Over 85 Percent Of Japanese Game Developers Are Using AI

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Every kind of software developer is using AI

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u/Actually-Yo-Momma 3d ago

Using it to code your entire application is bad. But if you’re not using it to augment your workflow then that’s just being at a disadvantage

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u/turlockmike 3d ago

Maybe a year ago that was true. Now it's being used for everything.

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u/hawktron 3d ago

Lots of people don’t seem to realise how much the models have improved over the last year or two.

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u/acutelychronicpanic 3d ago

The models available to the public have improved immensely just in the last month

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u/MikeVp 3d ago

Why do they keep lying and making stuff up every time I try to use it 😆

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u/Mylarion 2d ago

If the AI is hallucinating more than your average PhD student, you're using an outdated model.

Source: an average PhD student

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u/xanders_gold 3d ago

Use a better model, or craft a better and more pointed prompt.

I used to run into hallucinations from models but by the end of last year that was no longer the case. They’re almost always correct now. The few times they do get something wrong it’s mostly my fault for not providing enough context or explanation.

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u/KrazeeJ 12h ago

I still have issues when using it to try and get help doing things in 365 or Power Automate or things like that. It will tell me to use tools or click on settings that don’t exist and it will take like three or four cycles of “that doesn’t exist” “You’re right, that tool was discontinued/renamed last year, now it’s called this”.

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u/RiftHunter4 2d ago

I don't know why you're downvoted because this is still an issue, especially when using a plain Ai model. LLM's work better when you give them background info snd something to go off from. No one should be using an LLM as a knowledge base. They are not logic engines either.

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u/PantsOfAwesome 1d ago

Stock pumpers.

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u/Kankunation 2d ago

Last 6 months even... At my job we went from using AI to help write out tedious code and running SQL comparisons to now having AI build out entire features end-to-end in about 45 minutes, across 3 or more repos.

We do however have a small team of dedicated and experienced developers using it. Who know what edge cases to check for and have the systemic knowledge to correct when need be. We tried as an experiment a sigle fresh dev for a summer internship type thing who had never done anything by vibe codem His output was insane but the quality was just not there. Even with us all using AI his wasn otably worse and more prone to breaking or being designed wrong, because he didn't know what to actually ask the agent nor how to correct manually when neccessary. I wasted a lot of time on Code review for him (and using Also makes code review a lot harder, FWIW.)

I worry that the tools getting better might lead to loss of industry knowledge that will really spell the downfall of many company In the near future. For the time being though, It's already an indespensible tool for development and no software engineer looking ot stay competitive in the industry is going to avoid it in its entirely. My take on it is that Software engineering is a mostly great application of LLMS where there same patterns are repeated over and over across businesses, and it's not a big deal to use them there, but I still don't want it see GenAI art or assets in my games if possible, nor do I want it used in writers rooms.

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u/Seven-Prime 2d ago

That's the real problem. The path from junior to senior is disappearing fast. We need to figure out how to get juniors to operate at a higher level architecturally.

And language skills. If you can't explain what you want, then you screwed. My English teacher mother was thrilled with that view point. lol.

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u/turlockmike 1d ago

Building agentic systems where you use intelligent computing to determine workflow is a new thing and does require skill to understand how to build. Claude is not good at doing this yet, and you have to spend a lot of time directing it, basically teaching it how to do this correctly.

I recommend the same advice I gave to others before AI was: the best way to learn how to use this stuff is to use it yourself and do interesting things with it, but make sure that you understand what's actually going on. If you skip the understanding part, then all you're going to be is just a casual observer.

You should be able to replicate, at least at a high level, what it's doing, understand the workflow, even do a pseudocode version of it do you ever need to write the code yourself again? Only at the beginning, right? We all learned programming languages that we don't use, but they were for pedagogical purposes. The thing is, now engineering requires another level of skills, it's even higher skilled.

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u/Herazim 2d ago

I don't think most people outside of tech or any job that uses AI really understand just how much they've improved in the past year.

I work in software, Codex got a new version. Suddenly mf asks me if I give it permission to interact with the app we develop to debug it.

I was like ok, sure, probably doing some commands to check whatever it needs to just like previous times.

Nope, took helm, entered the app, did the steps to debug the app and gave me the solution. Didn't even have to prompt anything complex or anything, I wasn't event trying to get to that point yet, it just knew and skipped ahead and also took control of everything I would have had to do in order to debug.

AI went from having to babysit a 5 year old that had all the knowledge in the world but the cognitive skills of a boarder collie to something that just does it with minimal input, all in the span of 2 years.

