Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51%

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• markz@suppo.fi ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  In the 2025 report, the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support.

  So assets and story are to go first.

  We automated the art, so humans can focus on labor.

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  • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    We're working on automating the labor too. Turns out art was just easier.

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    • MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If art isn’t perfect, we can shrug. If something goes wrong with manufacturing, programming, whatever, much smaller issues can shut things down. Art brooks a greater margin of “error”.

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  • ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Hold your horses, making by hand another 1000 cheap ugly stock waifu gacha images is not art. It is and was slop.

    Most j-games that have ads that reach me were slop since forever. Same story, same looking girls, same gameplay.

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    • p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s like bean mouth with animated movies and cartoons.

      It turns out that most people weren’t that creative, anyway.

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  • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I mean, that makes perfect sense. Game development is mostly programming, so if you're an aspiring game developer these are probably inconvenient bits you'd love to automate away.

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    • tb_@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Game development is mostly programming

      Is it though? Especially when you’re making use of an existing engine.

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  • mrfriki@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah. That the whole idea behind the so called AI thing.

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• frostypanda@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  2026 is so depressing, lol. I’ve noticed this with some (non-gaming) Korean media, where the writing feels very AI (and I’m kind of suspecting a lot of it is considering Asia’s quick embrasure of it).

  All of this is easy to legislate (not necessarily fix because people will just lie and face no consequence if they’re rich). Ban generative AI for commercial purposes.

  Anything with art, being that games, illustration, even writing feels tainted these days. Those of us who don’t want gen AI are going to have to find ways to form our own communities (and hope we can trust the majority of people in them).

  On the bright side, I’m suddenly feeling okay with not getting the chance to play the newest Fire Emblem game.

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  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    One of the games that was briefly popular this year was Where Winds Meet, a Chinese free-to-play RPG. They made it a selling point that NPCs and sidequests were entirely LLM-driven. Look up a video if you want to see some of the most awkward and cringy dialog this side of Soulstorm.

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  • toxicbubble@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    i can barely find a gaming blog these days that aren’t: written by AI, clickbait, or videos (also AI)

    journalism is a lost art

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    • arules@retrofed.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      proper journalism cost money.
      we lost the market in the 1900s.
      yellow journalinm women’s suffrage

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  • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Ban generative AI for commercial purposes.

    Because?

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    • frostypanda@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Because generative AI has been built off the backs of everyone, whether they consented or not. Because AI companies (Nvidia, Facebook, pick a company) have pirated enough material to keep any individual in jail for life, and yet they have no consequences and can profit off everything.

      If generative AI can not be used for commercial purposes, it also cripples the ability to replace artists, writers, etc., with an AI that stole all their work in the first place and is regurgitating it. Generative AI isn’t the issue, and it won’t go away (I wish it would, but the world doesn’t work that way). It’s the way it’s being used. Take the profit out of it, and we can all (to some degree) benefit from it. Take the profit out of it, and stop them from hoarding and destroying books/knowledge, destroying the environment, destroying your economy.

      I’m sure people more well-read into generative AI can give a better example than a layman who is tired of billionaires and trillionaires doing whatever they like with no consequence, destroying our environment, our jobs, our economy, and now our souls along the way.

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  • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Most national medias are running AI services to translate “important” international stories.

    I wish they’d spend less time running international stories (I know it’s for the boomers incapable of reading English) and more time on doing proper journalism

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• underscores@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The one country known specifically for it’s art and music, lol

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  • crimsonpoodle@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Is really sad

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• Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This seems weird to me. Isn’t Japanese culture obsessed with aesthetics? Like when you buy fast food there it actually looks neat and clean like in advertisements, and you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries but they’ll be the brightest, most flawless specimens you’ll see in your lifetime. Even cheap throwaway meals are packaged like a professional food stylist went over them.

  That focus on perfection seems incongruent with the slop machine that churns out soulless, derivative, and often obviously flawed ‘art’.

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  • farmgineer@nord.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Having lived in Japan for over a decade, I think the west generally over-elevates/-mystifies Japan. Capitalists gonna capitalist. They can do more work with fewer people and make more money. Most Japanese consumers also do not care at all about generative AI. It’s in the train stations, city offices, and everywhere else as a part of the normal.

