“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.”
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.
AI is just another dot com bubble event. We still have websites, don’t you think? Most AI services are providing little to no value for the average person, but some are. I am willing to bet that these are going to be the survivors. As in every new technology driven revolution, I’d say. And with higher complexity comes higher automation rates. The current technology has more complexity, data and information than ever, hence automation is still there. But who am i to tell.
The main difference between Ai and the .com bubble is that AI has it’s enshitification built in. It’s 2026; Tech companies are in unison degrading their products and engaging in anti-consumer practices that would not have happened in the .com era. Generative Ai tools will follow a regular tech “disruption cycle.” it will be sold at a discount to game devs as a miracle tool and when they are dumb enough to de-skill the tech corpo oligarchs will raise the prices 500% and give the individual user a more neutered product compared to their own monopolies.
And with that aside what a waste of my life to throw away on the creative output of a machine. Especially with so many great human-made games out there. If every game in the future is made by a fucking AI, then I can just sit back and enjoy the human made backlog. Or search for communities of humans who still enjoy creating.
I was curious about the whole ordeal again, and even than corporations tried, and obtained, many things that we deem as good in comparison with the thing we have now, but 1999 -2001 laid the groudwork for the next social media revoltion (2005 - 2007) that brought us here. But the outlook on technology was more positive, overall, and we weren’t digital addicts wandering around the streets. But there are analogies here and there. I don’t think the AI bubble is a subprime like event.
In my eyes the AI bubble is an attempt of monopolization of all white collar industries by a the tech oligarch degenerates. Things will get increasingly worse if we let them.
They’re far too aware that this is a bubble, so I think they must know that they have a relatively short time window to make themselves necessary.
Considering a lot of these corporations , including gaming services, all have the side project of moving their products to the cloud. I imagine they know the bubble is going to pop and their bet is to use the chaos to restructure as many services as possible as rent seeking.
anectodally, I accidentally vibe coded a web app while i mistakenly loaded my dictionary file (a .txt) in the wrong page. Surprisingly the website works, but I doesn’t permanently save any new addition to the flashcard set.
I was just trying to get translation + example sentence for a flashcard / anki deck. I think I can restructure this thing to accept a .txt file as an input and make it actually useful, but If I didn’t know input / output on basic things like this i’d be unable to fix it. Well. Now imagine the number of users who are trying to make these web apps. Also it is 2026 and knowing java is still important apparently, so yeah also keep java in mind. And python.
I wanted to make my own flashcard thing with python. I was thinking at In / Out. I wasn’t thinking at automation. Some people are already getting used to that, tho, Idk if it is a problem. I wouldn’t use AI without a proper introduction to coding. Oh btw I know anki is better I was just thinkering with ideas.
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.
The problem of genAI software is that it comes from non technical users. Ideally, knowing the logic of a program is necessary to even imagine one. They always show these nicey nicey flow-charts with logic and decision based pathways. A non technical user will spit out a software that they wouldn’t know how to fix, don’t you think? And if fixing the software is more time consuming than writing it, the balance shifts towards manual work
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.