“Use of generative AI among game developers has declined after rising sharply in 2025, according to new data from the Game Developer Collective and Omdia. The survey shows 29% of developers reported using generative AI tools in early 2026, compared with 36% during the same period in 2025.”
it’s a survey. the backlash to using AI in games is deterrent enough for game devs to claim they’re not using it… I wouldn’t trust these reports.
Not saying you’re wrong about there being a bias but also I suspect use is actually dropping off
I’m currently in game dev school. Many people here absolutely hate AI and refuse to even learn about using it. Of the few that are using AI they’re embarrassed about it. It’s also mostly used to generate code when a designer or artist needs some code and was never taught anything about programming. The code tends to be a disaster and because they don’t know how to fix it they get mad at the AI for giving them nonsense and mad at themselves for not just learning to code basic stuff. I haven’t seen anyone use AI for anything art related yet
People don’t become game devs for money. We’re artists looking to express ourselves in a human way to other humans. Regurgitron 9000 does not help us produce human relatable stuff and it certainly doesn’t help us express ourselves
Well, we’re talking about game DEVELOPERS here, so of course the generative AI use will be mainly, if not always code generation. So I don’t even know why you’re bringing up any other kind of genAI.
LLMs are great at writing code because they’re designed for languages - and writing code is essentially a language, expressing instructions.
If you get nonsense code from the AI… Then you didn’t use it right. You can’t just tell it to write your game and expect the model to extrapolate your specific needs and wants on a whim. You need to be precise, and know what result you want.
People don’t become game devs for the money.
Oh, who are you kidding? A majority of game developers - as in, engineers, not designers - are in it because it was an available job in a language/framework they’re familiar with. Given a majority of game dev work IS Regurgitron 12K, even without AI (please don’t tell me your artistic goal is to create the 98374516th gatcha game with mostly naked women with impossible body ratios). Very, very few engineers get to work on the big, actually artistic titles.
This is incredibly incorrect on basically every front my goodness please be a troll…
I’m just going to focus on one aspect: Not even a “software developer” is limited to just programmers
Wait hold on you seem to like AI:
Your insistence that only people who code are developers is factually incorrect, ignores how much design work can include coding, and the way you keep reasserting it is insulting.
Designers and asset artists are still developing a game without coding it. Even the music in something like Rift of the NecroDancer constitutes level design, and in most cases music still can be used for conveying critical information if not just tone. It’s all still developing a game.
Getting into game dev for the money is genuinely a bad idea, as your odds are terrible. There was a famous talk in the indie boom that showed you were mathematically better off opening a Subway franchise than getting into game dev. Technical roles definitely come with a pay cut compared to what you can find elsewhere (and I know that from experience), not to mention less job stability, so you’re taking that job because you like the work and the end product more.
Guessing the image from “Detroit: Become Human” is because it’s a game about AI and not because it uses AI (since it came out in 2018).
That alone is problematic. Just never ever reference a Quantic Dreams game.
EDIT: David Cage, the director of these games thinks female empowerment is a woman getting sexually assaulted multiple times and fighting their way out. That happens to a single character in Heavy Rain. Oh and one of the endings they get is jumping out a burning building to their death. And this is over a period of like two days.
Because of the backlash from gamers/consumer/the general public, or because it was detrimental to the production of their product?
Looking also at the 2024 data, sounds more like fluctuation. Would need more data to see by those if it’s a tendency.
I feel like we can see the light at the end of tunnel, finally.
Generative AI as in image generation, text generation, predictive text, Code Intellisense, AutoComplete, etc?
This is too vague. Not only is “Generative AI” not qualified/specified as to what actually counts under that label according to the article, this would realistically also rely on people voluntarily responding and being honest. This particular survey is probably going to attract more responses from people that hate “AI” in its current general sense than from people that actually use it.
Also, most people that currently work in the games industry are in art (digital painting, texture painting, 3d modeling, etc), so obviously most of them are going to say it will negatively effect games as a whole. Regardless of whether that is true or not, the impact of perceived “job security” by trying to influence executives/management by negatively responding to “Generative AI” surveys is enough to skew the data to the paint that I believe it does not actually reflect reality. In other words, I believe that negative responses are being given for reasons other than “the tool is not helpful or useful,” but instead “I hate the tool.” Much like how animation artists first responded to the computer replacing cel animation technique. The people that hated computers animation talked down on the computers not because it would make their job easier, but because they thought they would lose their job if they talked positively about it. The sad fact is that people will lose their job regardless, especially in the current game industry where you can make a huge hit successful game and still get fired.
Generative AI is a tool, just like PhotoShop or Visual Studio. Its not a particularly useful tool for most of the stuff it is marketed to do, but it does have some use cases where I find it is a helpful tool. Asking “In which file is XYZ struct defined?” or “Explain to me ZYX function and what it returns” when working with a codebase you didn’t write yourself or have a team of others working on can be genuinely helpful (especially if the actual people that wrote the code are not available to do that). However, asking it to write specialized code for you is going to be a bad time because it will almost certainly not work correctly.
We’ll know when we see an excessive use of em dashes and single words after a period in an NPC’s dialogue text.
True, but you wouldn’t know if it was generated text first and then edited/altered manually by a person to remove the telltale signs. You might think it was generated, maybe, but youd never know for sure, and wouldnt know if anything else was generated or not either.