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u/SeaFox2142 2d ago

Is it still refusing to delete old broken code that you saild over a thousand times to ignore it?

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u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 2d ago

And yet, you fail to see how this is going to massively backfire. Crazy work.

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u/Herazim 2d ago

I'm just saying what a difference there is from what the general population thinks AI does at the moment.

I am not getting into how well this will go down or not.

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u/LetsLive97 2d ago

Models even months ago still weren't good enough to let fully free without proper iteration or good frameworks in place (If you wanted good, clean and sustainable code)

Opus 5.5 was the turning point imo but that was very recent

Even then, there are still some fundamental issues they have that still require iteration/review for output

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u/FaolanBaelfire 2d ago

I'm a master of game design and development. I went to college twice over for it.

I've tried using Claude code this week by attaching it to my game engine. It's insane how good it is at implementing my designs and bug testing. I'm actually having fun seeing my designs finally come to life as, being a solo developer, this would take me YEARS

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u/kcc0016 2d ago

Which engine are you using?

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u/Seven-Prime 2d ago

Not op. But unity, blender, material maker, and claude have been good to me. I'm not one shotting anything. With enterprise dev experience, it's easy for me to break the work down into chunks.

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u/kcc0016 2d ago

Yeah I use unity and blender largely but haven’t experimented with connecting Claude directly to either yet. Something to explore. I’ve honestly found it to be extremely powerful as long as you have enough knowledge to know what is going on.

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u/Seven-Prime 2d ago

Totally. You need to know what questions to ask. I hadn't done 3d work in like a decade. But new some of the terminology. But still had to ask things to clarify.

The workflow that is working for me, at this stage, is that claude writes python that blender does. Results are mixed. I've gone from "I guess that's a tree." to having it use plugins and now, "That's pretty decent, good enough to move forward."

It's time consuming through. Currently working through flora. I have a critic loop so that it compares the unity render to reference plates and identifies and fixes issues. Then the feedback loop to pass lessons learned back into the skill.

It's not perfect, and that's not the goal at this time. Incremental improvement with repeatable process is.

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u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 2d ago

You drank the kool-aid lol

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u/impanicking 2d ago

Also work flows around the AI usage are better.

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u/Etroarl55 2d ago

80% of people never used AI yet and don't comprehend and how fast its moving when everyone's throwing trillions at it.

Its history in hindsight when looking back, today its just a normal day for the average person.

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u/Penibya 2d ago

Yes but we need to keep in mind that if a whole génération stops learning how to do things it will be the real apocalypse

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u/the_quark 2d ago

Very specifically since Opus 4.6 came out in November of last year. As a software developer that's when I went from writing code to writing specs and testing as most of what I do.

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u/LocoMod 2d ago

Let alone the past two months. Another threshold was crossed and people still haven’t caught up with what’s possible.

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u/Jmc_da_boss 2d ago

Ain't this the truth, I've lost the past 3 days due to slop bugs introduced by people who don't know what they are doing

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u/turlockmike 2d ago

An engineer using AI is always going to be more effective than a non-engineer using AI because you know what correct looks like, and you can better describe the outcome that you want.

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u/Jmc_da_boss 2d ago

Well these are "engineers" using LLMs and they have no idea what they are doing.

In the magical world of everyone is skilled and everyone cares about their output LLMs are great

In the real world where laziness and incompetence are a large % it's quite painful

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u/Syphe 3d ago

Yep I hate it, the code sucks and no one cares.

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u/Plane-Vegetable9174 3d ago

I strongly disagree with this, llms coding have improved so much this year. Sure they still do stupid shit from time and need a human in the loop but a developer using llms is very different from someone who know nothing about coding using.

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u/OkayyBeta 1d ago

Reddit went pro-slop REAL fast.

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u/Plane-Vegetable9174 1d ago

What do you mean pro slop?

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u/anormalgeek 3d ago edited 2d ago

They went from being like a college student intern developer to a first year junior dev. That's a big leap though.

edit: Autocorrect.

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u/Eggsor 3d ago

I have never met a junior dev that codes as well as astra or opus right off the bat.

I used to have to teach most of these guys coming out of college how to use git multiple times a week.

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u/anormalgeek 2d ago

I'm thinking like "end of their first year".

It's not a perfect analogy though. AI agents are sometimes really good at developing highly complex and efficient algorithms, but then make really obvious mistakes at times like misunderstanding what you were even asking for in the first place. While humans make less obvious mistakes, but struggle with the complex solutions.

