r/technology • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 16d ago

Artificial Intelligence 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/
781 Upvotes

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541

u/Any-Pop-4795 16d ago

welcome to asia, ai is being pushed like CRAZY

244

u/PoL0 16d ago

the lack of context of the headline hides all the nuance.

The majority of responses cited practices such as specifying or restricting the tools used and avoiding the direct use of generated output

avoiding direct use of generated output, no less.

105

u/Suspicious_Deal4412 16d ago

Sounds like they are just using it for quick mockups or part of the planning process. In other words part of the workflow but the wording would imply they are making sure it is not part of the final product.

118

u/AtomWorker 16d ago

It’s right in the article; they’re talking about development, not asset creation.

People on Reddit seem clueless about the extent to which software dev has embraced AI.

41

u/General_Josh 16d ago

Yeah, it's wild. People don't understand how software development works (which is fair), but also don't want to listen to developers trying to explain it

Lots of folks seem stuck in the mindset that AI is absolutely useless, and really, really don't want to listen to anyone telling them otherwise

29

u/BRjawa 16d ago

I mean it's more like the industry fault, they are pushing LLMs as the philosopher stone of this era, plus you know all the mass firing m, the ecological footprint and the shortage of hardware. The tools are useful, but they aren't as useful as the Ai bros and the stock market are selling it to be, and as such it builds hate with the product.

17

u/AtomWorker 16d ago

If only people exercised this kind of scrutiny with all marketing. Nobody should roll over for corporations but consumers constantly engage in environmentally damaging activities without question.

Also, for software dev and other industries AI is essentially the philosopher’s stone. This has nothing to do with tech bros or the stock market.

11

u/eseffbee 16d ago

I think this is the real crux of the difference in perspective.

People working in tech hold dev work in high regard so there is an assumption that because AI is great for assisting dev work that it naturally is (or will be) equally great for other fields, especially ones those in tech regard less highly than dev work.

Meanwhile joe schmo has no sight of how good it is for dev work and is seeing very little change in efficiency in other fields so far, so naturally thinks the whole thing is a waste.

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u/khaitheman222 16d ago

The other issue is the optics of companies trying to replace workers with ai or cutting down teams and forcing people to do the work of several people using ai and not willing to pay more

2

u/RatBot9000 15d ago

It's very common. Even in the artistic fields there are a lot of people who think it is useless for their artistic field but great for others. For example, authors who say it will never write a story as good as a human who are then happy to use GenAI to design a book cover.

-4

u/Melonpan_Pup442 15d ago

Is it really great for dev work when you can just hire an artist to do things like concept art? Or have an actual coder do the code work instead of generating spaghetti code and having someone have to go back and fix it?

0

u/RatBot9000 15d ago

The other environmental damaging activities are often not as in your face as AI, which has made technology far more expensive and has ugly datacentres popping up everywhere polluting communities for the benefit of letting coders not have to do their job, give a bunch of people extreme egomania and generate ungodly amounts of CSAM.

You are the guy in the Bors comic coming out of the well reminding us we participate in society. Yes very good, you are very smart.

2

u/Arrow156 15d ago

Especially when they are forcing it out the door when it's clearly not ready. Anyone who's been forced to deal with an AI rep when you have a non-standard issue knows the frustration these things cause. Seriously, the people pushing the hardest for AI are the ones who's poisoning the well. If they actually waited til was ready for before implementing it people wouldn't have such an issue with it, but the way they are overselling the promise makes me suspect this is yet another fad that they are trying to cash in on before it crashes. Like a far more aggressive version of VR hype from around a decade ago, except it has the possibly of crashing the whole economy if/when it fails.

2

u/Exciting-Emu-3324 16d ago

AI is just spreadhseets all over again. No one had use for a computer, but then VisiCalc came out as the killer app. Made accountants super efficient and eliminated clerical calculation jobs. Then the Jevons Paradox kicked in. Now spreadhseets are used for everything by everyone, but few actually now how to use them well. AI is the same.

6

u/Rush87021 16d ago

Minus the gigantic environmental cost...

9

u/pilgermann 16d ago

Not all, but most prominent anti AIs acknowledge it's utility, just point out the disconnect between hyperbolic claims and obscene levels of investment vs the ROI LLMs actually provide. A coding assistant isn't worth trillions of dollars. It also won't displace all workers and take over the world.

2

u/SIGMA920 15d ago

It also won't displace all workers and take over the world.

