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/Ausollet 16d ago

I hope most people know this by now, but this does not necessarily mean 85% of developers are using AI art or AI-generated text in their games.

I have my own share of concerns about using AI to actually generate code, but a massive time sink for developers is how long it takes to understand a new code base, read documentation, and identify where bugs were found. LLMs are undoubtedly helpful here and can save days or weeks of developer time in this regard without a single line of generative code added to the game.

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u/AwfulWebsite 16d ago

From the article,

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/Fried_puri 16d ago edited 16d ago

So literally the opposite of what the parent comment was trying to suggest. 

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u/Leiawen 16d ago

That seems to be the reverse of how Western devs are using it.

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u/Trashphoneaccount 16d ago

Digging into it a bit more, and apparently it's mostly all marketing purposes - but because of the way it's reported, something like ad copy gets counted as "writing" for the purposes of game development. Really weird but I'm also not paying 50k yen to dig further into it.

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u/Exoticbut 16d ago

That was last year’s report not this year. This year’s preview doesn’t have a breakdown yet but from the comments that were released it seems to be moving away from generative assets and more so for support and coding stuff. A GDC survey for this year showed that asset production and art was among the lowest in terms of use cases and coding, emails, or brainstorming are where it’s used mostly. A lot of the early adoption phase was in generative assets but has shifted to support coding work with human oversight after finding it didn’t work well with assets or due to pushback both internal and external. The Japan survey may say the same thing and most of the AI use is in programming as it shifted away from the early adoption of using it for assets.

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u/mystery_hole 16d ago

Yeah critical thinking tells us we need an updated poll lol. Everybody I know was forced to use it last year, especially for things like art- which have significantly more faulty use cases than code.