Gaming Is Embracing Generative AI Whether Devs Like It Or Not, GDC Survey Says

The Game Developers Conference’s annual State of the Game Industry report is out, showing 2024’s biggest development trends. Along with continuing grim updates on layoffs and a move toward live-service games, one of the most surprising insights in the report is the prevalence of generative AI, a technology that’s divided players and developers alike in the past few years.

In the survey of over 3,000 developers and other games industry workers, 52 percent said they work for companies that use generative AI and 36 percent say they personally use it. There are stark differences in how much different departments use the technology. Workers in business and finance were most likely to use generative AI (51 percent), compared to 39 percent in community, marketing, and PR.

While the use of generative AI may be increasing, that doesn’t mean it’s actually popular among developers. The survey shows that 30 percent of respondents see the technology having a negative impact on the industry, up from 18 percent last year. Those who have a negative view of generative AI cite the low-quality of what it produces, fears of intellectual property theft, bias built into AI models, and its well documented environmental impacts as the main reasons.

Developers also expressed concern that the use of generative AI could lead to even more lost jobs in an industry that’s been plagued with layoffs in recent years. There’s good reason to believe that could be the case, as even the executives pushing to embrace generative admit that the technology will cost a lot of workers their jobs.

A 2024 survey of nearly 5,000 chief executives across multiple industries showed around 25 percent of leaders expect “significant AI-related job losses” and multiple other studies have found similar results. Microsoft, which laid off thousands of workers in 2024 alone, says that the use of AI will boost profits and accelerate layoffs in a blog post grimly titled “The Golden Opportunity for American AI.”

In gaming, we’ve seen pushes to increase the use of generative AI from executives across the industry. Square Enix has made public statements about its intentions to inflict generative AI upon its development pipeline, though there’s been no sign yet of what that could mean, or if it’s already in use at the company. However, studios have been much more public about their intentions to replace voice actors with AI, as games like The Finals have already done. That facet of AI has already led to a long-running strike by members of the SAG-AFTRA actors union, who continue to fight for AI protections in their contracts. Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA, has touted the potential to let players create their own game content using generative AI. While such a statement may be absurd on its face, it does show that executives are eagerly looking for ways to use the technology to cut actual developers out of the development equation as much as possible.

Given the last year in the games industry, it’s no wonder that the fear of layoffs looms large. A shocking one in ten respondents to GDC’s survey was laid off in 2024, while 29 percent say they had at least one colleague in their own department laid off. Narrative jobs were hit the hardest, with 19 percent of respondents saying they were laid off. The push toward generative AI may be responsible for some of those layoffs, as companies shift resources toward the technology and away from developer salaries, but the full picture is much more complex, with ballooning development costs and rampant studio mismanagement likely having a lot more to do with job losses at this point.

GDC’s survey shows a trend toward generative AI being foisted upon developers whether they like it or not, but like any survey, it has its limitations. Laine Nooney, an associate professor of media industries at New York University, has long criticized the survey for failing to make clear exactly who it includes. For example, indie developers vastly outnumber those at major studios in this year’s data, and the data set is also heavily skewed toward the United States.

The survey therefore shouldn’t be taken as a complete picture of the games industry, but it does show that, at least among the developers it captures, the use of generative AI is on the rise even as confidence in it falls, and the consequences of that could be even more instability in the already chaotic games industry.