This article is part of AI Week.
Almost nine out of ten workers in the games industry (88.4%), predominantly developers, believe that generative AI use should be declared on digital storefronts like Steam, according to a survey conducted by GamesIndustry.biz.
Valve brought in its AI-disclosure policy back in January 2024, and by July 2025, around 7% of all games on Steam had declared generative AI usage. But the requirements were relaxed in January this year, so that developers only need to disclose the use of AI for content generation and not for “efficiency gains” during development.
Crucially, the survey found that nearly half of respondents disagreed with this aspect of the policy. When asked “Do you agree with Valve’s approach of requiring developers to declare AI use only for content ‘consumed by players’, rather than for efficiency tools?”, 48.7% said “no”, compared to 32.1% who said “yes”, and 19.2% who responded “maybe or don’t know”.
The respondents also indicated they would practice what they preach, with 70.8% stating they would declare the use of AI for administrative purposes – for example when checking code – on the game’s storepage. Similarly, the majority (76.8%) said they would declare AI usage even if it was only used in the concepting process.
It suggests that, at least among the respondents to the survey, transparency is paramount when it comes to disclosing the use of GenAI during game development, regardless of whether the player interacts with those elements directly.
The issue is how granular AI disclosure should be. 28.4% of respondents said they believed a simple yes/no statement regarding whether AI was used at all would be sufficient, while 3.1% believe a percentage estimate of how much of the final product is AI generated would be better. An overall majority of the respondents (51.9%) said they instead favoured allowing stores to provide a list of criteria for AI use that developers and publishers must choose from. This would include everything from “used for QA and store description pages” to “generative AI used to create concept art”, encompassing both player-facing and dev tool use. Of the 13.7% of respondents who provided a custom answer, the majority advocated full, detailed disclosure of every instance of AI use.
Survey respondents
The GamesIndustry.biz survey was sent out via the GI Daily newsletter, running for just under two weeks, and was limited to people who work in the games industry. It received 826 responses, 93 of which were a partial completion of the form.
The majority of respondents (71.2%) said that their company’s primary focus was game development. Two-thirds (66.1%) said that generative AI tools are not used within their company, with 30.6% saying they are used to at least some extent.
However, even if a company offers GenAI tools, it seems not everyone is using them. 78.5% of respondents said they “never” use AI on their own projects, and almost one in ten (9.5%) said they “rarely” use it. 4.7% and 2.9% reported using AI on a “somewhat regular” and “very regular” basis, respectively, while 4.5% of respondents said that they use AI “daily”.
The companies to which the respondents belong skew smaller, with 64.8% belonging to firms of up to 49 team members. 15.5% work for companies of between 50 and 250 employees, with the remaining 19.7% belonging to companies of 251 or more employees.
A large proportion of respondents work in the creative aspects of game making. A quarter (25.2%) said their primary job focus is in art, with a further 18.9% reporting their work primarily involves game design. A large proportion of the 9.8% of respondents who wrote in their job description stated that their responsibility lies in narrative or narrative design.
A quarter of the respondents (24.8%) are at executive or senior leadership level, with 16% at team lead and 7.2% at management level. Almost four-fifths (79.6%) also self-reported as being mid-level or veterans within the industry in terms of experience.
The received wisdom in the industry is that senior management is pushing GenAI use, but given the relative seniority of the respondents and the overall negativity towards AI found in the survey answers, it seems that isn’t necessarily always the case.
Backing that up, 45.5% of respondents said they had been actively “banned or discouraged” from using GenAI by leadership or management, with a further 28.0% saying they had received no specific direction on its use either way. Just over a quarter have been directed to use it to some extent: 12.7% reported “some suggestion to use it”, 10.2% said they have been “strongly encouraged to use it”, while 3.5% reported actively being mandated to use it.
The vast majority (73.4%) of respondents’ companies are privately owned, with 14.3% being publicly traded, and 5.1% owned by venture capital firms or private equity. 42.9% of respondents’ companies were based in the United States, with 15.5% coming from the United Kingdom and 10.1% from Canada. The remaining respondents are based in a variety of countries, though primarily Western Europe. With minor differences, the respondents themselves were based in the same country as their employer.
