The video game industry has been in a tough spot for the past year, with studio closures and job security at the forefront of developers. Increasing layoffs with seemingly no end in sight paint a bleak picture for developers as companies pump money into AI initiatives.
According to a new report from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference, 52 percent of developers surveyed said they work at companies that use generative AI on their games. Of the 3,000 people surveyed, about half said they were concerned about the technology’s impact on the industry and an increasing number reported feeling negatively about AI in general. The “State of the Game Industry” report, released Tuesday, is one of a series of surveys conducted each year by GDC organizers ahead of their annual conference. This year’s event will take place in March in San Francisco.
The 2025 GDC report comes on the heels of a tumultuous few years in the industry. Even like games like Astro Bot, Heldivers 2and Balatro achieved success, studios like Microsoft and Sony cut staff and canceled games. Amid a mix of cultural and economic factors impacting the industry, developers also continue to deal with company enthusiasm for technology that some find ethically troubling.
“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 presented my contributions.”
About 30 percent of developers who responded to the survey said they felt negatively about AI, up from 18 percent last year; only 13 percent believed AI had a positive impact on games, down from 21 percent in 2024. “No matter how you put it, generative AI is not a good substitute for real people and quality is going to be damaged,” another developer wrote in their reply.
For developers, AI has the potential to help with various tasks, respondents said, including coding, concept art and 3D model generation, but when asked what uses they see for AI in the industry, “the word most frequently used in their responses was ‘none.’ ,” GDC organizers wrote.
In theory, generative AI could help some developers ease their workload. It doesn’t happen. 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 can be attributed to developers taking on additional work to make up for colleagues lost during 2024’s massive industry-wide layoffs, many have expressed concern that AI was also a factor. “We should use generative AI to help people get to work faster, not lose them,” one worker wrote.
Layoffs, the story of the industry for the past few years, continue to pose a major problem. “Survive to ’25,” the mantra for struggling developers, hardly helped those who did lose their jobs. According to the survey, one in 10 developers has been laid off in the past year. There was also an increase in “N/A” responses: “the question did not apply because they were already laid off or otherwise unemployed. In other words, it wasn’t a concern now because somehow it had already happened to them.”