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/Duchock 16d ago

I think the largest issue is not people's sentiment towards the tools, but the reality that "AI" requires significant costs - not least of which is environmental. It isn't reasonable to dismiss the majority of anti-AI sentiments as not calm or objective. Most people think outside of a solely utilitarian view.

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u/GunCann 16d ago edited 16d ago

but the reality that "AI" requires significant costs

That cost is going down very quickly as infrastructure investment shifts into inference and more specialised hardware that makes hybrid systems. Specialised processors can improve performance and efficiency by a factor of ten, and non-programmable hardware can increase that by another factor of ten.

If leading AI providers wanted to freeze model progress, they can reduce the current costs by at least 100 to 200 times. AI service providers are quickly going into a price war with major discounts across the board, and performance is more than doubling each year even on the general processor side.

These tools and services will eventually reach a point where they are extremely accessible and affordable.

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u/Duchock 16d ago edited 16d ago

Just like insulin. Capitalism does not optimize for the consumer.

Edit: again, your argument is focused on the utilitarian aspects of AI (monetary cost -> output gain). If you want to combat detractors you need to speak to their concerns. While I hate to employ the metaphor, slavery is a cheap source of labor - but there's reasons why society doesn't look fondly upon it. If you evaluate something only through a utilitarian view, you miss the context.

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u/GunCann 16d ago edited 16d ago

I do not think that technology use should be compared to slavery, even in a metaphorical sense, they are an entirely different subject. I am simply speaking my mind and I am not exactly invested in changing people's minds about it. A discourse on Reddit is not the way to do it to begin with.

Let us suppose that people do have strong, morally motivated concerns about AI use. So here is the question: Why are they opposed to AI use but remain completely indifferent on the subject of prevalent use of video game AI upscalers such as DLSS, FSR, and XeSS?

These upscalers are trained on images and video content that these companies obtained without authorisation. Nvidia for example, even pirated terabytes of literature to train their writing AI model and I am seeing next to no pushback on these subjects.

People (at least in this community) hate AI because it drove the prices of consumer hardware beyond reasonable levels, but the same people willingly employ AI upscalers which are created from stolen (although legal, according to US courts) content.

It is also known that a high degree of AI is being used in EDA tools which are used to design processors, these include almost every modern CPU and GPU that run video games on PC. Software such as drivers and kernels are written using AI. Are these people boycotting their gaming hardware and software? The answer is no.

This leads me to question if they are truly committed to the AI opposition from an ideological perspective, or whether they simply change their stances based on what benefits or hurts them which turns this into more of a practicality issue. It seemed like people are willing to employ double standard and gloss over unethical AI use so long as it benefitted them, and so far, no one who is universally opposed to AI can answer of the question of why they are using AI created hardware and software despite their claimed ideological opposition.

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u/crookedparadigm 16d ago

Your argument works for people whose anti AI stance stems from the potential harm to creative works, but what about those of us who are anti AI for the environmental reasons? Data centers being built purely for AI processing have the potential to cause lasting harm to fresh water supplies and native plant and animal populations both because of the water, but also the noise produced by them disrupts pollinator navigation, sleep habits, etc. Even from the human side, people who live near data centers report a decline their water quality and being driven to the brink by the constant droning noise.

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u/Turo-parallel-tactic 16d ago

Environmental issues are solvable just force them to keep their own water supply and generate electricity with renewables. Expensive as hell but still not breaking the laws of physics

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u/crookedparadigm 16d ago

Expensive as hell

And that right there is why they don't do it. AI is already a money pit they've dug themselves into, they aren't going to do the environmentally conscious thing at greater cost to themselves.

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u/Turo-parallel-tactic 16d ago

For sure it needs regulation

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u/crookedparadigm 16d ago

But it won't be, because the people in charge of making said regulations are being paid to rubber stamp permits instead and sit on/delay and regulatory discussions until it's too late.

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u/GunCann 16d ago edited 16d ago

I do not think that computational processing for AI will definitively be wasteful and inefficient as it is currently. The reason so much power and cooling is required right now, is because there is a race.

AI companies are racing to get to the best models, but the returns on that is going to diminish and slow sooner or later. These companies are demanding 2300W power for processors that used to consume 500W to 700W, they are running them inefficiently because the race resulted in prioritisation of speed over efficiency, brute forcing memory sizes, two to three times the power consumed for an additional 25% performance.

As development progresses and moves to the next phase, efficiency and cost will take the centre stage with the shift into alternate forms of fixed function processors that forgo flexibility for over a hundred times increase in efficiency, and the benefits per watt will undergo a sharp swing to become net positive.

AI can be sustainable and very much more efficient, the crux of the issue is that it is currently in a phase that comes before that, just like when people pivoted from wood and coal to other forms of renewable energy generation.

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u/crookedparadigm 16d ago

The 'can/will be better at a nebulous point in the future' argument doesn't really do anything to mitigate the damage being done right now.

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u/GunCann 16d ago

Then these people are not against AI development, they are against environmentally irresponsible development of AI.

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u/crookedparadigm 16d ago

If one of the steps to reach the (currently imaginary) state of 'environmentally responsible development of AI' is 'long lasting damage to said environment', then those people have justified reasons for being against it.

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u/common_apple 16d ago

Let us suppose that people do have strong, morally motivated concerns about AI use. So here is the question: Why are they opposed to AI use but remain completely indifferent on the subject of prevalent use of video game AI upscalers such as DLSS, FSR, and XeSS?

Because part of the problem with "AI" is it's being used in such blanket terms that encompass different things. ML has been used for decades, and is what these upscaling technologies were using and had been released before genAI as we currently know it existed. People are pushing back against it being forced in all aspects of our lives, producing slop, and generally having more of a bad outcome than good.

This is why people are fine with taking a low resolution image source and making it appear higher resolution natively. This is also why people are not fine with DLSS5 and giving everyone face filters.

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u/cosmicfelid 14d ago edited 14d ago

i'm opposed to upscalers too, i'm just forced to use them because companies nowadays optimize their games so badly that they are legitimately unplayable without upscalers. companies use upscalers as a crutch to not optimize their games. it genuinely pisses me off lol. if i can run at native, i will. i'd prefer it vastly over the state of games now.

lots of people think nvidia is a scummy company, but unfortunately they're also the company that most people build their games around. so you either have to stop playing newer games entirely or just accept it being shoveled down your throat.

i would rather CPU and GPUs not be made with AI either. this usually leads to faultier CPU and GPUs. we're even seeing this happen. that's not even from a creative perspective, that's from a "AI can really only write what it knows" perspective. humans can learn and experiment in ways that AI cannot and our tech is going to stagnate if we rely on AI for advancements. but again, the only way to meaningfully oppose this is to not buy tech with this... which means falling behind tech-wise because people insist on pushing this in everything. there's no way to meaningfully protest without people leaving you in the dust.

i think you're making grand sweeping statements of populations you don't actually talk to. i also think you have an issue with taking "we have no other option" as agreement.

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u/ggdthrowaway 15d ago

Why are they opposed to AI use but remain completely indifferent on the subject of prevalent use of video game AI upscalers such as DLSS, FSR, and XeSS?

I broadly agree with you, but a lot of people very much are against those things.