The gaming industry's romance with generative AI is officially over. A new survey from the Game Developers Conference reveals that 52% of game developers now view gen AI as having a negative impact on the industry - a stunning reversal from just 18% two years ago. The data, pulled from 2,300 industry professionals, exposes a widening gap between studio leadership embracing AI tools and rank-and-file developers who build the games. While executives at EA and Krafton tout AI's transformative potential, the people actually making games are increasingly skeptical.
Game developers are turning against the AI tools their bosses keep hyping. The numbers from GDC's latest State of the Industry survey paint a stark picture: more than half of working game developers - 52% - now say generative AI is bad for the gaming industry. Only 7% view it positively.
What makes this especially striking is the velocity of the shift. When GDC first asked this question in 2024, just 18% of developers held negative views on gen AI. That jumped to 30% in 2025. Now it's eclipsed half the industry in a single year, revealing what looks like a fundamental crisis of confidence in the technology that companies like EA and Krafton are betting billions on.
The survey captured responses from 2,300 game industry professionals, though GDC acknowledges the sample skews male (64%), white (67%), and US-based (54%). "Far from truly representative of the global community, and we know more work is needed," the organizers admitted in the full report. But the demographic consistency actually makes the sentiment shift more telling - this isn't a changing sample pool, it's changing minds.
Here's the disconnect: while developers grow more skeptical, their executives are all-in. EA has publicly positioned AI as transformative for game development tools. Krafton, the studio behind PUBG, recently announced massive investments in agentic AI infrastructure. Even Larian Studios found itself defending how it uses AI for concept art after community backlash.
But the actual use of gen AI in day-to-day development tells a more modest story. Only 36% of surveyed developers said they use generative AI as part of their jobs. The remaining 64% don't touch it. Among those who do use AI tools, the applications are telling: 81% use it for research and brainstorming, 47% for administrative tasks like email. Those are support functions, not core game development.
