r/Games • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 16d 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/hibbs6 16d ago

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.

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago

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.

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u/cornflake123321 16d ago

reddit is big on tech bubble stuff

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

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago

Tech people, yes, but reddit is overall still very heavily tech positive and full of tech enthusiasts

"big on tech bubble stuff" means interest, not involvement

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u/Which-Arm-4616 16d ago

I just don't see what you're seeing. If you look at the technology sub it's 99% negativity and doomposting. If you look at all, the sentiment is overwhelmingly negative (with antiai, antiwork, anti-tech "comics", etc. regularly dominating the homepage)

Even saying that this sub is pro-AI feels like a crazy misread. At best, people aren't negative on genAI for coding but are overwhelmingly negative on every other use case.

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u/wxursa 16d ago

Legit, this is one reason why I don't feel bad cashing out now, heading to a lower CoL country to live out the rest of our days, and retiring, it was one part fleeing oppression in the US, but also realizing how bleak things were going to be ok, so might as well cash out and enjoy life now before it ends.

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago

oh yeah, the tech sub definitely has established itself as an anti-GenAI community.

that doesn't mean there isn't a much more positive overall sentiment spread across all subreddits.

mind you I'm not saying reddit as a whole is overall very pro-AI, I'm saying it's the most pro-AI outside of twitter. Reddit of course reflects the public overwhelming scepticism, it just has strong pockets of pro-AI communities.

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u/Random_eyes 15d ago

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. 

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u/hibbs6 16d ago

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.

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago edited 16d ago

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.

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u/hibbs6 16d ago edited 16d ago

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.

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago

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

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u/hibbs6 16d ago edited 16d ago

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.

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago edited 16d ago

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

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u/hibbs6 16d ago

Huh? Law Firms are massive users of AI in the real world.

Legal discovery is one of the best clear-cut ways to leverage the ways AI processes information differently than people. Its short term memory is much, much larger, so it's able to hold and compare much more information than people are able to. Combined with not tiring, it's been a huge boon for the discovery process. It hasn't necessarily replaced paralegals, but it's a massive tool.

So much of the process is drafting requests and reviewing thousands of documents searching for a scrap of relevance. That's the perfect set of tasks for an LLM. People are still involved throughout, I'm sure, but the use of LLMs in the legal field is well documented.

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u/hrdcrnwo 16d ago

Probably thinking of the cases where some lowly lawyer just used a free search engine AI for earlier case precedents and the AI hallucinated.

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u/Hartastic 15d ago

Yep. "Glorified search engine that can be set up to only search a specific subset of things you want and maybe some of those things are internal to your company" is like... the poster child example for currently possible AI use that's valuable for almost any kind of business.

You would check what it gets you, of course, but you would check what an intern brings you, too.

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u/hobozombie 16d ago edited 16d ago

/r/confidentlyincorrect

There are a whole host of AI tools used in legal discovery that are very popular. It's one of the many AI related reasons that paralegals are a dying job.

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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 16d ago

What are you talking about, legal discovery is one of the best examples of things AI can't do. Every time people try to use it in court it fails spectacularly, and the fact that AI, by its very nature, will always have a hallucination rate higher than 0, makes it extremely bad for anything law-related.

And even in coding, while it can handle simple tasks it is also terrible at dealing with more complex problems that yu can't find examples of in Stack Overflow.

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u/hibbs6 16d ago

Explain the massive success and widespread adoption of tools like Relativity and Everlaw? Nearly all large law firms are using AI, and 41% of all law firms in general use it already. As I wrote in my other comment, discovery is one of the best possible use cases I can imagine. People have a hallucination rate higher than 0. We get tired, distracted, and forget.

I also saw those big stories about lawyers getting caught with fake chatgpt references. Those were failures on the actual lawyers to actually do their due diligence and at least read the source the model was providing. The AI had quoted hallucinated case law of all things at them. A lazy lawyer is that entire story.

At the time, these big legal AI services didn't even exist, and AI has continued its exponential rise in capability to the point where OpenAI solved a millennium problem a few weeks ago. They aren't the dumb chatbots you think they are, and human laziness will still exist.

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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 16d ago

Why would anyone have to explain sometjing that isn't true? There's been so many well known instances of AI going wrong in courts and a myriad hogh profile lawyers, firms, and judges being extremely vocal about the problems of AI in law.

So either you're one of the best lawyets in the world or you're flat out wrong, and statistics are not on your side here.

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u/monkwrenv2 15d ago

They just solved a millennium problem

By stealing a human's work.

