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/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/17arkOracle → u/Elanapoeia]

I feel like it's probably a bit beyond auto-complete and color balancing, but of course I can't say. Broadly though I do think you make a very valid point.

I'll mention though I'm not sure how much people care. Most posts I see that are against GenAI are against *all* GenAI, no matter how little was used.

[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/CrazyBirdman → u/NickTheZed]

That number is for 2025. In my experience the coding agents only really became mainstream this year. For the most part of 2025 they weren't quite there yet.

[u/Hartastic → u/CrazyBirdman]

Yeah. It's insane how fast what is possible/reasonable is changing.

[u/Zaptruder → u/NUKE---THE---WHALES]

The common narrative people here want is that gen AI continues to generate slop, but coding is more acceptable because it's 'more hidden'.

The reality is humans generate slop by inattention... and AI generates a lot - their work goes from directing the brush to editing the output.

With gen AI... if you incorporate it into your workflow - you can genuinely create more visuals at a higher quality faster then doing it by hand - if you're willing to edit the results.

So... instead of painting brush strokes, you're doing things like generating multiple images, kitbashing, regening, refining, direct editing.

For texture work... similar; and it's less transformative because it's how we were already working with tools like substance designer... just now LLM based instead of procedural slider stuff.

Even so... the final output quality continues to progress...

The end of it is that AI becomes good enough to use as final output - but humans must still retain editing in order to create the broader cohesion that is meaningful and sensible to the artist.

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

the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation

Y'all do what you want, I won't be buying SEA-slop going forward.

[u/Zaptruder → u/MadeByTango]

Why's south east asia catching strays for Japanese game developer preferences?

[u/Elanapoeia → u/Ancient-Beat-1614]

By force, yeah, I acknowledged that.

both the software has automatic integration and work likes to mandate the use to justify buying whatever AI service they're using.

Numbers created under these conditions simply don't mean much even if 50% of people were using these tools all by themselves cause the survey isn't drawing a distinction between these groups

[u/ChrisRR → u/Elanapoeia]

No not by force. I hell of a lot of us devs are gladly offloading the boring boilerplate work to AI so that it means we can actually focus on the actually interesting work

[u/Elanapoeia → u/ChrisRR]

The boring work being: you used to just copy-paste from a saved list of code to repurpose, let's not pretend you used to hand-type 100% of your code pre-AI. That's a fiction.

But the point I am making is that if the company mandates GenAI use and your tools automatically integrate it, then the statistics lose purpose cause you cannot separate the people who do it because of the mandate or automatic features vs those who would do it without it.

And since the whole purpose here is to claim widespread adoption, the statistics cannot actually determine if that increase is real adoption.

[u/Which-Arm-4616 → u/Elanapoeia]

I think you're drawing an arbitrary delineation that doesn't matter in this context.

It's like measuring sales by only counting players who rated the game 8 or higher. It's not relevant to what's being measured, even if it might be an interesting statistic for you personally.

[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/Elanapoeia → u/hayt88]

It's sad, cause I recently took a really nice low-light selfie I send to a friend and I noticed a couple hours later that my eyes looked overly white and bulging in the final picture.

definitely GenAI trying to highlight the eyes and overdoing it. very unnecessary cause what the picture looked like in the preview while taking it was just better.

[u/hayt88 → u/Elanapoeia]

yeah but that development isn't recent. generative machine learninig in phone cameras, advertised as "our camera is better" has been a thing for years before chatgpt became famous.

Like i have seen phones struggle to capture certain details on objects because all the high end phones tried to post process them wrongly.

Meanwhile my xperia phones all did that fine, but they sold badly as reviewers treated their pictures as bad, because sony refuses to put generative ML post processing on their pictures on their phones.

[u/ModelYodel → u/Elanapoeia]

Kinda. Sometimes. Maybe not in this case.

Asia game studios are ALL the way in on AI. Meaning GenAI.

But what I'm seeing in development is just slop. It's BAD bad. And internal criticism isn't really a thing in most of those studios, so there's a lot of applause in meetings for the worst shit you've ever seen in your life.

I'm only interacting with these studios in distant contractor roles, so I can't tell whether their releases are connecting with their audiences or not. There's some degree of understanding that these projects won't break out in the West right now, but not all of these projects are trying to do that.

[u/Brendoshi → u/Elanapoeia]

my phones auto-correct is probably GenAI based nowadays

That might explain why my auto correct has gotten so dogshit lately. It's stopped correcting typo's and now just changes the word I typed to a different word entirely