What are people using AI for?
A total of 602 respondents (78.1%) replied to the question “What do you use AI for?” with the answer that they never use AI for anything within game development. But among those who do use AI, the most popular uses were for ideation in terms of research and brainstorming (9.3%); generating code (9.1%); creating documents and reports (7.9%); code review (7.7%); prototyping (5.8%); translation (5.3%); email scheduling and other daily tasks (4.7%); and concept art (4.2%). Relatively few respondents reported using AI for asset generation (3.5%).
Among the least popular uses for AI were creating marketing plans (3.0%); writing storefront and web copy (2.7%); creating marketing materials (2.7%); QA and testing (2.6%); editing/tidying up assets (2.5%); generating voices (2.3%); creating in-game text (1.8%); and generaing music and audio (1.3%).
One respondent said that they were required to use AI to generate reports, “so that management can be sure we ‘don’t cheat by handing in false reports,’ which is nuts because now my reports contain AI hallucinations that I need to justify.”
Art and AI
There is remarkable consistency among respondents when it comes to attitudes to AI use for the creation of artistic assets in terms of voice acting, art and graphics, in-game text and narrative, and audio and music.
With minor variations, more than four-fifths of respondents believe that no amount of AI-generated content is acceptable in the development process. In each case, around 10% of those surveyed said that it was acceptable to use AI for placeholder assets, but not in the final game. And low single digits reported that minority or majority use of AI-generated assets in the final product would be acceptable to them.
86.3% argue that AI should never be used for audio and music; 85.7% say the same for in-game text and narrative; and 84.2% say that with regards to art and graphics.
In terms of voice acting, meanwhile, 82.9% believe that no amount of AI should ever be used. This category also has the highest proportion of respondents (11.8%) who thought that it was OK to use AI to generate placeholder assets. This might reflect a trend for using AI voices as placeholders during development until real actors are brought in to record the dialogue later on: something that Wizards of the Coast president John Hight suggested would be a benefit in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz last year.
“Generating an audio performance so that a writer can hear their words before we go into the recording studio I think is going to help us make those recording sessions go a lot faster and smoother,” he said.
Changing attitudes
Beyond the quantitative responses, many of the volunteered comments from respondents are illuminating. There is a significant amount of vitriol directed at the technology and those that use it, with some comments calling its use in game development “pathetic” and “lazy”.
Some suggest that any company found to have used the technology without disclosing it on storefronts should be banned from digital stores as a whole. One respondent questioned why proponents of the technology would have an issue disclosing its use at all: “It’s ‘the future’ right? Why hide it?”
Others take a more nuanced – or possibly cynical – approach, with one respondent stating: “The only reason we are declaring the usage is because currently players care. For the time being, we should be specific and clear about its use. In the near future, players will no longer care and then we won’t disclose it anymore.”
Some respondents noted that AI is, ultimately, a tool, comparing it to Photoshop or Blender. One respondent said: “This whole debate is dumb. The logical conclusion of this is to have us scrape the art for our games onto cave walls with rocks. It’s just a tool. Its providence doesn’t matter.”
Meanwhile, other comments were extremely pro-AI use. Some suggest that indie studios will benefit hugely from its use, or perhaps cede ground to competitors that do. One respondent said: “Those unwilling to use AI will be welcome to unemployment city.”
As with most surveys of this nature, the comments typically reflect the emotive ends of a spectrum of attitudes to AI use. Nevertheless, the vast majority of respondents were mostly negative in their attitudes to the technology and its use in games, suggesting widespread ideological opposition to AI. Many of the respondents flagged the theft of IP used in training data and the environmental effects of the technology.
Perhaps most importantly, however, the support for AI disclosure on storefronts is overwhelming. It suggests that, at least among those who responded, the games industry recognises that consumers and gamers deserve to be informed of how the sausage is made.