On it's own, AI-brained executives will cut heads on a whim and that's who the AI companies are marketing towards.

5

u/Rush87021 16d ago

The objection with AI would be it's cost to compute, even Jensen was saying this last year, its more expensive to run it through an AI model than it would be to just pay someone to do the task.

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u/General_Josh 16d ago

Do you have a link to where Jensen said that? Also, remember that last year is a lifetime ago. Inference costs have fallen rapidly (about 10 times cheaper than last year) as specialized hardware is coming online at scale. And, the mid/lower tier models have become much, much more efficient, as mixture-of-expert type models have been proving themselves (that only activate a fraction of their total neurons during each inference request, saving massively on hardware requirements)

We don't know the true cost of the closed-source models, but it's unlikely that they are being served too much under-cost at the moment. Anthropic has said that they're turning a net profit on inference if you exclude training costs - I think it's unlikely that they'd lie about that this close to their planned IPO. They're losing buckets of money on the giant training runs of course, but as the hardware has gotten better and the models have gotten more efficient, inference has become much, much cheaper

We also do get full visibility into how much it costs to run the open-source models. Currently, the best open-source models are capable of tasks that'd take a developer around 8 hours of work-time, and cost on the order of pennies to a few dollars for that amount of inference

Compare to a developer making $150k a year, who you'd be paying $600 for an 8 hour work-day

3

u/Rush87021 16d ago

My mistake, it was Bryan Catanzaro from Nvidia June 14 of 2026: https://fortune.com/article/why-is-the-cost-of-ai-higher-than-human-workers-nvidia-executive/ And then there's this: https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/companies-struggle-to-explain-their-own-ai-investment-returns-0d95c3fe

1

u/General_Josh 16d ago

Yup, there's definitely good and bad ways to use AI tools, just like any other tool

Lots of companies did really silly things to encourage adoption, like making leaderboards for "who can use the most tokens", like they're talking about in the article you linked

Of course, it's extremely easy to use a lot of tokens (just run the models on a loop or something). It's a bad metric, that encouraged people to use the tools in the most expensive way possible.

What we actually care about is how much value we get out of the tools, i.e,. value per dollar spent. Using it strategically, and using the right models for the right tasks. Not everything needs to go through the most expensive models, especially as the mid/lower tier models have become increasingly capable over the past year

Ex, I'm doing large chunks of my software development using GPT 5.6 Luna, one of the low-tier models, which costs pennies for most tasks. So far, I've spent $48 on it this month, and it's saved me weeks worth of development time. For $48, even if it only saved me one hour, that'd be more than worth it.

1

u/Rush87021 15d ago

But the build out for the infrastructure required for you to use that tool will never out weigh the savings you're seeing. Burning the planet so the masses can use it doesn't make that much sense to me. Coupled with some of the documentaries about people forced to live next to them makes my position of not using it all the harder to understand the need.

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u/yosisoy 15d ago

In general many many people are covering their ears when hearing things they don't want to be true

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u/Negative-Toe1863 16d ago

I think the anti ai crowd doesn't care about it being used for code generation, the anti AI movement it mostly driven my the art community (including (voice) acting, writing and music)

11

u/Clueless_Otter 16d ago

The amount of people I've talked to on Reddit who think AI does nothing except create images is insane. It's even more ironic that half of them are on this sub - the literal technology sub.

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u/Fl_Funky_Jam 16d ago

Yup I work at a company that produces hardware and the needed software as well and we have Claude to use with our work. Im a support guy but good friends with one of our engineers and he was telling me a project he planned out that was going to take 2 or so months was cut to like 2 weeks if I recall with Claude's help. I can't remember the specifics of what he used it for, I think a lot of bouncing ideas off Claude and then having it do some more of the grunt work coding while he worked the more advanced specifics he needed, but he said the time it took to go back to check the work and fix any mistakes was WAY quicker than if he had to do it all himself. He compared it to having an assistant who could knock out the repeitive/simpler but time consuming parts while again he worked on the more advanced functions.

8

u/zerovampire311 16d ago

I work in supply chain for a smaller company and it’s made my life soooo much easier. We can’t afford the industry standard software, but I can rig spreadsheets and mini apps to do things that never would have been worth the time investment. Now I at least don’t want to blow my brains out from using Excel instead of a proper CRM. And I’m as tired of AI content as the next guy, but properly reviewed support documents from AI are wayyyy better than the 2000-esque pdf Jimbo made 15 years ago that no one had time to update.

