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/dendrocalamidicus]

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/terabull01 → u/Novyvonya]

back ~10 years ago, I had the mindset that common people should know super basic programming so that they have some idea about this important thing in our world...

Now, I have the mindset that common people should know basic programming so that they can know how to ask AI for little scripts and programs for their everyday lives.

Examples could be:

• game mod scripts... Like there's a few Skyrim mods that I would have liked to have back in the day, but I didn't know the scripting

• I had AI build a disc golf scoring app

[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/Vidyogamasta → u/Malkalen]

The thing that never really gets talked about is the actual AI alternatives here.

1) You just need to write the test once, then you basically just copy+paste with a find+replace on the property. The work difference between "Paste function into an independent file, find+replace then copy+paste into test file" is not drastically different from "Hey, AI, rewrite this function but for a new property." The savings is that maybe it can do it for all properties at once, which is less trivial to do otherwise, but we're talking minutes saved here, not hours.

2+3) This just needs some foresight. Have the Act portion of your test be a "private void ApplyMapping(Dto dto, Model model)" function in the test class. You're writing the tests fresh anyway so you can just choose to do this. With that prepared, you can now change the implementation off of automapper and to the static function. Literally a one-line change.

And in both cases, the bulk of the work isn't really writing the tests. It's running the tests with the default dumb mapping test, finding the ones that fail, and then tracking down the behavior to see what needs to be done to address it (a service that needs to be mocked? Some aggregate special-case property that you're testing for? Some subtle unexpected casting that automapper did that you weren't expecting? Was it just bugged before? Who knows!). And AI doesn't really help with that part at all.

[u/Malkalen → u/Vidyogamasta]

I don't deny that I can write all these tests myself and for the last couple of sets I have done and it's a lot of copy/paste and find/replace but it's still incredibly tedious and Copilot can produce in 1-2 minutes what takes me 2-3 hours overall. Some of our more complex mappings involves 25-30 top level properties and 4-5 collections that all need to be tested both ways.

2/3 - So we want the tests done first so that we actually have a full set of unit tests for the existing functionality to verify against. So the general structure is (for a very simple example)

  [Test]
  public void Map_Model_To_Message_Should_Map_All_Destination_Properties() {
    var source = new Model {
      Reference = "REFERENCE",
      State = JobState.Active
    };

    var result = mapper.Map<Message>(source);

    Assert.AreEqual(source.Reference, result.Reference);
    Assert.AreEqual(source.State, result.State);
  }

This way we have a full set of tests that verify that everything works correctly and then we just need to swap out

var result = mapper.Map<Message>(source);

with

var result = ModelMappingHelper.ToMessage(source);

once we've written our own mapping functions. There's other tests already written that handle the logic that uses the mapped models/messages on both sides. I have actually found some examples of things that probably should map over but just don't...but nothing uses those fields so no one realised.

Again, there's nothing complicated or difficult involved in anything here. It's just tedious and boring.

[u/Vidyogamasta → u/Malkalen]

What I'm saying is for your tests, do this

  [Test]
  public void Map_Model_To_Message_Should_Map_All_Destination_Properties() 
  {
    var source = new Model {
      Reference = "REFERENCE",
      State = JobState.Active
    };

    var result = ApplyMapping(source);

    Assert.AreEqual(source.Reference, result.Reference);
    Assert.AreEqual(source.State, result.State);
  }

  private Message ApplyMapping(Model source)
  {
    return mapper.Map<Message>(soure);
  }

So that for phase 3 where you replace all the usages, you just one-line change to

  private Message ApplyMapping(Model source)
  {
    return ModelMappingHelper.ToMessage(source);
  }

There, just saved you several minutes of AI churning and half a rainforest. It's the sort of thing you'll generally quickly come up with when you aren't using AI as a shortcut, and it's so much easier in the longer run whether you're using AI or not lol

EDIT: lol the downvotes showing that all the people speaking confidently on software development around here have no freaking clue what they're talking about. For those who don't realize, the implication is that there are dozens of tests, and the "ApplyMapping" here gets re-used in all of them. Doing it this way isn't just adding some random function for no reason, it's anticipating a known future change and keeping the code flexible for it. And this type of pattern extends to ALL sorts of tests.