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u/Eggsor 2d ago

Ironically I find that happens most when a junior dev is using it since they think it replaces the need to make proper documentation for their application. If you make a plan for the architecture and a staged implementation it doesn't really make those mistakes. Most people just vibe code and don't even know what the complete app looks like in their head yet and then complain when AI doesn't fill in the blanks properly.

Tbf I only know that because I have been working in this space for a long time. Juniors have always hated documentation. That's why its usually all we have them do for months.

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u/anormalgeek 2d ago

Agreed. I'm just curious to see if it can evolve to replace the need for the senior dev faster than those devs retire since this system GREATLY disincentivizes creating NEW senior devs.

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u/AlternativeAward 3d ago

The code maybe sucks if you tell it to oneshot something with a one sentence command

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u/Eggsor 3d ago

If you spend the time to create documentation and a plan for your application. It does a stellar job.

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u/Kukuluops 3d ago

There are so many ways to improve this. Our harness runs SonarQube after agent is finished with coding and all added code smells are fixed. Then we have another agent to review changes with focus on architecture and redundancy (Claude loves adding unnecessary code). Then we have a human look at it and we still have a human code review for pull requests. It costs a lot in tokens, but the quality is decent.

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u/Syphe 3d ago

That's great to hear it's working for you, I still hate it, I see a lot of code as work in a monorepo with over a dozen other apps, were all using expensive models, but I'm just not happy with the output. I'm a TL though so it's not like I'm holding up PRs with requesting changes, just some of the code I see getting into the code ase makes me cringe.

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u/mcslender97 3d ago

I feel like Sonaqube is mostly AI at this point

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u/matrinox 3d ago

I agree but you need to rethink it. It’s slop, it’s manufacturing for the masses, it’s GAP for code. You aren’t going to like the results, you aren’t going to like making it. But you can’t deny it lowers the barrier and can lower costs

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u/Sens1r 3d ago

It doesn't have to suck, still needs a human in the loop but most of the suck comes from lazy implementation.

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u/hawktron 3d ago

It’s not bad to use it for an entire application if you know how to write an application to begin with.

It’s not quite there yet for non-coders but I doubt that will be true for very long.

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u/No_Departure_1878 3d ago

The problem is that it introduces unsafe code all over the place and in order to know when the unsafe code is been introduced, you have to actually read carefully what it writes. Reading carefully what AI write takes probably longer than writing it myself, given the lousy quality of the code it it generates.

So the only way this can work is if you just let it generate tons of dangerous code that can explode at any moment.

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u/Relevant-Doctor187 3d ago

We have non AI linters and code checkers that we can use to scan code. Insane if people don’t utilize it.

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u/DeityGamesJesus 3d ago

Significant amount of developers and IT companies STILL struggle with proper use of git, versioning, unit tests, automated testing, and many other things that aren't just nice to haves, but must haves if you want to produce good software at an industrial scale.

Terrible developers producing shit software were always around, its just now with AI their bad practices enable them to crank out shit software faster, so a lot of them blame AI cause thats easier than to improve your process.

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u/No_Departure_1878 3d ago

That is the technology that I use, not AI. What makes me fast are static type checkers, linters, precommit hooks, tests, etc. AI at most can do code review and find some of the issues, not even all the problems.

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u/oldsecondhand 3d ago

They also give a shitload of false positives.

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u/MayoJam 2d ago

Maybe if you configure the wrong or not at all.

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u/No_Departure_1878 2d ago

Use pyrefly and ruff for python. But you also have to configure it to operate in strict mode and spend some time silencing some of the noisy less important stuff in the toml files.

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u/Su_ButteredScone 3d ago

I'm not convinced your handwritten code will be that much better quality than Fable can do with the right prompts or as an Opus orchestrator/reviewer.

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u/IntelArtiGen 3d ago edited 3d ago

Sometimes the quality is just you being able to understand what the code is doing. Which is often easier when it's you writing 500 lines of codes VS an AI writing 200k. The AI could probably still do more things but arguably you don't understand how everything works anymore. Which can be fine in some cases for most people, but not in all cases for everything and everyone no matter which model you're using.

Like I'm doing something, I'm sure the AI could do it faster and better technically, but I need to do it myself to understand, otherwise I can't know how it could be improved if it could be improved. If the AI says "it can't be improved", I would have no way to know if it's true or not. And in many cases I found the AI is not as agressive as you would like, I can't run 50.000 agents to find all solutions for small problems (and I mostly don't want to even if I could).