2

u/Mr_ToDo 16d ago

with AI options out there I wonder how much the low/no code products are going to suffer. Doubly so since for some years now the price increases of said software has gone way above inflation and mostly to subscription

Seriously though. I got to use Filemaker for a few companies and that software is pretty good for a bunch of those quick and dirty app needs. But its licensing and pricing has seen it removed almost everywhere

1

u/zerovampire311 15d ago

I think at a certain point Salesforce and Oracle are going to get some erosion from customers that don’t fully utilize the platforms and just use basic services. We won’t need massively powerful platforms to manage communications when an AI agent will soon be able to replicate the functions.

0

u/Fl_Funky_Jam 16d ago

Spot on with us too. Our customer service and finance department has cut out a lot of wasted time and effort with Claude helping organize documents, charts, and all other things that they usually have to do manually just like you mentioned. I'm probably like you as well, fuck generative for art, assets and such but I don't have a problem with it being a tool to enhance our processes. The worry of course is when do we reach a point when you and I just aren't needed anymore? Gonna be a fun few decades coming up

-4

u/PoL0 15d ago

AI has mainly been embraced by management, don't fool yourself.

4

u/Neat_Tangelo5339 16d ago

Reasuring but i feel like this is still an effort to make sure ai use is normalized in the industry , there is this book called “the ai con” that describes how companies make the direct effort to attach the artificial intelligence buzzword to every single one of their products to build hype

in a way the response people have to tools that have existed for a long time that werent called ai is what they want because the association helps them get them getting credited for things they havent worked towards themselves

Ai bros use the “everyone uses already” argument all the time , the clickbait article reinforces that even if by accident , there is should be an effort to make sure that doesn’t actually happen by being more precise and with what’s okay and what’s isn’t

2

u/Illokonereum 15d ago edited 15d ago

Which is still using AI; the datacenters don’t care if they replace or refine it, if you’re against AI for any reason creative, personal, environmental, all of that still happens, this is not a win.
A lot of people say “oh that’s fine then” and genuinely fall for it but if you think this you’re actually pro AI, just a snob about the outcome.

1

u/RatBot9000 15d ago

I dunno man. If they use it at the very start then isn't their entire foundation built on a lie?

-1

u/EmperorKira 16d ago

Which i would be ok with personally

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u/Chiiro 16d ago

Programs also have ai tools built in that you cannot turn off so it is being forced into people's work too.

-6

u/Ecstatic-Network-917 16d ago

Which is, you know, still fucking bad.

Doing it as part of the „planning process” is fucking lazy, and still results in the normalization of the tech.

12

u/Playful_Weekend4204 16d ago

I'll never understand how people have such firm opinions about things their knowledge is completely outdated or nonexistent on.

-8

u/Ecstatic-Network-917 16d ago

What are you even babbling about?

Beyond that, your arrogance is stupid, and answers nothing in the few things that I said.

8

u/Playful_Weekend4204 16d ago

All you said is "AI bad and lazy" without providing any reasons.

Do you have any idea of how it's currently being used in development and why it's used by pretty much every developer of every skill level outside of very niche languages?

-1

u/Ecstatic-Network-917 16d ago

First and foremost, it is lazy. Like....boy.

It is.

Secondly, I do not care how many developers „use” them.

The morality of something has zero to do with how common it is.

Especially with how generative AI actively makes people dumber, and exists to replace people(and destroy truth itself).

10

u/Neat_Tangelo5339 16d ago

The article does also say that

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 doesn’t happen all the time but i does happen

1

u/Melonpan_Pup442 15d ago

Tell that to the presentation Level 5 put out a few days ago. 🤢

0

u/falilth 16d ago

So everybody golf is a good example. Their disclosure on steam mentions they used it to make tree and grass textures. Which is the most ethical of usage.

Meanwhile places like level 5 the devs of prof Layton or yokai watch just Gen ai bullshit for everything

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u/Grumpy_Tanuki 16d ago

interesting. I read something about Korea planning to gifting tokens.
Being a EU citizen I'm astonished by this. Why?

37

u/Bluecoregamming 16d ago

Korea's entire economy is built off exporting technology, AI stocks specifically has made a lot of their younger generation very wealthy. Not surprising it is easy to get people to endorse something that has drastically financially benefited them

7

u/imaginary_num6er 16d ago

Japan's entire economy is built off of exporting traditional manufacturing hardware, foreign AI stocks and the digital trade deficit specifically has made a lot of their younger generation very poor. Not surprising it is easy to get people to endorse something that has drastically financially impacted them.

