Generative AI is becoming a routine part of making games, even as many developers say they dislike it. The latest annual industry survey from the GDC Festival of Gaming, reported by The Verge, finds that 40% of game developers now use generative AI as part of their job, up from 36% in the previous survey. The more useful detail is in how they use it, and it is not mainly for the art players see.
The breakdown is telling. 73% of those surveyed use AI for research and brainstorming, 62% for data analysis and summarising, and 56% for writing and debugging code. Only 22% use it for concept art or visual ideas, and just 8% for production art or final game assets. Use is far from even across the industry: 58% of developers working on free-to-play games use it, and 70% of those at mobile-only studios.
That pattern matches what the tools are good at. The tasks at the top of the list are the ones general assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini handle well, and code help is where coding assistants have found most traction everywhere. In the earlier 2026 edition of the survey, GDC reported ChatGPT as the most used tool among game professionals at 74%, ahead of Gemini at 37% and Microsoft Copilot at 22%. Final art remains the area where both quality worries and the strongest community objections sit, and the low 8% figure suggests studios are cautious there.
The survey lands in a tense moment. The Verge notes the row in indie circles over Big Walk developer House House's limited use of language models late in development, the growing use of AI to reverse-engineer retro games, and a post from Xbox chief Asha Sharma suggesting small teams will build worlds that today take hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. Against that, 34% of respondents said they had been laid off at some point in the past two years, up from 28% in the earlier edition.
The limits are those of any self-selected survey. Respondents choose to take part, and the questions measure whether people use AI tools, not how much or with what result. Nothing in the figures shows that AI caused the layoffs, and the jump in use is four points, modest for a technology this heavily promoted. Sentiment matters too: in the earlier 2026 edition, 52% of respondents said generative AI was harming the industry.