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  • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah, it does seem inconsistent with the view that anything AI touches must obviously look awful.

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    • BillyTheKid2@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Self selecting bias. If all AI is bad, then if it’s good it’s not ai by definition.

      My point is, probably a lot more content is ai than people think, but they don’t notice.

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  • pycorax@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There’s a big difference between what’s happening in the commercial world and art circles. I can’t speak for food but with regards to the topic here, Japan has a huge creator market and that market responds very differently. A year back, their biggest creator fair had a few “artists” selling AI “art” but essentially no one was interested and they hardly sold anything while others had sprawling queues. This year there was pretty much 0 as a result.

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  • Blaster_M@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Maybe they have high standards for what they generate, use the models as “fillers” or “finishers” (broadly adding details or patterns to a base sketch, then touching up on any errors or ungeneratable details), or rely on models they’ve vetted for consistent quality? I doubt they’re all using a piss filter chatgpt text to image gen.

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  • markz@suppo.fi ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries

    Isn’t that mostly because their farms are so far behind and producing such low volumes that they can only survive with artisanal hand picked/whatever products

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    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Looking it up, while the high-end gift fruits are insanely expensive (hundreds of dollars), regular fruit seems to be widely available and costs the equivalent of a dollar or two. They also tend to be unnaturally unblemished even on the low end.

      I wonder how much produce gets thrown away due to a single bruise or spot. I’m hoping it gets turned into drinks or purée for desserts or something instead.

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  • chunes@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Have you considered that wherever you’re from is the weird place? They are much more optimistic about AI in Asia.

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  • lechekaflan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Japanese creatives are now heavily split on LLMs. What with half taken to defend their work with watermarks and proofs of manual processes. While others are churning out thirst traps by the dozen, and still others “enhancing” game screenshots of their player characters in poses and skimpy clothing.

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    • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      So its really just the same “actual artist” vs “horny gooner dumbass” split that has plagued Japanese media for decades 😭

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• nullspace@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I can’t prove it, but I’ve felt like a lot of the girls from gacha games have been generated for a while now.

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• Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Oh good, I can focus on only 15% of Japanese game devs! That's a relief!

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• zib@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Well, damn. I guess I’m gonna have to be way more critical of which Japanese developers I support. Or stop buying Japanese games altogether.

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  • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Like every region, there’s developers who love throwing up asset flips, and there’s developers who make stuff out of passion.

    I remember one of my favorite comparisons of AI generated art in media is as an expensive replacement for stock footage (and in game development I guess it would be stock assets).

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• taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yes, this tracks. My wife’s at a company that has both JP and US branches and the JP side seems a lot more chill with generative AI (although they learned already not to use it in production, only internal visuals and planning). It’s rather unfortunate, although hard to say if they would have hired an illustrator or just gone without visuals.

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• Gonzako@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yeah, guess I’ll stop buying new Japanese releases

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• NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  AI stigma generally isn't mainstream in Japan, so that makes sense.

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• SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t need any new games to be happy. I won’t by slop out of pure spite.

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• mechoman444@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  O no! Looks like most of Lemmy is going to stand on their laurels and not play a single Nintendo game ever again! Right?

  Because y’all hate AI so much.

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  • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I already don’t play them cause they are the same shit copy pasted like EA sports. Also Nintendo sucked way before AI

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    • mechoman444@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Preach brother.

      To make the same old tired games over and over again and people go crazy for them.

      “OMG this new Mario game is revolutionary they really improve the jump mechanic!”

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    • Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Seems like you haven’t played a Nintendo game in a while.

      Even their Mario Kart series add new stuff in every edition. Which is just a racing game and how much can you improve on that? Well Nintendo found a way every time.

      Nintendo is an awful company with lawyers that sue anything that isn’t nailed down. But there is a reason why their consoles sell so well.

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  • Nihilore@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes, I genuinely plan to live the rest of my life off my backlog, it will be surprisingly easy

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    nah, I’ll just pirate them.

    why pay for something they stole?

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  • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Haven’t played a Nintendo game in over a decade because fuck Nintendo for how they treat the consumer.

    Just because you’re feckless and have no integrity doesn’t mean other people don’t as well.

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  • REDACTED@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Are there even any Nintendo games on PCs? Feels like they’re living in their own proprietary world and I’ve never played any of their titles

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