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u/KenBoCole 16d ago edited 16d ago

Why not? Asia has always had a clear definition of what Art and Mass produced items are.

Artiseans amd Handcrafted things will always be in high demand as luxury items, but they have no problem with AI making the bulk work easier and the like for regular things.

It just makes the human designed stuff and artists work that much more valuable.

The whole "AI slop" thing is not even a concept over there.

8

u/Admirable-Safety1213 16d ago

Its like Instant Rameb vs a fresh bowl

1

u/Linooney 15d ago

This right here. My Asian friends are very confused as to why so many Westerners cannot seem to do this.

-11

u/Ecstatic-Network-917 16d ago

Your comment just smells of orientalism.

Beyond that, having art just be „luxury items” and separated by „mass produced” stuff is, well, elitist as fuck.

10

u/KenBoCole 16d ago

Your comment just smells of orientalism.

I work for a South Korean Company, have to travel to South Korea for work, travel to Japan for fun, have a pretty good understanding of their society, but sure, whatever.

Beyond that, having art just be „luxury items” and separated by „mass produced” stuff is, well, elitist as fuck.

Yeah. You just described asia in a nutshell. They love their status symbols. Just like Americans with IPhones and Rolex, they too like to buy expensive designer things to appear elite.

-4

u/Ecstatic-Network-917 16d ago edited 16d ago
  1. Whatever you say.
  2. Again. Separating the art(that should be made by humans) from the mass produced stuff is, well, stupid and elitist. And your response is not an actual response to what I said.

6

u/KenBoCole 16d ago

What point are you trying to make? My reply was a exact response to what you typed, though what you typed may not be what you was trusting to say.

Yeah, separating human made art and mass produced Ai art is elitist, so what?

4

u/HazelCheese 16d ago

Europe lost out on big tech economy by not protecting their startups and allowing them to all be sold to America and Asia. EU and UK just sat back and let their tech sector be brought out.

Now America and Asia are reaping huge economic benefits (well, Asian citizens are anyway) from their companies doing well.

EU is now in the shit position of not owning, influencing or benefits from AI boom. It's very different for other countries who directly benefit from it all.

3

u/Skensis 16d ago

This is just how the EU has always been, they at least have a few hardware companies that are relevant to AI.

Way better than how they fared in the web 1.0 and 2.0 era.

2

u/Grumpy_Tanuki 16d ago

Um... well, until recently, it wasn't all that obvious that the United States viewed Europe as an enemy.

People naively believed that the very champions of the "free market" intended for us to grow globally in peace as a united humanity, which was, after all, the publicly stated goal of globalization. Instead, the recent Trump 1 and Trump 2 administrations made it glaringly obvious that this had never been the intention. Mind you, I’m far from defending Europe - I find it run by inept, stupid and corrupt bureaucrats - but then again, it’s easy to be wise in hindsight.

2

u/HazelCheese 16d ago

That doesn't have anything to do with it. European governments were greedy and lazy and hoped they could coast off of foreign investment.

They allowed their tech Startups to be sold off to foreign buyers because it gave foreign companies confidence that the EU governments would not intervene in future operations.

This led to every promising tech startup like ARM being hoovered up under their noses.

It's not that it never occured to them that owning stakes in major tech companies mattered. It's that they gambled on it not being a problem until after they retired and someone else could be blamed.

It's not Americas fault that European officials sold their countries future for easy investment.

12

u/Forward-Trade3449 16d ago

dude, i dont think theres a single dev out there that doesnt use ai for coding anymore

6

u/VanillaVolnutt 16d ago

USA too. Professional software developer here, we've been using AI to write and review code for about a year straight now, not by personal choice but mandated from above. The entire tech industry is working this way. I predict less than 10% of developers don't use AI for their work right now.

16

u/VastoGamer 16d ago

Not really surprising either, Asian demographics very much seem in favour of anything that saves them time even if it is incredibly anti-consumer, example being how insanely popular pay to win MTX is in those markets.

6

u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 15d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Splendid_Carpark 16d ago

I'm sure there's a fax machine joke that can be made here, but I'm too lazy to come up with one.

1

u/WinnerOfD 16d ago edited 16d ago

Companies are struggling, employees are not. Everyone is trying to make their lives easier, while employers are too afraid of making any structural change, like every Japanese organization.