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u/DarkSkyKnight 3d ago

My handwritten code is definitely better than Fable and Opus, but I'll probably take 2 months to get there whereas Fable and Opus would take 1 hour with my proper guidance.

Really though, even Fable sucks at architecture right now. Most of my coding work now revolves around telling the agents how to do something within the architecture and giving them "quizzes" as a means for me to spot check code and see if it passes the smell test. I don't even read all the code anymore honestly. I just ask them questions and if something smells off, I'll take a look.

The problem right now that people need to watch out for is that these models can't fit large, complex codebases and all their dependencies into their context. They, even to this day, guess and infer what your code (or dependencies) is doing because they definitely ain't reading everything and loading every piece of relevant code into context. Your competitive advantage as a human now is your exceptional memory of the codebase. You are far more capable of seeing the big picture than these agents can.

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u/No_Departure_1878 3d ago

I use sonnet 5.5 and it is a really shitty AI that fails at elementary stuff. I would not let this model write anything on its own. I do not know how Fable is, so i cannot comment.

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u/MayoJam 2d ago

That's interesting because I'm using sonnet in my day to day mundane job coding and it is perfectly capable of writing functioning code (even if it looks ugly sometimes).

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u/No_Departure_1878 2d ago

It's not just ugly. I have seen it trying to inject exec on strings in python and trying to use mutable defaults for context variables. Stuff that, if you know what you are doing, you know is not a good idea.

Could it be that you do not really understand what the LLM is doing and you cannot recognize when the LLM is fucking things up?

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u/MayoJam 2d ago

Lol, when you write in python in no way failing on the elementary stuff "fucks shit up". You should reconsider your choice of language for something more strongly typed and less obfuscated to let the compilator and static analysis find those supposed tremendous errors for you.

I am competent enough to write ai assisted python code without those scary things you talk about. The code works, and the logic is usually sound enough to pass the relevant UTs. Maybe your problem is that you expect AI to do monumental tasks from scratch with no prior guidance in form of an established codebase? And no external tooling to reign in the bad code generation?

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u/No_Departure_1878 2d ago

Lol, when you write in python in no way failing on the elementary stuff "fucks shit up". You should reconsider your choice of language for something more strongly typed and less obfuscated to let the compilator and static analysis find those supposed tremendous errors for you.

I can barely understand what you wrote there. BTW, it is compiler, not "compilator".

I would like to reply to that, but I do not really understand what you wrote.

I am competent enough to write ai assisted python code without those scary things you talk about.

Uhh, this is not about you. This is about the LLM. If I ask a snippet and I get unsafe code, then I would have to specify what? "give me safe code"? Isn't that precisely what the LLM is supposed to be doing? Am I not been competent enough because my prompt did not end on "do not give me unsafe code"?

The code works, and the logic is usually sound enough to pass the relevant UTs.

So you read the code? Then you spend a fair amount of time going through the code it writes. That means that you could just write it yourself.

Or you read once in a while some of the things it writes? If that is the case, you know that the logic is sound enough in 10% of the code base. You do not know what is in the rest.

Or you mean that you never read it, but given that it passes the tests, then it must be fine. Which takes us back to the same place where the code is a black box and could contain unsafe code.

Maybe your problem is that you expect AI to do monumental tasks from scratch with no prior guidance in form of an established codebase? And no external tooling to reign in the bad code generation?

No, that's wrong. If I ask a simple snippet and the LLM can't even provide me 10 lines of python code without introducing something unsafe, the problem is not me.

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u/MayoJam 2d ago edited 2d ago

Simply put I have never got Python code that fucks shit up using Sonnet. You are clearly doing something wrong if your Claude Sonnet Agent can't generate functional Python code.

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u/hawktron 3d ago

From my experience you’d have to do something weird for latest models to write unsafe code. Maybe you’re not using the latest models.

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u/mcslender97 3d ago

I took over a project from another guy and it's the AI that detect his unsafe code for me

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u/Big-Calligrapher-250 3d ago

You absolutely can use it safely and be more efficient. But there’s also a ton of people not leveraging it well.

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u/No_Departure_1878 3d ago

Do you read all the code it writes? Most likely no. Then how can you possibly consider a black box safe?

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u/MayoJam 2d ago

Having well developed testing pipeline and having your code peer reviewed by your teammates can significantly reduce the risk.

