According to a new document from the administrators of the Game Developers Conference, 52 percent of developers surveyed said they worked at businesses that were using conceptual AI on their game. Of the 3,000 people surveyed, about third said they were concerned about the tech ’s effect on the market and an increasing number reported they felt severely about AI overall. The “State of the Game Industry ” document, released Tuesday, is one of a series of studies conducted each year by GDC promoters prior to their annual event. This year’s event will take place in San Francisco in March.
The 2025 GDC statement comes on the feet of a contentious couple of years in the industry. Yet as activities like Astro Bot, Helldivers 2, and Balatro found victory, producers like Microsoft and Sony have slashed workers and canceled activities. Amid a mix of cultural and economic aspects impacting the economy, programmers are also still dealing with business passion for systems that some find morally concerning.
“ I have a PhD in AI, worked to develop some of the algorithms used by generative AI, ” one developer wrote. “ I greatly regret how blindly I offered up my accomplishments. ”
Some 30 percent of the engineers who responded to the study said they felt severely about AI, opposed to 18 percent next year; only 13 percent believed AI was having a positive effect on game, over from 21 percent in 2024. “No matter how you put it, conceptual AI is n’t a wonderful substitute for real people and value is going to be damaged, ” another designer wrote in their answer.
For developers, AI has the potential to help with several tasks, respondents said, including coding, concept art, and 3D model generation, but when asked what uses they saw for AI in the industry, “the word used most frequently in their responses was ‘none, ’” GDC organizers wrote.
In theory, conceptual AI may help some programmers lighten their workloads. That’s no happening. Instead, designers are apparently working longer hours than they have in decades. Thirteen percent of respondents reported putting in 51-plus-hour months, away from 8 percent of respondents next month. While those extra hours may be attributed to devs taking on more work to make up for colleagues lost during 2024’s large industry-wide layoffs, some voiced concerns that AI was also a issue. “We should use generative AI to help people be faster at their jobs, not lose them, ” one worker wrote.
Layoffs, the story of the industry for the past several years, still pose a huge problem. “Survive till ’25,” the mantra for struggling developers, hardly helped those who did lose their jobs. According to the survey, one in 10 developers have been laid off over the last year. There was also an increase in “N/A” responses: “the question did n’t apply because they were already laid off or otherwise unemployed. In other words, it was n’t a concern now because, in some way, it had already happened to them. ”
Of those who have already lost their jobs, many reported difficulty in finding new employment. Some said they were still out of work more than a year later, with one reporting they’d sent 500 applications to no avail. “I’ve been laid off before, but this was by far the longest it ’s taken me to find work. It was scary, and my life was flipped upside down, ” one developer wrote.
Said another: “ I have been laid off three times in the last year. The first two times I was able to find a role. My current studio just laid everyone off. I was only there four months, and haven’t found anything yet. ”
Even once they’ve landed a new job, it ’s a coin toss on conditions. While one developer said they were able to quickly find another role in a better position, another said their new job is a “way worse pay level. ”
Developers blame problems like over-expansion in the wake of Covid-19, unrealistic expectations on game success, and poor leadership and mismanagement. “ In this industry, we set impossible goals and then fire everyone if they prove to be impossible, ” wrote one respondent. “We need to apply lean and agile processes instead of shooting for the moon every single time. ”
