Japan's game industry body says 85.8% of developers now use generative AI at work
CESA's first survey on the subject found generative AI use among Japanese game developers at 85.8%, up from around 51% a year earlier, with most of it going into efficiency rather than finished art.
The Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association, the trade body that counts Capcom, Sega, Konami and most of Japan's other major publishers as members, says 85.8% of the game developers it surveyed now use generative AI in their work. The figure comes from the preview edition of the CESA Game Industry Report 2026, published on September 17 and handed to press at Tokyo Game Show.
What the numbers say
The developer side of the survey drew 1,349 valid responses. Of those, 63% said they use generative AI daily and 22.8% occasionally, which is where the headline 85.8% comes from. A further 8.6% described themselves as trialling or evaluating it, 4.8% had never used it, and 0.7% had used it before but no longer do. A year earlier, CESA's equivalent figure was around 51%.
A second, separate survey went to CESA's member companies and got 48 responses out of 220. Asked what they expected to gain, the most common answer was efficiency and productivity, named by 38 companies, followed by shorter development cycles (30) and lower costs (29). Multilingual support and global expansion came fourth with 24, ahead of new forms of creative expression (22), quality improvements (21) and easing labour shortages (20).
The guardrails companies describe
Asked what controls they have in place, member companies most often said that humans handle verification, correction and supervision. Restricting which tools staff may use, and avoiding shipping generated output directly, were the other recurring answers. In other words, the industry's stated position is that generative AI sits upstream of the work rather than producing it.
What this is and isn't
This is a preview edition, not the full report - CESA says the complete version arrives in early December, and both AI surveys are new this year, so there is no long trend line behind the jump from 51% to 85.8%. It also measures whether people use the technology, not how much of any given game it touches. A programmer asking a model to explain a stack trace and a studio generating in-game art both count as a yes.
Why it matters
Japanese publishers have generally been quieter about generative AI than their Western counterparts, and this is the first time their own trade body has put a number on it. Whatever else the figure means, it makes "we don't use AI" a much harder claim for a Japanese studio to make by default.
Why it matters
It is the first industry-wide number for generative AI use inside Japanese game development, from the publishers' own trade body rather than a third party, and it lands at a point when players are actively asking studios where AI sits in their pipelines.