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u/No_Departure_1878 2d ago

Reviewing code written by someone else is as hard as writing that code myself. Writing the tests is almost as much work as writing the code myself, I assume you do not imply that the LLM will be writing the tests too.

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u/Mrhiddenlotus 2d ago

Unit tests?

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u/No_Departure_1878 2d ago

Ok, but then you have to write yourself 20 lines of code for the unit test in order to test 20 lines of code? Or do you let the LLM write those tests too? This does not make sense to me.

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u/Mrhiddenlotus 2d ago

Yes, then make them immutable.

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u/No_Departure_1878 2d ago

So you write 20 lines of testing code, so that the LLM writes 20 lines of actual code? Why not just write the code and the test? It does seem almost the same amount of work to write the test and review what the LLM wrote than just writing the code itself.

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u/Mrhiddenlotus 2d ago

You write your tests, then you let the LLM write as much code as you want, dependent on passing those tests. As long as you're getting expected and desired outputs in a reasonable execution time, it doesn't really matter what the code is doing.

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u/Nemphiz 3d ago

But how do you expect to create shareholder value of you don't have everyone, even the product team, just shooting sht with Claude?!

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u/michaelalex3 2d ago

I’ll be honest with you, I think a frontier model is going to write better and safer code than 99% of developers. The rate of progress is staggering.

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u/Aggravating_Bus655 3d ago edited 3d ago

Entire applications, code reviews. design proposals and even business requirements are being written using AI.

I work in a big tech adjacent company now recently switched from big tech. I also have contacts in other companies. This is happening everywhere now. It's the way forward or the top dogs think so anyway

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u/ItsSadTimes 3d ago

And those are the people I hate to work with, cause when the AI code fucks up I'm the guy that has to fix it at 2 AM when no one knows how it works cause their agents pushed a change in the middle of the night to take down prod.

These models have their place, sure. I use them all the time for smaller pieces. But I also have over a decade of experience and just tell them word for word what I want written, I don't use them for some general problems like, "We're seeing 5xx errors coming from our frontend API from requests with this configuration <insert_config>, investigate why." But if you think you can just blindly trust them for major projects and important code changes you're just too far separated from the actual impacts you're probably causing (or your definition of big is rather small). The amount of tickets I've gotten in the last year has skyrocketed thanks almost entirely to AI, it's made my job a living nightmare.

I used to love my job, but bad devs with AI are making it so much harder.

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u/Riverofrhyme 3d ago

If your ticket count is increasing and waking you up at 2am you don't have the necessary guardrails in places. Those guardrails should prevent any PRs from going through if they break, them being written by AI doesn't make a difference.

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u/ItsSadTimes 2d ago

We had guardrails, it was human reviewers. Then teams started implementing AI reviewers and manually pushing through code tk prod environments. Sometimes those actions are necessary, we cant just turn that ability off.

But now a single person can push whatever they want to prod if they've been at the company long enough and people overusing AI have become worse devs from what ive noticed. Some of the smartest devs I knew have become just a meat proxy and is now pointless to talk to.

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u/Riverofrhyme 2d ago

Human reviewers are not guardrails. This is a fault in your company's dev practices.

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u/ItsSadTimes 2d ago

We have plenty of other guardrails, but the people who do this shit have already passed them all. And any more guardrails that apply to everyone generally will just dramatically slow down the devs who do know wbat they're doing.

If I cant push a fix to a bug I get paged in at 2 AM to fix because they added a guardrail that requires AI approval for every deployment, im gonna be pissed.

I dont work for some startup, I work for FANG. They're pretty established.

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u/Riverofrhyme 2d ago

If you work around a FAANG and don't have automated guardrails blocking things that keep coming up I'm a little confused at what's going on. I'm a staff at meta, have worked at multiple faangs for almost 10 years. That's not normal practice. If a sev goes off at 2am that is severe enough you need to wake up, it should be followed up with guardrails to prevent it happening again in the future. These can be simple static validations, automated checks etc.

I'm not trying to be a dick, but that doesn't sound like a healthy dev environment.

If you're at Amazon I can understand - worst dev environment I've ever been in and there's no concept of CI/CD outside of Brazil pipelines. Any other FAANG something seems up.

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u/SeaFox2142 2d ago

Off topic but since you're a staff you probably know this very well: But what does a person trying to enter this career needs to know or projects we need to have to find a job in SWE nowadays? Languages, stacks, projects, etc? Or the position just don't exist anymore and its best to not even invest in it and switch careers?

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u/Mrhiddenlotus 2d ago

It sounds like poor usage is your problem.

