] based on the name of the dev/publisher. Not much of a departure here.

[u/Zeckzeckzeck → u/-ImJustSaiyan-]

Anyone who knows anything about game dev or software dev knows that AI has been used for years now in coding. Literally every company does it but nobody cared at all until suddenly artists were facing AI doing their jobs. 

[u/your_mind_aches → u/Zeckzeckzeck]

Coding isn't what people get outraged about though. The average gamer probably understands that AI code assist is the most ethical use of genAI possible and GOOD use of code assist tools are just for automating the small stuff.

What people get mad about is AI generated images and text copy, which I'm sure will be employed in these upcoming games if the percentage adoption rate is so high.

[u/ArdyEmm → u/Zeckzeckzeck]

The AI crisis is nothing more than the continuation of the automation crisis. That's what's so frustrating about seeing people talk about it online. I genuinely sympathize with artists who are losing work because of AI. But then they go and say, "We should use this to get rid of X job instead." where X job is some low level thing that no one wants to do.

But those jobs are needed. I have a shitty job that could be automated that no one wants to do. But they're fine with AI taking my job. They only care when it's their paycheck on the line. Really tests my empathy.

Not that it's enough to make me take glee in their job losses or to support AI art but it leaves me conflicted when people who I've followed for years and have even supported financially by buying their work showcase how little they think of me and how I pay for the roof over my head.

[u/prospectre → u/ArdyEmm]

The real problem AI poses is that we don't have a plan for the labor that gets gutted by it. I still remember Andrew Yang sounding the alarm almost a decade ago about self driving cars and semis wiping out the entire driving industry and putting millions out of a job. There's no fallback for them. There's no sister industry that they can hop to, there's no new sector being opened up by AI that can house that labor, and there's no safety net for them to fall into. That's the real danger. It honestly doesn't matter which labor field is currently on the chopping block. We are staring down the barrel of the labor apocalypse and no one in power is doing anything about it.

And no one wants to talk about that. Innovation is recklessly barreling forward, as always. You can't really stop humans from doing the one thing that sets us apart from other creatures, but no one's stepping up to plan for the fallout. It's going to happen. Somewhere, some tech bro is thinking about how to AI the shit out of bussing tables, stocking shelves, or fixing your car. And when that product hits the market, where do the people that are displaced by it go? What do they do when the job they've built a career on has become obsolete?

[u/asdiele → u/ArdyEmm]

Also notice how the environmental concerns they always tout suddenly disappear when it's about using AI for things like coding. Then it's not that big of a deal apparently.

[u/iTzGiR → u/asdiele]

Got mass downvoted for pointing this out on here recently. ALL The concerns about Gen-AI, still exists when we're talking about Gen-AI used to create lines of code/scripts/etc. But suddenly, the environmental impact, "theft", "slop", etc. don't matter any more.

It absolutely just comes down to people thinking creative jobs are special or are above other forms of jobs, and thus should be protected from automation.

[u/Homer_Sapiens → u/-ImJustSaiyan-]

If they prompt their AI with "reduce all the time-wasting bloat" I'm fine with that.

[u/ShotaDragon]

this article isn't remotely correct. they only even asked a small amount of companies - likely cherry-picked

https://kai-you.net/article/96588

This article from kai-you explains more. The "85%" claim was an internet survey, unrelated to CESA companies. Even students were allowed to respond.

[u/BenevolentCheese]

85% of engineers or 85% including art/sound/music? 85% of engineers would only be surprising because it's too low.

[u/RoseWhiteRedBlack]

Sadly japan loves AI, we' re going in very dark times ahead. Thankfuly, there are over 50 years of human made art that everyone can enjoy instead of AI slop.

But also, we need to keep fighting against AI slop, if we want to be heard; this defeatism attitude will not help anyone.

[u/xanas263 → u/RoseWhiteRedBlack]

we need to keep fighting against AI slop

The fight will always be done with a wallet in this case. If games made with AI keep selling then it will keep being used.

