Friday, November 13th 2026
Video Game Workers and AI: 40% Use It, but 55% Think It's Bad News
We have repeatedly seen generative AI divide the gaming industry in game industry worker surveys and in comments by game developers, and this is apparently still the case, according to the latest GDC State of the Game Industry: November 2026 survey. The organization surveyed over 2,600 game workers across different disciplines in the video game industry about a variety of topics, including the ongoing layoffs, hiring rates after being laid off, and the future of the gaming industry. When it comes to generative AI, 40% of game workers reported that they used AI in their work, with a more granular look revealing that 63% of workers in business operations or services used AI, while 51% of marketing and PR employees, and 48% of programmers used generative AI in their daily work.
Workers at "older indie studios" were less likely to use AI, with only 29% of respondents confirming AI use, while workers working on premium games also showed lower rates of AI use, at 32% of respondents. The inverse was true for free-to-play games, with 58% using AI, and mobile studios, where 70% of workers reported using AI. Company AI policies are also interesting, with as many as 23% of respondents reporting that AI was banned at their studios, while only 1% were required to use them, 12% were allowed to use them at their own discretion, 11% were discouraged from using them, and 17% were encouraged to use AI tools.
Of the video game workers who reported using AI for their work, 57% reported that they used it daily, and 72% used it for text generation, 62% used it for code generation, and only 22% and 7% used it for image and video generation, respectively.
Despite its obviously widespread use at game studios across the gaming industry, the general sentiment towards generative AI continues to lean negative, with 55% of respondents reporting that they thought AI would have a negative impact on the video games industry, while 35% reported a mixed sentiment, and only 8% of video game workers in the survey felt that it had a positive impact on the gaming industry.
While proponents of the tech expressed positive impacts ranging from increased speed and reduced cost, to eliminating unpleasant grunt work. Some of the concerns and objections expressed by those with negative outlooks on AI in the gaming industry include that it will replace people, that it eliminates human expression, and that it dulls or removes creativity from the game design and development process.
Sources:
GDC, via GamingOnLinux
Workers at "older indie studios" were less likely to use AI, with only 29% of respondents confirming AI use, while workers working on premium games also showed lower rates of AI use, at 32% of respondents. The inverse was true for free-to-play games, with 58% using AI, and mobile studios, where 70% of workers reported using AI. Company AI policies are also interesting, with as many as 23% of respondents reporting that AI was banned at their studios, while only 1% were required to use them, 12% were allowed to use them at their own discretion, 11% were discouraged from using them, and 17% were encouraged to use AI tools.
While proponents of the tech expressed positive impacts ranging from increased speed and reduced cost, to eliminating unpleasant grunt work. Some of the concerns and objections expressed by those with negative outlooks on AI in the gaming industry include that it will replace people, that it eliminates human expression, and that it dulls or removes creativity from the game design and development process.
10 Comments on Video Game Workers and AI: 40% Use It, but 55% Think It's Bad News
"Everyone involved in some form of content creation use it"
I mean, I do some streaming every now and then, dont use AI so...you are already wrong out of the gate.
I also do some image creation for work, I just use Gimp/Fireworks, no AI envolved there either soooooooooo yeah.,
It's like saying I go to work on my horse, and I respect myself, while those people with the model-T, are just plain evil
Firstly, it makes tons of mistakes, mistakes that I still understand well enough from the pre-AI days to recognise as mistakes. There's always this back and forth where the AI gaslights you and then after being helm-corrected multiple times, finally comes around to a working solution after you've re-stated how important certain criteria were that it seemed to ignore without emphasis.
Secondly, it lets me do things outside my field of expertise, and that works to an extent, but it has knock-on implications and when something breaks, *I* don't understand how to fix it and neither does the AI because you can ask the same AI agent to do the same thing twice and you'll get two different results.
AI is superficially amazing, but when you dig deeper there's a shitstorm brewing and it's only getting worse as AI becomes usable on increasingly complex tasks. On a wider scale, AI search engines are regurgitating the internet, while simultaneously damaging the internet. It's like how pinterest has made image search now impossible because every search engine just spits out pinterest thumbnails with no link to the source and no information about what it stole.
pcgaming/comments/1xptpcv/star_wars_zero_company_developer_bit_reactor_hit
You do need to rewrite every line though.