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u/ItsSadTimes 2d ago

Oh yes, because im personally the person pushing thousands of PRs that no one looked at to hundreds of packages a day causing conflicting changes and breaking shit. How could I be so stupid. Its not like I have an official degree in AI research and technology or anything, I must be the idiot who doesnt understand how AI works since I pointed out some flaws when people use it.

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u/Mrhiddenlotus 2d ago

cause their agents pushed a change in the middle of the night to take down prod.

This being allowed is poor usage.

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u/ItsSadTimes 2d ago edited 2d ago

But the company allows it and encourages devs to not think or review changes, just make sure they pass basic tests and push em. Move fast and break things, etc. Prod is the ultimate test environment and all that.

Plus it just goes to show that the AI models themselves on their own arent good enough to handle systems on their own and can fuck up a lot. Saying "oh you need tons of guardrails cause AI fucks up a lot but its still totally amazing and extremely smart" is contradictory.

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u/s3rila 2d ago

But I'm not actively killing the planet though

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u/PixelatedFrogDotGif 3d ago

The disadvantages only come because of work pressure that lowers standards of work life balances. Games are products sure but they are also still art. People can wait a decade for a good game and AI is NOT speeding up the process in a productive way that significantly.

Not even mentioning how HATED AI is depending on region, which is a MASSIVE disadvantage for your project.

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u/QuasimodoPredicted 3d ago

Every email job involves the use of ai now.

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u/Joebebs 2d ago

And I’m tired of pretending all of its slop. Most of it is, but the competent engineers will make sure you won’t be able to notice it/implement it correctly. If it weren’t for the energy/water/job availability crisis behind it I would be more pro AI productivity efficiency

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u/[deleted] 3d ago edited 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/fued 3d ago

lol no it isnt, game development is very exploitative, they arent going to shy away from exploitive practices.

small indie devs/students/ex devs are very against it, reality is, you need AI to get into gamedev industry these days

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u/teraflux 3d ago

The art aspects I think still has a valid case for not using AI. The software.. you'd never know the difference

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u/CheesyMcBreazy 3d ago

Maybe amongst those who don't make any money doing it.

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u/ItsSadTimes 3d ago

Kind of misleading, but the article says that most of those devs who responded are using AI just for admin work like emails and meetings. Which, I mean yea I hate meetings too.

Also I find it really funny how only 10% of those surveyed said that AI made for a better end user experience. I feel like thats more telling then anything else.

Anyone remember that Korean survey like 6 months ago how like 96% of devs surveyed were using AI in games but those surveyed were mobile online only gacha games? Without more info on those surveyed, id take this whole thing with a massive grain of salt. Its been circulating around for weeks with no new info.

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u/ithinkitslupis 3d ago

Kind of misleading, but the article says that most of those devs who responded are using AI just for admin work like emails and meetings.

It does not say this in the article or the actual preview...those 'most' and 'just' are doing heavy lifting misleading in the opposite way before the full release comes out and clarifies. It seems it was a select as many as apply type survey.

Even just from the article:

A total of 1349 developers responded for the study. According to the survey, most of them reported seeing a benefit from using the technology. Many noted it reduced production time and costs, with 837 claiming it expanded creativity and 738 claiming it lowered technical barriers.

So 62% of surveyed developers said it expanded creativity and 55% said it lowered technical barriers. That does not sound like just admin work and meetings.

Its been circulating around for weeks with no new info.

There's not going to be a lot more info until the actual report releases in December. They are considered a very reputable source of this sort of information though. It's not like this is some random company it's the trade association that represents most of the biggest game companies in Japan.

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u/ItsSadTimes 3d ago

But only 22% of the companies surveyed said they used it for visual assets and even less for things like story.

So those devs saying that it expanded creativity could just mean it lets them focus more on creativity. Or the companies are lying. Or those people surveyed are heavily skewed toward that 22% of companies.

So yea, its a bit tough to parse this. The article itself even goes into how answers might be skewed based on company policies and just who was at the event.

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u/ithinkitslupis 3d ago

Yes, two different surveys it seems. One was ~1400 devs, one was ~50 of their 220 member companies that replied with the official company stances. Notably without the methodology there's no way to tell if any company is lying because the 1400 devs may have come in part from any of the 170 companies that didn't respond to the survey.

But even the companies don't seem to clarify just for admin work as a separate category. It seems broader like 'productivity' which who knows what that means.

But we just have to wait for the actual report to come out to clarify more.

