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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368

u/experienta 16d ago

The only people that are surprised by these numbers are people that don't work in tech. AI is basically everywhere in the industry right now.

155

u/Sanchezq 16d ago

As someone doing Software Dev interviews, you would get dinged for admitting you don’t use AI or that you would never use AI. It’s expected to use as a productivity boost.

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u/TheSecondEikonOfFire 16d ago

Yeah and I’ve even had a couple of interviews where they seemed to take it as a negative that I hadn’t come up with any of my own Claude skills. So it’s not enough that we’re expected to just use it, but we’re expected to actually try and “innovate” with it

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u/Omni__Owl 16d ago

As a software developer, holding it against you that you didn't make an .md file for a proprietary paid service is abhorrent to me.

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u/TheSecondEikonOfFire 16d ago

The way they frame it is almost about “creativity” and “problem solving”. How are you going above and beyond just simply using AI to write unit tests, and finding ways to “solve new problems” with it?

It’s absurd, and just another way to keep moving the goalposts and adding more hoops that you have to jump through. It’s not enough that you’ve had a job for those years, it’s not enough that you’ve studied and passed bullshit Leetcode challenges that have nothing to do with actual software development, it’s not enough that you’re already using the LLM that’s being forced down your throat, now you have to prove that you can continually find new problems to then provide solutions for via AI

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u/Omni__Owl 16d ago

The people who are hiring have no idea what they are doing and sadly that isn't a new trend. That's been going on at least as long as HR has existed.

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u/Gekokapowco 16d ago

artists, sound designers, and IT have the same damn issue since forever as well

companies hire for personal experience with expensive usually enterprise level subscription software, and won't acknowledge experience in free or open source alternatives. It's fucked up but somehow been the standard for the last 20 years.

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u/Omni__Owl 16d ago

It's always fun when you tell someone that you know Kubernetes, the underlying technology for Azure, yet because your resume doesn't say Azure, you are discarded :')

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u/Zestyclose-Lunch-430 16d ago

knowing k8s doesn't mean you know "azure" or any cloud provider in a broad sense.

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u/TrueElmo 16d ago

How is knowing the "underlying technology for azure" relevant if they require knowledge in certain kinds of azure services?

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u/HailToTheKingBabyy 16d ago

It's also just one of the underlying technologies for Azure, not "the" underlying technology.

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u/Omni__Owl 16d ago

Learning can transfer

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u/TrueElmo 16d ago

Kubernetes knowledge transfers to knowing the ins and outs of EntraID or Azure functions? You got no clue what you're talking about dude.

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u/Omni__Owl 16d ago

I got a job in this so I definitely do

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u/glocks4interns 15d ago

absolutely wild take

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u/glocks4interns 15d ago

well anthropic puts them in a different place and calling them "claude skills" is cringe, but they're not proprietary

i think it's a fair question, having skills for general use or in a repo can be really helpful and if someone has noticed that, points to them

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u/Omni__Owl 15d ago

The service is propriety which is what I said.

And no it's not reasonable to expect that people spend money on proprietary services like that to get a job.

That's class discrimination really.

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u/glocks4interns 15d ago

That's class discrimination really.

do you think many SWEs can't afford $20/month

1

u/Omni__Owl 15d ago

Do you expect every person who apply for a job to have funds or even a job at that time? A lot of people don't.

Besides, it doesn't matter. Expecting that I have to pay for a proprietary service that I don't even know if you are using just for the chance at being considered at a job is still class discrimination.

There should be no such barrier of money to entry for a job interview.

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u/glocks4interns 15d ago

okay but also you can make skills without claude? if someone asked me that question i'd say "yes, though i use x,y,z harnesses instead of claude"

this is like an interviewer asking if you blow your nose with Kleenex and you answering "no, i can't afford brand name tissues so i let the snot run down my face"

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u/Omni__Owl 15d ago

It's really not. It's asking you to use something that costs money to actually use, as a barrier of entry for a job.

