Video game The industry has been in trouble for the past year, with studio closures and job security at the forefront of developers’ concerns. An increase in layoffs with seemingly no end paint a bleak picture for developers while companies are busy pumping money into AI initiatives.
According to a new report from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference, 52 percent of developers surveyed said they work for the companies they use generative AI at their games. Of the 3,000 people surveyed, roughly half said they were concerned about the technology’s impact on industry, and a growing number said they had a generally negative view of artificial intelligence. The “State of the Games Industry” report, released Tuesday, is one of a series of surveys conducted each year by GDC organizers ahead of their annual conference. This year’s event will be held in San Francisco in March.
The GDC 2025 report comes after a tumultuous few years for the industry. Even as games Astro Bot, Hell Divers 2and Balatro achieved success, studies like Microsoft and Sony have cut staff and canceled games. Amid a mix of cultural and economic factors affecting the industry, developers still face the company’s enthusiasm for technology that some consider ethically troubling.
“I have a PhD in artificial intelligence, I worked on developing some of the algorithms used by generative artificial intelligence,” one developer wrote. “I deeply regret how naively I offered my contributions.”
Some 30 percent of developers who responded to the survey said they felt negatively about artificial intelligence, up from 18 percent last year; only 13 percent believe AI has a positive impact on games, down from 21 percent in 2024. “However you say it, generative AI is not a good substitute for real people and quality will suffer,” another developer wrote in your answer.
For developers, AI has potential to help with several tasks, respondents said, including coding, concept art and 3D model generation, but when asked what use of AI they saw in the industry, “the word most frequently used in their responses was ‘none,'” GDC organizers – and wrote.
In theory, generative artificial intelligence could help some developers make their jobs easier. That doesn’t happen. Instead, developers are reportedly working longer hours than they have in years. Thirteen percent of respondents reported working more than 51 hours per week, up from 8 percent last year. While those extra hours could be attributed to developers taking on extra work to make up for colleagues lost during mass industry-wide layoffs in 2024, many have expressed concern that AI is also a factor. “We should be using generative artificial intelligence to help people get faster at their jobs, not lose them,” one worker wrote.
cancellations, the story of industry the last few years, still are a big problem. “Survive until ’25”, a mantra for struggling developers, hardly helped those who lost their jobs. According to the research, one in 10 programmers was fired during the last year. There was also an increase in “N/A” responses: “the question did not apply because they had already been laid off or otherwise unemployed. In other words, it was not a concern now because it had, in a sense, already happened to them.”