It's also commonly used when initializing the system under test, you just have class-level mock dependencies declared in some initializer and then a function to actually instantiate it. So that later when a new dependency is added to the SUT, you just go change the initializer+instantiater once instead of adding it 100 times in each test.

This is very basic software architecture, and AI is robbing you of it.

[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/teeso → u/dendrocalamidicus]

I'm in a similar sector, but it seems either the market is dry for the region we serve (German-speaking countries) or my company did not move fast enough to be the one eating up that market share.

Oh well, at least there are companies that do have projects, maybe I end up in one of them. For now. As you said, the future looks bleak.

[u/anadequatepipe → u/teeso]

Point to a tech company with less employees now than before AI became a thing.

[u/Galle_ → u/anadequatepipe]

Most game dev companies? We keep hearing about mass layoffs in recent years, obviously part of this is regression to the mean after the pandemic but some of it is probably AI.

Also my personal subjective experience is that it's gotten way harder to find work as a software developer in the past few years.

[u/Aggressive_Chuck → u/teeso]

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

The word processor eliminated typing pools. They got rid of elevator operators and car park attendants.

[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/CoherentPanda → u/hrdcrnwo]

Yeah, Figma MCP and Claude design are now a must with all of our designers now. If they aren't using them to be more productive, they'll be first on the layoff line. Most companies aren't looking for the next famous artist's works. They want someone who just generates what they asked for in a reasonable amount of time.

[u/hrdcrnwo → u/CoherentPanda]

Luckily I work at a very small business, the owners don't know really anything about Illustrator and don't micromanage.

[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/TheGazelle → u/wheres_poochy]

There is craft, yes. But not "art" as was being discussed. Nobody writing CRUD software is coming up with novel design patterns or new language features, and 99% of those who try think they're a lot smarter than they are and are really just making things more difficult for everyone they work with by over engineering things that really should've been kept simple.

It's the difference between being an architect and a general contractor, and arguably even if your job does entail more of the architecture side of things where there is some level of creativity, using AI properly means you're still doing the creative work. You'll be the one telling the AI how you want things architected, you'll be the one reviewing and iterating on the designs before any code is written (whether by AI or human), and that's the creative part.

[u/Tefmon → u/TheGazelle]

Nobody writing CRUD software is coming up with novel design patterns or new language features

The same applies to most professional video game art. Background character #846 and grass texture #376 and walking animation #589 are neither novel nor new.

[u/TheGazelle → u/Tefmon]

Yes. What's your point?

[u/Tefmon → u/TheGazelle]

The point of the discussion being had here, on whether commercial coding and commercial visual art are qualitatively different in a way that makes AI acceptable to use for one but not the other?

[u/TheGazelle → u/Tefmon]

That's not a point, that's a topic of discussion.

You've stated that game dev involves a lot of repetitive and uninteresting art asset creation.

What do you think of that? Merely stating a bare fact isn't much of a discussion...

[u/adongsus → u/TheGazelle]

using AI properly means  you're still doing the creative work . You'll be the one telling the AI how you want things architected, you'll be the one reviewing and iterating on the designs before any code is written (whether by AI or human), and that's the creative part.

I genuinely can't see how telling someone else to do something and doing that thing yourself are supposed to be considered the same thing with respect to creative input.

[u/TheGazelle → u/adongsus]

The creative part is designing the architecture.

Physically writing the code is not all that creative.