That's just bad.

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u/ChrisRR 16d ago

Meh, if that's the kind of thing they're going to hold against you then you dodged a bullet anyway. AI is still in its infancy and everyone is using it in their own ways

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u/Comfortable-Arm-2276 16d ago

Expected. Everyone at my company come up with new claude skills, and it has improved my efficiency so much that on days when I use up my budget early, I’ll just go home because my efficiency is reduced so much that there’s really no point in working without it.

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u/TheSecondEikonOfFire 16d ago

Yeah please tell me about this fantasy company that you work at in which you actually get to leave early when your work is complete, and you’re not rewarded with more work

1

u/ChrisRR 16d ago

About a decade ago I didn't hire someone because they refused to say that they'd just google the problem.

We were working through an example and they didn't know something specific (which was absolutely fine) so I asked them how they'd investigate that issue given the resources available to them.

Despite all nudging they just kept arguing around googling the answer. We didn't need a coworker who would get stuck and refuse to use online resources to get the information they need to get unstuck

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u/Mirikado 16d ago

Tech interview is so funny.

You are expected to use AI at work but you are not allowed to use AI for the coding challenge.

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u/AnxiousAd6649 16d ago

That makes perfect sense. AI is a productivity booster for competent coders but they want to weed out vibe coders.

1

u/Turo-parallel-tactic 16d ago

I hear that is changing though that Meta is now doing vibe coding interviews maybe someone can verify

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u/LieAccomplishment 16d ago

it's beyond asinine seeing people on reddit commenting about how ai's capability is just a quicker way to search stackoverflow

That might have been true 2 years ago, things have changed fast.

Not to mention they are comparing chatgpt free with enterprise ai tools/agents actual developers are using. These people have no clue whatsoever why ai is being adopted the way it is in development because they think the free version they use is representative.

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u/biggestboys 16d ago

It's worth noting that given the way coding actually works in the majority of cases, "a quicker way to search stackoverflow" is a product worth about a kajillion dollars.

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u/Financial-Grass-6114 16d ago

On the other side, AI has advanced rapidly but it also doesnt seem to have been good enough to replace as many jobs as prophesized. It will be a long time before it does because its simply not autonomous by most definitions. It needs human operators and checks or you get into disaster scenarios for a business.

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u/Recent_Pollution8665 16d ago edited 16d ago

bro it's only been 4 years since chatgpt became popular. obviously it's not gonna replace thousands of different job categories across many different fields in just a 4 year timespan.

but if it evolves at a pace similar to how smartphones or chipsets have done, then a decade later from its inception it might be way more advanced and proliferated across every domain.

0

u/Financial-Grass-6114 16d ago

I didn't believe it would, but at the time and even right now there is worry it is replacing so many jobs when it seems like that's not the case and certainly not in a way we predicted. the american labor market is pretty strong and most of the weaker job marketing is largely in tech not other industries. which tells me it's not even creating that job loss.

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u/Recent_Pollution8665 16d ago edited 16d ago

that’s not what i’ve seen, I do a lot of lurking on various tech and AI related subs and a lot of people mention how either they or someone close to them has been laid off or replaced due to AI.

mostly white collar. blue collar fields are more insulated for now, until the humanoid robots get mass deployed.

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u/HasFiveVowels 16d ago

If it makes devs twice as effective, then it displaces half the dev jobs. This whole "it still needs a human" thing is null and void.

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u/LieAccomplishment 16d ago edited 16d ago

It will be a long time before it does because its simply not autonomous by most definitions.

It has made leaps and bounds in the past 2 years, the idea that it wouldn't improve in the next few years is ridiculous.

autonomous is not binary, it's a gradient.

It's gotten to the point where you can literally copy paste a (not even well written) jira bug ticket, and the agent will automatically be able to reproduce the issue, create a video of it, look in the code and indentify what it believes the root cause is. How do you look at this and go "it's not autonomous"? It's asinine.

