GDC have released their 2026 State of the Game Industry report, comprising survey results from thousands of quizzed developers on the craft and business of gamesmaking. As in the 2025 report, this year’s responses signal a growing discontent with generative AI tools, with opposing sentiments tipping into simple majority status for the first time: 52% now say GenAI is having a negative impact on the industry, up from 30% in 2025 and 18% in 2024.
Before we start celebrating the moral arc of the universe, this opinion-hardening appears to correlate with neither an overall decrease not increase in the adoption of GenAI tech. Asked if they or someone in their company used these tools, 52% said yes and 35% said no, both unchanged from their 2025 survey levels. However, optimistic views are becoming harder to come by, with the percentage of respondents who thought GenAI is having a positive impact dropping from 13% in 2025 to a mere 7% in 2026. Presumably that’s made up of Tim Sweeney, Larian’s Swen Vincke, half the people on my LinkedIn feed, and that one dentist out of ten who doubts toothpaste.
For all the executive talk, mandatory AI usage policies also represent a small minority of companies, with just 6% reporting its enforced deployment at their workplace. By contrast, 28% said that GenAI use is entirely optional, 22% said that some tools were allowed while others were not, and 16% reported a blanket ban on the technology altogether.
We’ve been seeing this divergence in individual companies’ approaches for ages, from Embark Studio’s openly AI-drenched ARC Raiders to Hooded Horse forbidding its use in the games they publish. Yet as someone who looks at GenAI and only really sees six-fingered Santas, horrible knock-on effects on hardware, and the general dishonesty of equating robotically aggregated sounds and pictures with genuine art, I’d be lying if this survey didn’t give me some hope of GenAI’s eventual defeat. Even by the admission of arch AI imposers Microsoft, this stuff will only exist as long as there’s a desire to use IT, and at least in games, that desire is shrivelling before our eyes.
Sadly, the rest of the report can make for grimmer reading. Chiefly, it puts some uncomfortable numbers on top of the widespread job loss stories across 2025 and 2026 so far: one games worker in four reports being laid off in the past 24 months, with the most common cause being studio or department closures. Of those who had been laid off, 48% of respondents said they haven’t yet found a new job. Confidence in future stability is mixed is as well, as while only 23% said they expected more layoffs at their workplace in the next 12 months, 30% remain unsure.
The full report is free to read, and I’d encourage giving it a flick through. For all the statistics, it still manages to paint a more human perspective of contemporary game development than whatever dose of jargon monoxide poisoning you might receive from corpo-speak press releases. Some nice little microfacts in there, too – I’m going to take the Steam Deck being the fourth most developed-for games platform as justification for my continued writing about it every other goddamn day.
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