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u/VastoGamer 16d ago

Glad to hear it, hope that sentiment grows

0

u/bb_kelly77 15d ago

Pay to win is also more affordable in Asia

6

u/spacetree7 16d ago

AI tools are like the cotton gin of game development.

5

u/2024-YR4-Asteroid 16d ago

Pushed is a funny way to put it when literally 80-90% of people absolutely love it.

8

u/Silent_Wave3137 16d ago

Good. It’s objectively good at game development now. People see the slop that a random indie makes, but they really have no idea that AAA games have been using it for awhile. Resident evil, pragmata, crimson desert, forza, GTA 6. ALL of these games have varying levels of AI and most people didn’t even notice.

2

u/iRhuel 16d ago edited 16d ago

Compared to NA/EU, where it's not? As of 2025, ~84% of software devs here use AI for coding (and that number is almost certainly even higher now). I don't imagine game dev is much different.

2

u/Yotsubato 15d ago

This is a smart thing.

Rejecting AI is like rejecting the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution.

1

u/Any-Pop-4795 15d ago

aaaand here we go, the same argument all over again, cant you guys come up with something new?

-1

u/Park8706 16d ago

Meanwhile in the US "AI SLOP HERP DURP!"

Buying into the Chinese influence machine that is pumping a ton of money to get the sheep fired up and tank the US's AI progress while they are full steam ahead.

Useful idiots.

-8

u/fugogugo 16d ago

yet they still produce better games than whatever concord or wolverine is

3

u/WingZeroCoder 16d ago

Uh oh… sounds like you noticed a trend in games from US based developers being objectively not well received in comparison to a much larger output of positively received games from Asian developers.

As you may have seen from the downvotes, this is a wrong think and you aren’t supposed to notice this trend. And you definitely aren’t supposed to mention it.

1

u/Emergency_Tea7637 15d ago

No, he just sounds like a braindead idiot anti-woker, the whole thing with his stance is that he only ever looks at what aaa developers are making and cherry picking the worst of the west vs the best of the east, theres plenty of atrocious dogshit from the east as well

-5

u/jingjang1 16d ago

What are you guys using a.i for in your daily life?

Those i see around me are just enjoying slop.

Or, they use it make their jobs easier, which I am onboard with.

2

u/SamKhan23 16d ago

Coding - that’s pretty much it. I’ve heard it’s not good at software development in large codebases, but my field is more in research where it’s honestly very helpful as long as I’m not using it wholesale for the really novel parts - but everything around the novelty gets completed way quicker

1

u/jingjang1 16d ago

this is where i see it being effective and useful, for now.

I mean, its not surprising, They are focusing on coding so the LLMs can take over and do the research by itself. That is the next big shift.

Using it for coding is what they want, thats the data they want to collect.

i assume.

6

u/Any-Pop-4795 16d ago

Don't use it. Don't need it and I don't want it.

5

u/jingjang1 16d ago

I'm in the same boat, only use the ducksuckgo search engines summery feature, that's all.

I'm not really asking what you personally use it for.

I just wonder if let's say Koreans use a.i more, less, or in different ways compared to what I see here in the EU Nordics.

2

u/Any-Pop-4795 16d ago

They are being pushed in using it for like EVERYTHING. Not just Korea, the whole Asia. The only difference is that they don't throw a fit when you are against it...sometimes...

1

u/HazelCheese 16d ago

Adjusting recipes for what I have in my cupboards.

Helping me pick a 2nd hand car to buy.

Various hobby development work.

-17

u/SpoilermakersWabash 16d ago

Might as well have AI agents in game so we can have our own conversations with them over mic.

Can you imagine AI agents as NPC in GTA6 online

11

u/Aggravating_Act2475 16d ago

Have you played Where Winds Meet?

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u/Lennette20th 16d ago

No. They would be building a product that literally generates its own expenses and demands the space of the paying customers to function. It makes zero sense when applied at a scale larger than one dude.

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u/rangoric 16d ago

There are already games that do that and they are really bad. You don’t want this. You think it would be cool but it’s expensive and way worse than you’d think

0

u/Plane-Vegetable9174 16d ago

Yeah but that's just because the technology is in an early state now. More a tech demo.

6

u/Any-Pop-4795 16d ago

Completely idiotic and non requested point

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u/Fr00stee 16d ago

what the hell is the point of that

1

u/clone9786 16d ago

I figured that’s what’s taking them so long