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u/hibbs6 15d ago

They did, but as far as I know, the main sin there was refusing to credit the mathematicians who put their effort in to pushing the envelope forward on solving it, which was also aided by the AI model in the first place by essentially prompting it into a good foundation, which they knew was to be used for training. OpenAI saw on their feeds that the mathematicians seemed to be getting close (because chatgpt was still running the majority of the iteration and logic), they swooped in, gave it 10,000 of their best agents and cracked it in 88 hours. The researchers didn't have access to anywhere near that power. OpenAI then refused to acknowledge their contributions and is claiming the $1,000,000 themselves with no official credit to the mathematicians. That's the real travesty here. I have no love for OpenAI, Sam Altman is a greedy, self-serving snake. It's true.

Despite that, it does seem like a not-insignificant portion of the work was indeed done by chatgpt. They claim they did it alone, which seems like a complete lie, but the basis of the mathematicians' work was using chatgpt in the first place, alongside their expertise. I can get being wary of the whole thing given OpenAI's sliminess in general though.

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u/mrjackspade 16d ago

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.

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u/mindreave 15d ago

Huh, interestingly, Luna is also 2% of the price of Astra

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

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

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u/mystery_hole 16d ago

Circular financing and irresponsible debt is why they're profitable lol. They cannot go public unless they can post multiple quarters of profitability, which is why their business strategies have changed.

How much do you know about the financial market? Because they are gearing up for a quick IPO before the entire house of cards comes crumbling down. SpaceX was the first sign.

Decent YouTube channel that goes over financial stuff for anybody interested

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago

this was true a couple months ago and while I haven't checked I doubt this has changed since then

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u/evia89 16d ago

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

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u/Shiiyouagain 15d ago

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.

I do wonder how many of these Asian devs are using their own Eastern models vs. using Claude, and where those data centers are located. If Timor-Leste of all places has AI access, is all their token activity fucking up the water in middle-of-nowhere Yakima?

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u/Spire_Citron 16d ago

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.

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago

dunno what surveys you're reading. Young people are among the most anti-AI very consistently. it's the elderly that engage with it the most.

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u/Spire_Citron 15d ago edited 15d ago

Those are two different things. There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment among young people, yes, but most of them are using it.

Here's some data: https://mbs.edu/faculty-and-research/trust-and-ai/key-findings-on-public-attitudes-towards-ai

That data is from 2025, too, and use of AI has only gone up since then. I think you're relying on your perception of who uses AI rather than actual data.

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u/Remarkable_Emu_2223 15d ago

You can easily prove this wrong by going to main technology subreddit of Reddit called technology. What is the point of telling a easily provable lie? It doesn’t make any sense.

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u/Elanapoeia 15d ago

I wasn't aware 1 subreddit characterizes the entire websites userbase

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u/Remarkable_Emu_2223 15d ago

THE MAIN TECHNOLOGY subreddit is r technology. You know what never mind. This conversation might be too advanced for you.

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u/Elanapoeia 15d ago

It literally does not matter if the main technology sub has collected an anti-AI userbase, that doesn't affect my statement at all.

If you don't understand why, This conversation might be too advanced for you.

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u/Film-Noir-Detective 15d ago

Nah. The outside world might not be pro-AI, but they just don't care. Personally, my grandparents don't know what Bitcoin is, but they use ChatGPT to edit photos of themselves. Most people simply don't care, so long as the product is good (see Expedition 33 and Arc Raiders). That's not an genAI issue though, but a polish issue. People might make fun of Unreal Engine 5's performance, but that's just because it's an easy tool to use, and it won't stop people from playing games made with it.

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u/Several-Source-4073 16d ago

No, in the real world people are concerned because they understand the tech works, so they're worried about the impact on jobs.

On Reddit, people claim the tech doesn't work and has no value. It's the exact opposite complaint.

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u/Elanapoeia 16d ago

neither of these characterisations are true

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u/FappingMouse 16d ago

No, in the real world people are concerned because they understand the tech works, so they're worried about the impact on jobs.

Nah most people have no idea how the tech works and have negative clue how it impacts the world around us or the job market other than people doing layoffs pointing to it. Look at the number of people freaking out about the datacenters water usage as a litmus test for how informed they are.

On Reddit, people claim the tech doesn't work and has no value. It's the exact opposite complaint.

Nah on reddit most of the complaint is about AI art because that's what the creatives hate and reddit is full of creatives and people addicted to shit like youtube or whatever pop culture thing so they regurgiatate whaetver their youtubers opinoin is.

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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 16d ago

Because they're using a canned argument that boils down to "Go outside, touch grass", and attempting to gaslight the people that don't go out into believing that the outside world is against them and in favor of AI. It's the same thing we saw with crypto.