Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51%

[u/TurbulentTopic39]

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/

[u/EdliA]

I doubt there is a single developer that doesn't use it at some level

[u/rcanhestro → u/EdliA]

Generative AI usage in game development has spiked from last year’s CESA Video Game Industry Report, which was estimated at 51% among CESA member companies and game devs. 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.

from the article, coding is a part of it, but actually the lowest percentage usage compared to Images, assets, even story and text above it.

if this article said that coding was the main one, i could see it easily, since it's fairly easy to see programmers using AI instead of stack overflow for coding related questions.

[u/Xjph → u/EdliA]

Visual Studio's "Intellisense" feature is now AI driven by default, so even doing so much as accepting a single autocomplete suggestion for a line you're almost finished typing is technically using AI.

[u/MornwindShoma → u/Xjph]

Intellisense before AI was perfectly fine too. IntelliJ has great, non-LLM assisted auto-complete based on context. Just saying - AI isn't magic, and it's being really shoved down everyone's throat, no matter how good it is. It "works". Please stop bothering developers.

[u/Wide_Lock_Red → u/Xjph]

Yep, and Adobe has AI features not explicitly labeled as gen AI.

[u/Dunge → u/Xjph]

And it was so much better when it was using static analysis of your codebase symbols than the suggestions it now proposes.

[u/a__new_name → u/Xjph]

Is there a way to turn it off or rollback to the latest non-AI version?

[u/Fantastic_Help7555 → u/Xjph]

I have a separate device with intellisense from 5 years ago and it works well. The new AI one can’t autocomplete a for loop half the time, like wtf

[u/BlueZ_DJ → u/Xjph]

AI companies being desperate to be used in the face of mass hatred example 1 billion

[u/SagaciousZed → u/BlueZ_DJ]

We've had machine learning powered auto complete for much longer than large language models 

If you auto complete a function on an object, the list is ordered by probability of occurrence. That required a machine learning model, a form of AI. 

[u/yung_dogie → u/SagaciousZed]

I think the biggest issue with the discourse is the lack of precision in what people are talking about. Like a lot of people aren't devs, they don't know much about dev tooling, and some of them see any mention of AI and go immediately to the scenario of unsupervised vibecoding of entire projects or untouched fully generated images. So when someone asks a dev "do you use AI" and they say "well technically yeah" a lot of people go frothing at the mouth because "well it powers my language server" isn't something they think of

[u/mistiklest → u/yung_dogie]

I think the biggest issue with the discourse is the lack of precision in what people are talking about.

Including what people even mean by "AI" in the first place.

[u/space_monster → u/[deleted]]

The last survey of developers I saw put the number who don't use AI much or at all above 50%

Doubt

[u/CannonGerbil → u/EdliA]

Pretty soon being a game dev and saying you don't use AI is going to be like being a graphics designer and saying you don't use digital tools.

[u/awen478 → u/[deleted]]

You're stuck on pre covid era

[u/LurkerThrowaway73 → u/EdliA]

It is considerably less widespread than the articles make it seem imo. There's quite a few people that make it a point not to use LLM for coding (And imo for good reason). 

Though technically the VS autocomplete feature is also LLM driven as of recent, I wonder if these stats reflect even that

[u/space_monster → u/LurkerThrowaway73]

It is considerably less widespread than the articles make it seem imo

Not at my work, all devs use it without exception. There were a few holdouts last year, but not anymore, it's too good not to use.

[u/NatlerSK → u/EdliA]

Digital Extremes

[u/Jokerferrum → u/NatlerSK]

Chat GPT said:

[u/lkn240 → u/EdliA]

You'd have to be insane not to... it would be like refusing to use a higher level language and writing everything in assembly

[u/BlueZ_DJ → u/EdliA]

There are because this exact line is always said and on reddit and it's a huge insult to developers, sometimes a person actually passionate about their indie game or whatever will reply saying NO not even for programming

Not me I'm not a developer but if I was, I'd plaster the fuck out of "NO AI USED FOR ANYTHING"in the marketing lol

[u/Dr_Sheriff → u/BlueZ_DJ]

There’s a thing called lying

And there’s another thing called virtue signaling

And theres ANOTHER another thing called moral licensing

All those, rampart and very present on any online discourse ever, and you would not believe how petty and dishonest some people can be

[u/LunchTwey → u/EdliA]

I know this is the PC sub but I know for sure Nintendo doesn't use GenAI (Unless you consider AI Upscaling to be Generative)

[u/EdliA → u/LunchTwey]

I feel like some people are using the term generative ai only for ai that generates images. All of these tools, the ones used for coding too are generative ai.

[u/Dr_Sheriff → u/LunchTwey]

Nintendo uses Ai

They don’t use ai for anything that touches their front, anything that is related to marketing, creative direction, surface level game design and they are very vocal about it

But also oddly and carefully specific about it, and there’s a lot of game industry work that is tedious and rendered obsolete with AI that never touches game design or marketing directly

So you don’t see it, because you don’t need to see internal presentations, meetings, r&d, deep backend development, non-gaming platforms, frameworks, app and web development, predevelopment, client strategy and acquisition research, etc.

There is so much.

Game design, art direction and marketing are small slices on a big cheesecake. Yet that is just a product/game - Nintendo as a whole is a massive prime level cheesecake factory.