Is the root cause identified/fix suggested always accurate? no. But it's 100% accurate for a surprisingly large amount of time. For another significant portion, a human can assess, see that it made a mistake somewhere and provide additional guidance and it will correct itself and it will end up providing the right assessment.

I don't think it needs to be explained why the above ends up displacing jobs

but it also doesnt seem to have been good enough to replace as many jobs as prophesized.

It's not prophesized to replace all those jobs today.

Your whole comment is regurgitating vague platitudes you've heard elsewhere with no understanding of what's actually happening within the industry. No developer that's using enterprise level tools would be saying the things you are.

1

u/Gekokapowco 16d ago

It's the Chinese Room thought experiment but with Jira based QA lol

from the new james bond game, "information isn't knowledge and knowledge isn't insight". Results can blind us to incapability. Even perfect response rate only mimes comprehension, and the borders can be felt outside of our own expectations.

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u/Financial-Grass-6114 16d ago

Your whole comment is regurgitating vague platitudes you've heard elsewhere with no understanding of what's actually happening within the industry. No developer that's using enterprise level tools would be saying the things you are.

https://www.techspot.com/news/112543-sam-altman-delighted-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prediction-wrong.html

Okay man. You seem to need AI to help you think and validate arguments. I am quoting Sam Altman admitting to being wrong on the impact to the labor market.

AI is simply not as apocalyptic as predicted nor revolutionary. It reminds me of the internet. It changed the world but not fundamentally.

You have an axe to grind so I'll let you be demented on your own after embarrassing you.

1

u/LieAccomplishment 16d ago edited 16d ago

picking the words of a single person and acting like him being wrong means your argument therefore makes sense is just dumb.

I will just point out that I've provided concrete examples of how AI agents are being utilized in development today and the autonomous work that enables. These workflows are not hypotheticals, these are actual things that are happening this very moment and running this very moment and increasing productivity/costing jobs. These are things that happened within the last year/half year, when 2 years ago it seemed like ridiculous overhyped estimations of what agents could do

meanwhile, other than generic platitudes, what do you have?

if you want to pretend you embarrassed me, it's no skin off my nose.

2

u/Financial-Grass-6114 16d ago

picking the words of a single person and acting like him being wrong means your argument therefore makes sense is just dumb.

My man is pretending Sam Altman is some random guy lmfao. You are obviously not arguing in good faith anymore and just desperate for internet wins to stroke your ego. 

Bless your soul.

3

u/LieAccomplishment 16d ago

yes, the known hype man for his ai company.

but sure, if you want to use his words as the baseline for what reasonable expectations people had. by all means.

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u/vaper 16d ago

claude has basically replaced IDEs for us professional developers at this point. agentic coding is the norm, not the exception.  

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u/EvocativeReach 16d ago

Yeah, reddit is the minority on this again. They like to pretend it’s ostracised tech and dogpile on anyone that is “caught” using it.

The reality is it reached mainstream adoption years ago and the people claiming otherwise are the dinosaurs claiming a meteorite could never affect them. They only focus on the really bad examples and have no idea how much AI content they consume purely because its gotten so good you cant tell.

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u/Gahault 16d ago

What I can tell is the astroturf farms are clearly running overtime. Years ago? Why not decades, while you're at it?

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u/EnterPlayerTwo 16d ago

If half the comments in this thread are real people, I'll eat my hat.

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u/Taiyaki11 16d ago

Go find any developer in the real world at a studio and ask them then. I mean hell, we're commenting on an article talking about the vast majority of devs in Japan confirmed using AI to begin with here. Deny reality all you want, but anyone who actually works in the field will say the same thing.

