40% of Game Developers Now Use Generative AI at Work, GDC Survey Finds

Forty percent of game developers say they use generative AI as part of their job, up from 36 percent in 2025. The figure comes from the GDC Festival of Gaming's latest annual industry survey, published this week. The increase is modest — four percentage points — but the gap between studio types is not.

Adoption among developers of free-to-play games reached 58 percent. Among workers at mobile-only studios, it hit 70 percent. In other words, the segments with the thinnest margins and the fastest production cycles lean on the tools hardest. The survey does not say whether these teams use AI to cut costs or to raise output. That distinction matters. It is the difference between efficiency and displacement, and the survey leaves it unanswered.

What are developers actually using AI for?

The survey breaks usage into tasks, and the pattern is telling. The most-cited applications sit far from shipped content:

• 73 percent use AI for research and brainstorming
• 62 percent use it for data analysis and summarization
• 56 percent use it for code generation and debugging
• 22 percent use it for concept art or visual ideation
• 8 percent use it for production art or final game assets

The numbers describe a tool for preparatory work, not a tool for making games. Only one developer in twelve puts generative AI into final assets. The headlines about AI-built worlds rest on a much narrower base of practice. Brainstorming, the top use case, is also the least verifiable — no survey can measure whether AI-assisted brainstorming produces better games.

Where does the industry stand on AI?

The survey lands amid open conflict over the technology. Many developers, particularly indie developers, have spoken out strongly against it. Yet AI now sits at the center of indie awards conversations, in part because House House, the developer of Big Walk, said it "sparingly" used large language models to assist with technical challenges in the "final stretch" of development. Even critics' circles are debating degrees of use rather than the principle.

AI is also increasingly used to reverse-engineer retro games, an application the survey does not quantify but which raises its own legal questions about original code and assets.

The loudest signal came from the platform side. In a post on Thursday, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said: "A small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars." The sentence is a promise, not a product. It describes no shipped title, names no tool, and offers no timeline. Read against the survey data, it also cuts the other way: if today's games demand hundreds of developers, and 34 percent of surveyed developers report layoffs in the past two years, the industry's employment picture and its AI ambitions are moving in the same direction at the same time.

What does the layoff number say?

Thirty-four percent of respondents said they have been laid off sometime in the past two years. That is the survey's grimmest figure, and it complicates every efficiency claim. The survey does not attribute the layoffs to AI, and no direct link is established. But a technology marketed as letting smaller teams do the work of hundreds will be measured against that backdrop, whether or not causation exists.

One caution on the data itself. The survey reports what respondents say, not what studios deploy. Self-reported usage may understate contracted AI services or overstate casual experimentation. With a four-point annual rise and final-asset usage stuck at 8 percent, the tools have entered the workflow — but not yet the games.