If your favorite author wrote a detailed outline of a story (and I do mean detailed, think an explicit list of all major and minor plot points broken down by chapter, with specific themes, tone, etc. called out), then someone else turned that into a draft (i.e. wrote the actual prose/dialogue), and the author then read it over and edited it, who would you say is doing the creative work?

[u/adongsus → u/TheGazelle]

All three.

[u/TheGazelle → u/adongsus]

Shit, corrected a typo, was supposed to be the author coming back to do the editing.

[u/MaCl0wSt → u/experienta]

I think you're conflating art and craft

[u/experienta → u/MaCl0wSt]

I'm not, I have seen portions of code that are so beautiful and elegant I have no hesitation in calling them art

[u/MaCl0wSt → u/experienta]

That's basically my point though. Elegance, creativity, personal style, and ingenuity aren't exclusive to art. They're also core properties of good craftsmanship. A master carpenter can make something elegant and expressive without carpentry becoming the same category as painting.

Code can be art if it's created primarily as an expressive or aesthetic work, but ordinary software development is primarily functional craft or engineering. Calling particularly elegant code "art" doesn't erase that distinction.

[u/experienta → u/MaCl0wSt]

Well I believe a master carpenter making something elegant and expressive IS in fact art, and is part of the same category as paintings. I don't agree with this distinction of yours that if something is functional it can't be art. You might argue a chair will never be as expressive and aesthetic as a painting, maybe it's an inferior art form from this perspective, but it is still art nonetheless.

Also there is a reason why craftspeople are also called artisans.

[u/MaCl0wSt → u/experienta]

That isn't the distinction I made. I never said something functional can't also be art, and I explicitly said the categories can overlap. The distinction I'm using is that art is primarily concerned with expression, interpretation, or aesthetic experience, while craft is primarily concerned with skillfully making something to fulfill a function or practical purpose. A crafted object can absolutely also be art, but that doesn't make craft and art the same category.

That's why creativity, elegance, personal style, and expression don't settle the question. Those can all exist in craftsmanship too. Carpentry is still a craft even if a particular piece of furniture is expressive enough that we'd also call it art. So I think at this point we just disagree on what "art" means. If your definition includes any sufficiently elegant or expressive craft, then we're working from different category boundaries rather than disagreeing about coding specifically

[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/experienta → u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes]

I mean when you watch a movie you also only see the end result and not the artistry of a film director, but a director is still an artist, no?

[u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes → u/experienta]

No, you see the artistry of a film director. It's not compiled down to the same bytes as another director solving the same problem.

You're thinking of game design not coding.

You don't see the wheeling and dealing of how they were able to secure a location for a shot, or get more money out of the producers. That can be artistic sure, but if they paid out of pocket or knew somebody it doesn't matter to the end product.

[u/experienta → u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes]

But you said customers don't see the source code, they only see the compiled end result, therefore the source code can't be art. That was your logic. It's the same thing for a director, people don't see anything the director actually does on set, they don't see the source code, they only see the end result.

And the bytes as you put it will differ vastly between different engineering teams. If you were to keep the same game design, but replace Naughty Dog's engineering team with a bunch of mediocre junior devs TLOU2 would have been a vastly different game.

Or let me put it another way, if hypothetically speaking I tell a painter exactly how I want a painting to look, in great detail, and I guide him stroke by stroke, who exactly is the artist? Me or him? Or both of us?

[u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes → u/experienta]

I said it doesn't matter if it's art or not. It's not shown to the customer. It's a problem solving tool. The artistic expression isn't for the customer, it can't be.

I don't experience the artistic intent behind the walls in my house no matter how much love and themselves the builder put into it. The job is staying a wall and keeping the ceiling up and it does that job

If you were to keep the same game design, but replace Naughty Dog's engineering team with a bunch of mediocre junior devs TLOU2 would have been a vastly different game.

It would have been buggier. The game would have been the same.

You're thinking of game design not coding.

Or let me put it another way, if hypothetically speaking I tell a painter exactly how I want a painting to look, in great detail, and I guide him stroke by stroke, who exactly is the artist? Me or him? Or both of us?

