Circuit board shaped like a brain, illustrating artificial intelligence technology
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Generative AI is one of the most divisive topics in game development this year. The clearest data comes from developers themselves, and it shows two things at once: more people are using the tools, and more people think they're bad for the industry.

What developers say: the GDC 2026 survey

The 2026 State of the Game Industry report from GDC, released in January and based on more than 2,300 game industry professionals, found:

  • 36% use generative AI tools as part of their job. Use is much lower at game studios (30%) than at publishers, support teams and marketing or PR firms (58%).
  • The tools are mostly large language models: ChatGPT (74%), Google Gemini (37%) and Microsoft Copilot (22%).
  • The most common uses are research or brainstorming (81%), everyday tasks such as writing emails and code assistance (47% each), and prototyping (35%).

The sentiment numbers are the headline. 52% of respondents think generative AI is having a negative impact on the game industry, up from 30% the year before and 18% the year before that. Only 7% see a positive impact, down from 13%. Negative views are highest among people in visual and technical art (64%), game design and narrative (63%) and programming (59%); the most positive groups are executives and business operations staff (19% each).

The same survey puts the jobs anxiety in context: 28% of respondents were laid off in the past two years, and 74% of students are worried about their job prospects in the industry.

AI teammates: PUBG Ally

The most visible player-facing experiment is NVIDIA and Krafton's PUBG Ally, first shown at CES 2025 as a "Co-Playable Character" built on NVIDIA ACE. It runs small language models locally for speech recognition, decision-making and speech synthesis, so the teammate can talk without pre-recorded lines, share loot and fight alongside you.

In June 2026, PUBG offered an Ally Duo Mode for two weeks, until June 30, open only to players with an NVIDIA graphics card with 8 GB of memory or more. It's a time-limited test, not a permanent feature.

Ubisoft's Teammates

Ubisoft showed its own take in November 2025: Teammates, a playable first-person shooter prototype in which AI squadmates respond to voice commands in real time. It builds on the NEO NPC prototype Ubisoft showed in 2024, which had conversational characters in a static environment. Teammates is limited to a closed beta, and Ubisoft presents it as research rather than a product.

Not everyone is adding it

Some of the biggest releases are going the other way: Rockstar has confirmed that Grand Theft Auto VI contains no generative AI (see our GTA 6 release date guide).

Where this leaves players

In 2026, generative AI in games is mostly behind the scenes: brainstorming, emails and code help. The player-facing experiments, like PUBG Ally and Teammates, remain limited tests, and the people who make games are growing more skeptical, not less. For more on industry jobs, see our coverage of the Xbox, Halo and Activision restructuring.

Sources

Vostrike Newsroom
Editorial team

Vostrike's editorial desk. Articles are researched from cited sources and checked by a human editor before publication. We don't put our own score on games we haven't played.