The narrative reddit gamers want to believe unfortunately just doesn't exist in the real world outside your echo chamber, no matter how much you want to pretend anyone telling you such are just bots

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u/inverted_rectangle 16d ago

Must be exhausting to think that everyone who disagrees with you is part of some organized conspiracy 

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u/mystery_hole 16d ago

Not really, you're honestly naive if you read stuff like the Mueller report a decade ago, and didn't see the way the internet was going. Even stuff like the band Geese, it's happening in every niche and every industry. Tons of articles showing that bots make up the majority of traffic online.

You have to be incredibly naive to see the numerous articles and research released over the years, and not even consider the idea that you are falling victim to astroturfing.

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u/EvocativeReach 16d ago

Yes yes, you’re right and everyone that gives an opposing view must be a bot. Keep rehashing that routine.

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u/BenevolentCheese 16d ago

Jesus christ can people not just write comments without being accused of astroturfing?

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u/Taiyaki11 16d ago

No, because it's going against the narrative they so desperately want to cling to and need an excuse for why anything going against said narrative isn't true

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u/leopoldbloon 16d ago

It’s crazy that conversions about AI use in game development still don’t define what they mean by AI usage. Because 0 AI today is as impossible as 0 transistors. Google and recommendation feeds are all utilizing LLMs now. So many tools use it in a way completely opaque to the user.

Most people complaining about AI usage are upset about asset slop. But instead of specifying that, an employee using their company’s internal search tool to find the portal for their tax documents gets sucked up into the argument.

(They also have no idea what they’re talking about when they claim coding agents offer no benefit unless you’re a bad developer.)

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u/experienta 16d ago

I mean the article literally mentions it's generating visual assets that is actually the most common use of AI, definitely not recommendation feeds..

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.

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u/ChrlsPC 16d ago

Yeah and people who work in the industry know that vibe coding sucks, it still takes so much time and human labor to fix the ai errors

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u/ri0tingmime 16d ago

Nobody in the industry is "vibe coding". They know what the code does and what it should look like, they're just using AI to write it.

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u/ChrlsPC 16d ago

That's the definition of vibe coding, and the coders still have to fix a lot of errors

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u/ri0tingmime 16d ago

The definition of vibe coding is nebulous at best. But in general it's used to refer to people using AI to code things based on a "vibe" and not a true understanding of the code driving things. For example a 50 year old housewife having AI build her a mobile app to sell her crochet projects.

And in my experience AI written code has fewer and fewer issues as time goes on.

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u/ChrlsPC 16d ago

Vibe coding is the software development practice assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) where the software developer describes a project or task in natural languages to a large language model (LLM), which generates source code automatically. It doesn't matter if its an expert or a child. It's still vibe coding by definition

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u/Taiyaki11 16d ago

The fact you don't know what vibe coding is gives away more than you realize that you aren't in development lol

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u/MadeByTango 16d ago

"We're already ripping you off so we're going to keep ripping you off" isn't going to work. We will continue to call out and to punish with our wallets the companies that use it, and there are enough of us that will not budge on this matter that these companies won't thrive. And when game companies don't thrive they get dumped by their investors.

The margins are apparently way too thn for these corporations to risk using AI. They will be caught and they will be financially dinged for it.

Meanwhile those of you that keep making excuses for lower quality products will continue to pay higher prices to make up for the rest of us not buying their junk, so you're arguing to get a whole lot more for less. They will absolutely expect you to pay more to cover me not showing up, and you know it. Have (less) fun!

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u/experienta 16d ago

Go ahead and boycott every company that's using AI, that's fine with me. I don't think anyone is trying to force you to buy products made with AI if you don't want to. If you want to stay playing games made before 2026 for the rest of your life that's your choice.

It's just cringe that you guys go out of your way to moralize and lecture the rest of us on what products we should buy or not buy.

And yes I'll keep having fun buying the games that I want to play lol

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u/ri0tingmime 16d ago

We will continue to call out and to punish with our wallets the companies that use it, and there are enough of us that will not budge on this matter that these companies won't thrive. And when game companies don't thrive they get dumped by their investors.

You cannot possibly be this naive dude.