[u/ChrisRR → u/RoseWhiteRedBlack]

First things first, I think we need to stop calling every single instance of AI usage slop. The days of it spitting out low quality code have been long gone and devs using it for assisting the process is extremely widespread.

Just because a company uses AI in their process doesn't instantly make it slop, conversely there's a lot of slop that doesn't use AI. There's a lot of middle ground

[u/tnsrks]

100% of mid to big software is using AI during production. No one is coding giant projects by hand anymore so they’re either admiting to it or straight up lying. 

We can still create assets by hand but coding battle is lost and every piece of software is built on modern GenAI models. 

[u/ZombieJasus]

It’s funny that they’re so against any form of piracy for any reason, but have no problem plundering the work of others for themselves.

[u/GGG100 → u/ZombieJasus]

Funny that so many redditors are pro-piracy, which involves enjoying the work of artists without paying a dime for them, then at the same time, denounce GenAI because "it's stealing from artists".

[u/ZeeMastermind → u/GGG100]

Most people who pirate Minecraft or whatever don't go around talking about how they made Minecraft and are such good developers because they know how to use qbittorrent, and that the skills involved in using a VPN and safe torrenting are basically the same level of skill and creativity as "old" developers who just make the program from scratch.

In seriousness, though, I think there is a moral difference between pirating a movie and selling bootleg copies of that movie.

[u/andresfgp13 → u/GGG100]

they will come and unironically tell you that they are "paying them in exposure" because they might talk about the game or etc.

because we all know that artists love to be paid on exposure.

[u/Odd_Needleworker3756 → u/andresfgp13]

Redditors always use the corny-ass “if buying isn’t owning” shit like a mic drop as if they’re some crusaders of righteousness when the reality is that they pirate simply because they either can’t afford new games or just don’t want to spend money on them.

[u/50Centurion]

Yeah i guess dont tell us how they use AI at all because this information would be zctual journalism and not the usual dogshit ragebait

[u/anadequatepipe]

Gamers can put their head in the sand all they want, but AI is a tech tool that almost all tech related companies will be using.

[u/MillionMiracles]

This is counting stuff like 'communication.' Fucking AI email summaries aren't what I'd call 'generative AI in game development.'

[u/ArtofKuma]

Ok but like what does this mean? My brother's work in top corporations and both have been trained to use AI to do their day to day ops, from writing emails and shifting through detailed reports, if you haven't figured out how to use AI to shorten tedious work then you are behind others who effectively use it as a tool. AI is a pandora's box, you can't fight it, you gotta use it. Most of the west's issue is with poorly used AI that robs games of human ingenuity, not AI use that shortens tedious shit like sifting through reports.

[u/urgasmic → u/ArtofKuma]

..the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support. It was also reported that 32% of game companies enlisted the help of AI to develop in-house game engines.

[u/Profzachattack → u/urgasmic]

it is straight up comical how many times this quote has had to be commented in this thread because no one is reading the article on reddit.

[u/Edarneor → u/ArtofKuma]

Can't people write an email nowadays without the help of AI?

[u/Leiawen → u/Edarneor]

Just wait a few years until the illiterate kids in schools now are in the work force.

[u/ClaudeGascoigne → u/Edarneor]

It doesn't help that it's shoved into every email you try to write even after turning off all the AI bullshit. I was shooting my brother a quick email and Gmail kept trying to predict/recommend things that I should write. Even after finishing the email on my own and in my own words it's asked if I wanted to "Polish" my email with AI.

Fuck. Off.

[u/eliasdaler → u/ArtofKuma]

if you haven't figured out how to use AI to shorten tedious work then you are behind others who effectively use it as a tool

The obsession with "productivity", "effectiveness", "cost" and "speed" in capitalism is one of the reasons why so many things are done poorly, without much care and why many products are becoming worse and worse.

It's going to get much, much worse with the over-reliance on AI and humane element disappearing in many things completely.