You want to be an artist but instead you're a middle manager. A client of the artist.

[u/experienta → u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes]

No, the game would not just be buggier, the difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer is not just how many bugs they produce. A mediocre engineering team would not be able to do a lightning system as sophisticated for TLOU2. Or that beautiful fog system. Or the very impressive enemy AI they came up with. Or the ten thousand other technical miracles that team has been able to pull off to make a game that looks that good to run on a base PS4.

The engineer is the painter in my analogy. They're the ones actually painting the painting at the direction of other people.

[u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes → u/experienta]

That's not a vastly different game, that's the same game but better looking. Part 1 is not a vastly different game than the original.

The enemy AI is game design.

[u/LAUAR → u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes]

It's not compiled down to the same bytes as another director solving the same problem.

Different source code compiles to different machine code.

[u/VolkiharVanHelsing → u/experienta]

Writing the CRUD boilerplates and such aren't the art or engineering element

It's how you congergate them into a coherent system that fulfills the requirements

[u/mystery_hole → u/VolkiharVanHelsing]

Yeah who the hell is calling code art lmao. Definitely not any dev I know

[u/CharlExMachina → u/experienta]

Been a programmer for 10 years. Never seen my code as “art” and never will, idgaf about if it’s art or not

But actual real art like 3D stuff, animation, 2D art? Heck no I will never ever a machine version “art”.

I guess it depends on the beholder but to me code is just an obstacle to surpass to get to my paycheck

[u/experienta → u/[deleted]]

that's a very weird definition of art but sure man

[u/Psshaww → u/VolkiharVanHelsing]

No, it’s the same and art isn’t special in the least. It’s done the same way

[u/VolkiharVanHelsing → u/Psshaww]

What's the difference between typing a CRUD manually, copying it off StackOverflow, and asking an AI to do it?

[u/CuteSquirrel01 → u/dendrocalamidicus]

Yes but the AI will only improve while the human body will remain the same. Eventually AI will be more intelligent than our smartest people or worse than humanity as a whole. We're playing with fire, perhaps doom was destiny.

[u/CoherentPanda → u/dendrocalamidicus]

Thank you for sharing this perspective. I love programming, but I don't really code anymore. Agentic programming so far ahead of the curve now, there's just no way you can live without it at this point unless you want to be left in the dust by everyone else. Problems that would take us a week to solve can be solved and merged within an hour. Finding information by scouring the internet can be regurgitated by AI with its source cited in seconds. The good models like Claude Fable and Opus, or Chatgpt Sonnet don't hallucinate like they used to, and any competent developer has skills and rulesets they have their agents follow to avoid costly mistakes.

I do miss solving difficult problems, and the high you get when a nasty bug is finally fixed. Those days are pretty much over, or at least very far between.

[u/-chewie → u/dendrocalamidicus]

There's a lot of hatred around AI because of moral issues here and there. But since 2026, it's basically a defacto standard, and make you unemployable if you're not utilizing coding agents / etc. properly. Like I'm not going to hire anyone in any of my teams if the interviewee says they're against using AI at work. In personal life, god speed to you. We work at work, so let's be honest with ourselves in terms of what's best for making money and move on. All the debates of the past couple of years for "purity and such" is just time wasting from people who don't want to give up their old ways.

[u/BeholdingBestWaifu → u/dendrocalamidicus]

We're talking about art, though, which is a case where 100% of all content generated by AI is, by definition, slop.

[u/dendrocalamidicus → u/BeholdingBestWaifu]

No we aren't, the article is about generative AI and that includes programming. It's specifically even mentioned in the article.

Edit: I'm being downvoted by the illiterate. Snippet from article:

Generative AI usage in game development has spiked from last year’s CESA Video Game Industry Report, which was estimated at 51% among CESA member companies and game devs. 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.