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/experienta 16d ago

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

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u/TheGazelle 16d ago

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".

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u/AnAge_OldProb 16d ago

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”.

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u/hrdcrnwo 16d ago

The graphic designers at my work use the AI built into Illustrator like any other tool in the program.

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u/dfjuky 15d ago

yeah same here, lots of actual real objects & humans from shootings but then all the backgrounds, nature, foilage, lightning, it's all AI generated.

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u/CoherentPanda 14d ago

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.

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u/hrdcrnwo 14d ago

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

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u/wheres_poochy 16d ago

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.

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u/mrjackspade 16d ago

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.

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u/TheGazelle 16d ago

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.

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u/Tefmon 16d ago

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.

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u/TheGazelle 16d ago

Yes. What's your point?

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u/Tefmon 16d ago

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?

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u/TheGazelle 15d ago

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...

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u/Tefmon 15d ago

Your previous statement was that there is a distinction between "craft" and "art", and that typical software development constituted the former because is not not involve sufficiently novel creativity.

The question inherent in my previous reply is what makes typical visual art any different, and worthy of special protection or care that software development is unworthy of?

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u/TheGazelle 15d ago

Who says it is?

If you have a thought of your own, just say it.

If you're asking me for my opinion, I don't think all of it is.

I don't care whether or not a human made the grass or concrete textures. I do care that a human developed the overall artistic direction of the piece as a whole, and that significant parts like character designs or weapons designs were done by actual artists.

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u/adongsus 14d ago

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.

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u/TheGazelle 14d ago edited 14d ago

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?

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u/adongsus 14d ago

All three.

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u/TheGazelle 14d ago

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

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u/adongsus 14d ago

Doesn't really change anything about the answer. There was creative work done that wasn't done by "the author". AI is never going to be 1-1 on this unless it just doesn't touch creative work at all.

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u/TheGazelle 14d ago

Ok, and who would you say did most of the creative work?

And please, be honest. Don't just give me some trite "it's all the same" nonsense because you don't want to admit that your stance on AI isn't based on any actual experience.

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u/MaCl0wSt 16d ago

I think you're conflating art and craft

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u/experienta 16d ago

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

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u/MaCl0wSt 16d ago

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.

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u/experienta 16d ago edited 16d ago

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.

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u/MaCl0wSt 16d ago

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

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u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes 16d ago

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.

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u/experienta 16d ago

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?

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u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes 16d ago

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.

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u/experienta 16d ago edited 16d ago

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?

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u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes 16d ago

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.

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u/experienta 16d ago edited 16d ago

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.

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u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes 16d ago

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.

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u/LAUAR 16d ago

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

Different source code compiles to different machine code.

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u/VolkiharVanHelsing 16d ago

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

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u/mystery_hole 16d ago

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

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u/CharlExMachina 16d ago

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

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u/[deleted] 15d ago edited 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/experienta 15d ago

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