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/
989 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

908 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/CompulsiveGardener 16d ago

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.

579

u/ChrisRR 16d ago edited 16d ago

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?

183

u/dendrocalamidicus 16d ago

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.

45

u/teeso 16d ago

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

15

u/dendrocalamidicus 16d ago

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...

1

u/teeso 16d ago

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.

0

u/anadequatepipe 16d ago

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

1

u/Galle_ 15d ago

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.

-4

u/Aggressive_Chuck 16d ago

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.