“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
Probably depends a lot on whether it’s an anonymous survey…
Generative Ai is Among Us.
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.
David “I don’t make games for f*gs” Cage
David “In my games, women are wh*res” Cage
David “COCK AND BALL TORTURE” Cage
*that one scene inside night club in heavy rain :>
I mean, famously the studio rendered a nude model of Eliot Page against their consent for Beyond: Two Souls (a game that is already stupid for not telling a linear story; there was a future release that include a chronological story mode) that was never intended for the final version but left in the retail release for anyone to discover.
EDIT: I’m gonna mention this to stress the point that David Cage is awful. Don’t read this if you get trigger by assault. Despite all this according to Wikipedia, Page as of 2025 is set to produce a television adaptation.
Mention of assault.
One point in the story, Jodie tries to escape the institution she is living in to go to a bar. The character during this portion is underage. If the player successfully escapes, they are treated to a scene which older men at the bar assault Jodie.
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.
If people put slop in their games; ANY type of slop; I’m gonna assume the whole thing was done with that little care. If a novel has a AI cover i am gonna assume the text is AI spam as well. Simple and easy. ;) If people wants to make mindless trash i hope it sells like trash.
Literal judging a book by its cover mention.
But I do agree that generative software proliferation can certainly lead to a flood of low-quality trash.
Off topic, but I read books, and I can tell publishers leverage " judging a book by its cover" extremely well, because it is true, otherwise I couldn’t tell an academic edition or a general edition. A book with an AI cover is, in general, a bad idea, and it conveys low quality to the reader. Some open source books use AI to format an epub file; some use text recognition without professional formatting, and it is a disaster to read. You are better off getting an old pdf edition or paying a premium for a publisher’s modernised version.
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.
