Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51%
AUTOMATON WEST
Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51% - AUTOMATON WEST
CESA is the organizer of Tokyo Game Show.
So assets and story are to go first.
We automated the art, so humans can focus on labor.
We're working on automating the labor too. Turns out art was just easier.
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”.
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.
It’s like bean mouth with animated movies and cartoons.
It turns out that most people weren’t that creative, anyway.
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 want to get out of the way rather than what you're there for.
Is it though? Especially when you’re making use of an existing engine.
Yeah. That the whole idea behind the so called AI thing.
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 East 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 to play a lot of the Switch 2 games.
Where Winds Meet is a Chinese free-to-play RPG that was briefly popular earlier this year. The devs actually considered 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 cringe-inducing dialog this side of Soulstorm.
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
proper journalism cost money.
we lost the market in the 1900s.
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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Because?
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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This is covered by fair use, and in any case intellectual property is bullshit.
Legally, downloading stuff illegally is a civil content, so you can't in fact go to jail for it, only pay fines. Morally, the whole concept of piracy evolved out of government-granted monopolies and was pushed by rich pricks as a way to get richer at the expense of everyone else, so there's no reason to give it any moral weight.
"Protecting jobs from competition" is very low on my list of things I want enforced via state violence. Maybe it's high on yours, but I'd like not to get state violence'd to satisfy your sensibilities thank you very much. Otherwise you can't complain when, say, conservatives use state violence so enforce their sensibilities on you.
Uh... what? What's your reasoning there?
No matter how much pirates try to push the point by repeating it, I have never agreed with the sentiment that intellectual property is bullshit. Has it been co-opted by large businesses to stifle forward movement? Yes. Does it still have a place that can protect genuine creators? Also yes.
But it’s very hard to convince people of this position if they’ve never had the experience of investing (equivalent of) thousands of personal dollars or man-hours into a work where they had some investment, monetary or emotional, in its success.
The universal anti-state-violence argument is also so circular. Do we believe state cops should murder black people? Obviously not. Who do we think should stop them? How about internal affairs peacekeepers and court-owned marshalls. Oh, so now we’re back to promoting state sponsored violence against preferred targets?
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tell that to the studios.
you’re preaching to the choir here.
I charge by the hour to localize.
The one country known almost specifically for it’s art and music, lol
Is really sad
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’.
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.
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.
Yeah, it does seem inconsistent with the view that anything AI touches must obviously look awful.
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.
Yeah, if the AI gets curated, it is almost impossible to notice.
And all AI should be curated. A human has to check everything for halucinations.
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.
Japanese creatives are now heavily split on LLMs. What with half taken to defend their work with watermarks and proofs of timelapses and manual processes, and there’s fierce loyalty for Miyazaki et. al. While others are either playing with dozens of LLMs to produce even animations, churning out thirst traps by the dozen, and still others “enhancing” game screenshots of their player characters in poses and skimpy clothing.
So its really just the same “actual artist” vs “horny gooner dumbass” split that has plagued Japanese media for decades 😭
Have you considered that wherever you’re from is the weird place? They are much more optimistic about AI in Asia.
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
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. So it’s more expensive than in Western countries, but not exorbitantly so. 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.
Anything that grows out of the ground is expensive in Japan in general, so it's not just the strawberries. You can easily get a situation when making food at home where a simple vegetable salad is as expensive as the rest of the meal combined.
How much of those are imported?
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.
Oh good, I can focus on only 15% of Japanese game devs! That's a relief!
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.
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.
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 the favorite comparisons of AI generated art I saw in a video on the subject is as an expensive replacement for stock footage (and in game development I guess it would be stock assets).
I don’t need any new games to be happy. I won’t by slop out of pure spite.
Yeah, guess I’ll stop buying new Japanese releases
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My impression is that AI stigma generally isn't mainstream in Japan, so that makes sense. Also wow, y'all are salty.
Yup, people here love crying over AI.
“Crying over ai” like it isn’t completely valid to be concerned over the environmental impact in a world already burning
There are valid criticisms, and then there’s going into every thread that mentions AI and saying “AI bad.” Yes, there are a lot of retards who love crying over AI here.
Some days it feels like it’s the only thing they have to live for.
“Stop all the downloading, you youngsters! In my day we had to punch all the punch cards by hand to write our programs and we liked it! People these days are downloading all their stolen, generated ones and zeroes from other computers instead of copying them by hand like real artisans. It’s computer slop, I tells ya!”
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.
Yes, I genuinely plan to live the rest of my life off my backlog, it will be surprisingly easy
nah, I’ll just pirate them.
why pay for something they stole?
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.
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
I already don’t play them cause they are the same shit copy pasted like EA sports. Also Nintendo sucked way before AI
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.
Preach brother.
They 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!”
You can say whatever you want about their (very shitty) business practices but saying that all their games are copy pasted is just flat out wrong. They make some of the best, most fun, and most innovative games out there.
Nintendo Games Released in the Last 3 Years
2023
2024
2025
2026
Ya. Super innovative.
Just because they make games in the same franchise doesn’t mean they don’t innovate. Mario Kart World has an open world, new mechanics that were never seen before in a racing game let alone a kart racer, and a completely new and fun game mode. Echoes of Wisdom is a completely unique game about copying and pasting items found in the world to solve puzzles and combat. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave doubles down on the social aspect from Three Houses and introduces a multiple playable characters with their own stories that intertwine with each other.
They innovate a lot more than you think. Especially compared to Xbox and PlayStation, who just seem to release the same shit under new IP. I do wish Nintendo would release more new IP, and that they would stop releasing things like Mario Tennis at full price, but to say that they never innovate is just plain wrong.
Nintendo hasn’t innovated anything since the Super Nintendo. It’s been the same schlock over and over again, just with variations on a theme. Open-world games aren’t inherently innovative, and there are multiple better open-world games than freaking Mario Kart.
And that puzzle game was basically a rehash of something they made back in the early 2000s. Nintendo is the king of rinse and repeat.
I remember everyone shitting their pants over Breath of the Wild. I literally bought a Wii U just to play it, and I liked the game. I thought it was very, very good. But then I played Horizon Zero Dawn and realized just how comparatively lazy Breath of the Wild felt.
Nintendo knows exactly what they have. They understand their fanbase, they know nostalgia will carry them a long way, and they take advantage of that in much the same way Apple does. They don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel when they know people will happily buy the same wheel with a slightly different hubcap every few years.
I’m sorry but Horizon Zero Dawn is literally the most cookie cutter game of all time (I like the robots tho)
It wasn’t for its time. It feels like that now since so many tired to copy it’s formula.