The video game industry has been in a troubled place for the past year, with studio closures and job security at the forefront of developer concerns. Increasing layoffs with seemingly no end paint a bleak picture for devs, 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 devs surveyed said they worked at companies that were using generative AI on their games. Of the 3,000 people surveyed, roughly half said they were concerned about the technology’s impact on the industry and an increasing number reported they felt negatively about AI overall. The “State of the Game Industry” report, released Tuesday, is one of a series of surveys conducted each year by GDC organizers prior to their annual conference. This year’s event will take place in San Francisco in March.
The 2025 GDC report comes on the heels of a tumultuous couple of years in the industry. Even as games like Astro Bot, Helldivers 2, and Balatro found success, studios like Microsoft and Sony have slashed staff and canceled games. Amid a mix of cultural and economic factors impacting the industry, developers are also still dealing with company enthusiasm for technology that some find ethically concerning.
“I have a PhD in AI, worked to develop some of the algorithms used by generative AI,” one developer wrote. “I deeply regret how naively I offered up my contributions.”
Some 30 percent of the developers who responded to the survey said they felt negatively about AI, opposed to 18 percent last year; only 13 percent believed AI was having a positive impact on games, down from 21 percent in 2024. “No matter how you put it, generative AI isn’t a great replacement for real people and quality is going to be damaged,” another developer wrote in their response.
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, generative AI could help some developers lighten their workloads. That’s not happening. Instead, developers are reportedly working longer hours than they have in years. Thirteen percent of respondents reported putting in 51-plus-hour weeks, up from 8 percent of respondents last year. While those additional hours could be attributed to devs taking on additional work to make up for colleagues lost during 2024’s massive industry-wide layoffs, many voiced concerns that AI was also a factor. “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 didn’t apply because they were already laid off or otherwise unemployed. In other words, it wasn’t a concern now because, in some way, it had already happened to them.”