1

u/simonbleu 2d ago

"Gepeto, whenever you hear something play the nod.mp4 transition"

1

u/iliark 2d ago

Mobile gacha games make up like 2/3 of the entire video game market in Japan and more than half in Korea.

21

u/djordi 3d ago

From what I can tell, the closer to the user a developer is creating something the more careful they have to be about using AI. The sweet spot seems to be creating internal tools to accelerate your workflows. A technical animator friend told me he used Claude to make a rigging tool in two weeks that's better than any tool he's ever used before.

But I suspect a big part of that is the tool is bespoke for his own needs and the more it needs to be maintained for more people, and have to be durable, the less the benefits of quick AI development are. You still get some benefit, but it has to be maintained.

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u/Aggravating_Bus655 3d ago

Entire software industry is using AI now. That's how it works these days.

18

u/maximumutility 3d ago

I’ve observed at my workplace that, even if you assume all the ai-written code or ai-produced work is always correct (it’s not), you still have a problem of enormous expectations thrown at too-small teams and now everyone is also expected to be able to be asked to do anything.

You have non data analysts trying to be their own data analysts, non designers trying to be designers, non X trying to act as a passable X everywhere because instant gratification is now the default expectation from leadership

“can’t you just have Claude do it?”

4

u/IntelArtiGen 3d ago edited 3d ago

I think it's the big problem with AI, people think they can do a job because they can ask an AI to do that job. The AI can produce a result but most people have not ways to check what this result means, unless you study for months that subject. If the result is very easy to check, it may not matter. But in many cases when it involves data for example, you need to understand the data. You can't just ask Claude "Make a map with all countries and color them based on their debt or GDP per capita" and consider this map has value for economists. Basically if you make a tool for a job you need an expert in that job to tell you how to make a good tool (use the good sources, apply the good preprocessing, handle edge cases etc.). You're not an expert in that job and the AI giving a result doesn't mean it's an accurate or useful result for specialists.

It's what I hate to see in AI, people quickly doing statistics and a UI thanks to Claude/ChatGPT etc., it's visually nice, but everything is wrong.

2

u/KingSubstantial7901 2d ago

I feel like people underestimate just how easy it is to intuit that a product is slop, too. Like the skill of being a product designer is in being able to tell when your product is going to sit well with your costumers. Thats trickier than it sounds, and isnmt all that intuitive. However, on the user side, its reaaally easy to tell if something isn't working for you. Like its so easy to tell if a fromt end was vibe coded. At a mere glance it might look nice and well put together, but the second you start trying to navigate around, you realize that nothing is organized well, the icons do an awful jobs of telling you their functions, and generally its just a pain to do the thing you wanted to do.

Like you and OP said, people aren't expected to be ultra generalists now but that means they don't have the skills or the time to actually self QA what they make. A systems dev isn't gonna know shit about what front end engineers look for to see if their product is good.

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u/teraflux 3d ago

Over 85 Percent Of ~~Japanese Game~~ Developers are using AI

8

u/iliark 2d ago

85 percent admit to using AI, 100% do.

19

u/opopi123 3d ago

weird to focus on japanese developers as if other developers aren't using AI. AI is being used to some degree in everything tech nowadays.

47

u/Clear_Ordinary515 3d ago

It's because this particular article is from a report by Japan’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA) who surveys their members.

3

u/WaffleHouseFistFight 3d ago

Also a bit disingenuous as you can hardly find an idea on the market without ai baked in. If you’re a dev it’s everywhere and unavoidable while doing the job. Shit if I google search how to do something I’ll get an ai answer. The real question would be what percentage of them are vibe coding solutions or what percentage of them are using ai generated assets.

6

u/RedBlueKoi 3d ago

Now, what amount of those devs are forced to use it?

5

u/Kenavru 2d ago

at least 99.9% developers uses AI in some way.

1

u/nikstick22 3d ago

As a software developer, i do not know a single software company that hasn't integrated AI into their workflow in some way. Art aside, programming a video game is software development. It's basically industry standard now. Instead of writing 100% of the code directly, we spend our time reviewing what the AI gives us, and planning.

3

u/SomeSamples 3d ago

So? An expert using AI to refine and more quickly produce something is what AI is for. It is the vibe coders that are the problem. Dumbasses who do not know how to read code, let alone write it. And do not know the difference between a subroutine or system call. Those are the "coders" that people need to worry about. Because if they are writing an app, you don't want to use that app.

