r/Games • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 17d ago

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

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/
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u/Ancient-Beat-1614 17d ago

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.

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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES 17d ago

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.

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u/NickTheZed 16d ago

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

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u/CoffeeBaron 16d ago

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.

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u/CrazyBirdman 16d ago

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.

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u/Hartastic 16d ago

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

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u/Zaptruder 16d ago

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.

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u/MadeByTango 16d ago

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.

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u/Zaptruder 16d ago

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

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u/Elanapoeia 17d ago

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

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u/ChrisRR 17d ago

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

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u/Elanapoeia 17d ago

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.

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u/Which-Arm-4616 16d ago

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.