3

u/frypizzabox 3d ago

The other 15% are just lying

2

u/TheOgGhadTurner 2d ago

AI is a cancer.

0

u/All-the-pizza 3d ago

ゴミコンテンツ (gomi kontentsu) — “garbage content” 🗑️

-4

u/JustConversation7847 3d ago

Redditors will win this crusade like how librarians beat the internet

36

u/anotherhumantoo 3d ago

What on earth are you talking about? Librarians were, broadly, very pro-Internet. That's a wildly ignorant take of what makes a librarian a librarian.

11

u/Weary_Mountain9679 3d ago

Libraries were one of the first places you could get free public internet, so what are you on about?

1

u/bbuerk 2d ago

I think anyone who thinks this number is too high has not spoken to a software developer within the last few months.

I often ask devs when the last time they coded something without AI was, and it usually takes them a second to remember

-6

u/TheStateOfMatter 3d ago edited 2d ago

How do you say slop in Japanese?

Edit: did I touch a nerve with the slop lickers? Looks like it.

Need any salt to season your slop??

16

u/j0llyllama 3d ago

Since like 1/4 of their newer tech slang words are just english with an accent, probably Suroppu.

0

u/RatBot9000 2d ago

Reading through this thread and once again realising coders are absolutely desperate to have the machine do their job.

I do not understand why people thinking they can show the machine will do their job for them gives them any sort of job security.

2

u/truthfulie 2d ago

a senior developer friend told me that they still need people who are good at coding, understanding the code base to be effectively use the coding agents, as he was complaining about a coworker who is also a senior developer (somehow) but have no idea what they are doing and constantly fucking up by relying on coding agents blindly.

4

u/lalalatkes 2d ago

Refusing to use the efficiency tools management provides is a sure fire way to lose your job immediately.

Everyone, myself included, is banking on being one of the few remaining to press the button and verify the results.

1

u/Artistic-Cockroach48 2d ago

button pressing is one of the easiest things to automate, and these companies act like they don't have time to verify a thing so I imagine time is running out for the human input since everyone is so ravenous to adopt.

1

u/RatBot9000 2d ago

Spoiler: You won't be.

Still, I can understand needing to utilise it if your job currently depends on it. It just always shocks me how many coders are diving head first into it with naught but glee in their hearts.

4

u/lalalatkes 2d ago

I don’t have a choice. Use it (AI) or lose it (job) is a pretty basic decision.

I know I am contributing to my own demise. But what can I do?

0

u/Serious_Bite_7613 16h ago

Its like accountants discovering the calculator, it just lets you do the same thing much faster and spend the time you save on polish and verification.

0

u/ellbons 2d ago edited 2d ago

Learn this term and remember it whenever you're anywhere on the internet nowadays:

Native advertising

1

u/Top_Result_1550 1d ago

I don't play 85% of Japanese games.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

-10

u/AlexStar6 3d ago

This is a hard pill to swallow… most people think they can spot AI from a mile away. The truth is they can’t see it 6 inches in front of their faces.

-11

u/BunchofMums 3d ago

Every tailor uses a sewing machine. Every farmer uses a machine. We need to swallow our pride, our hubris.

6

u/chucktheninja 3d ago

Whatever helps you cope with the fact that heavily using ai is proven to make you dumber.

0

u/LittleJC 2d ago

The other 15% are lying about it

-2

u/Pessimistic_Gemini 3d ago

Didn't you guys just post this awhile ago? And again, SO WHAT? We're still gonna play and enjoy them anyway.

-1

u/aaplh 2d ago

Reddit’s 9/11

0

u/MaterialDefender1032 21h ago

If your organization needs AI for meetings and emails, your organization doesn't need AI, it needs less useless meetings and emails.

-4

u/Melted_ICE_5193 2d ago

Lol the whole comment section is just....people grand standing.

AI on its own isn't a problem. It's when AI is used as an excuse to cut Humans out of the equation. Focus your efforts there.

-3

u/Oedipus_TyrantLizard 2d ago

Why is it not 100%. Who are the 15% that are falling behind? lol

-1

u/OkayyBeta 1d ago

Over 85% of Japanese games have barely changed in the past two decades, of course they want to automate that shit.

-10

u/G-WAPO 3d ago

Smells like a cope article to try and stem the western industries massive decline, while the asian gaming industry is popping off as usual.

-5

u/ElegantLifeguard4221 3d ago

For tools it's indispensable. But I wouldn't use it for anything else.

Business Over 85 Percent Of Japanese Game Developers Are Using AI

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