Vivrato spent six months chasing one number. The games consultancy is run by former PlayStation executive Adam Boyes. It interviewed 101 senior studio leaders across North America and Europe, one on one, from April to September2.
Ninety-seven percent told Vivrato they had used AI somewhere in their work. Ninety-four percent said AI now touches at least one of nine production stages1.
The topic jumped in search this week. Video game studios ai adoption stats broke out as a U.S. query on Google Trends6. Readers want to know what that adoption looks like, stage by stage.
Code Gets the Most AI, Live Ops the Least
Coding draws the heaviest use. Eighty-six percent of leaders said AI already helps with code and engineering, the highest of Vivrato's nine stages1. General productivity work follows close behind at 83, and concept or pre-production work at 79.
Design and prototyping land in the middle, at 68 percent. Analytics and player data sit lower, at 4914.
Vivrato tracked six kinds of AI, past the one chatbot most players picture first. "We've noticed this year, public discourse and definitions about AI in games usually defaults to generative AI: chatbots, image generation and synthetic voices," Boyes said2.
Studios reach further than that, he added. Machine learning predicts when a player quits. Scripted logic runs a test on its own.
Art, assets and animation reach 60 percent. Europe outpaces North America there, 70 percent against 535.
Creative work trails lower down the list. Narrative and world-building sits at 55 percent, and live ops and monetization lower still, at 371. Adam Boyes, Vivrato's founder, said the drop makes sense to him. "People are just not relying on AI for writing stories and building stories," he said2.
Code Draws 86 Percent AI Use, Live Ops Just 37
Share of 101 studio leaders in North America and Europe reporting AI use at each production stage, interviews April to September 2026
Each bar is one of Vivrato's nine pipeline stages; the longer the bar, the more leaders said AI already touches that part of making a game.
Source: This Week in Video Games [1]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Code and engineering | 86% |
| General productivity | 83% |
| Concept and pre-production | 79% |
| Narrative and world-building | 55% |
| Live ops and monetization | 37% |
A few studios show how public this work has become. Epic Games announced in October that AI had rebuilt its launcher entirely, and it named the method in public1. Capcom, in Japan, has described reworking its RE Engine to work better with AI tools.
Xbox took the opposite path. Its new Xbox Labs team formed to answer AI-driven game decompiling, yet its announcement avoided the word "AI" completely1. Disclosure, it turns out, varies more than use does.
A Median Score of 3 Out of 10
Use is one question. Depth is another. Vivrato asked leaders to rate, zero to ten, how deeply AI reaches their whole pipeline. The median answer came back a 31.
More than half rated it lower still. Fifty-two percent scored their pipeline at 3 or under, and just 7 percent scored it 9 or 101. Europe edged ahead of North America, averaging 4.2 against 3.5 on the same scale5.
52 Percent of Leaders Rate Their AI Depth a 3 or Lower
Share of 101 studio leaders self-rating AI integration across the whole production pipeline, 0 to 10 scale, higher is deeper
The colored wedge is the share of leaders who rated their pipeline's AI integration 3 or lower out of 10; the rest rated it higher. Higher means better integration.
Source: This Week in Video Games [1]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Rated integration 3 or lower | 52% |
| Whole | 100% |
The Case That This Is Already Real
Boyes argues the adoption question is settled. "The interesting question isn't around which game studios are using AI anymore," he said. "Most of the 101 leaders we spoke with declared that they have adopted some form of AI within their development pipelines. The focus is now where they're using it, what is changing, what's actually helping, and where teams are still running into challenges," he said2.
He wants that use managed and visible, past the chatbot label most players reach for first. "It's measuring everything that's occurring, keeping humans in a loop and creativity at the forefront of what you do. And then talking about it openly with your team and your players," Boyes said2.
To Boyes, the dabbling itself is the honest finding. "To me, what that means is that people are still dabbling and they're still trying to figure things out," he said2.
The Workers Who See It Differently
Vivrato polled people who run studios. A separate study asked the people who work in them.
GDC's own State of the Game Industry survey reached 2,300 professionals in January3. Fifty-two percent called generative AI's effect on the industry negative, a 30 percent jump from the year before.
Survey author Beth Elderkin called the shift surprising. "I did not anticipate it going to majority negative sentiment," she said. "That said, the more that this technology is being utilized, the more strongly people feel about it, and the more impact they're seeing on the game industry," she said3.
Few of GDC's respondents use the tools themselves, even where their employer does. Only 36 percent said they personally use AI at work, while 52 percent said their company uses it somewhere3.
Testing stays more human than coding does. Fifty-seven percent of leaders told Vivrato that AI reaches QA and testing, well below code's 861.
The two surveys measure different people. Vivrato asked leaders about their own pipelines. GDC asked a wider, more junior workforce how AI feels to live with13. Both point the same direction: use keeps climbing faster than trust does.
What to do
Ask a vendor which of Vivrato's nine stages its tool actually reaches. The word "AI" alone is marketing, past that it says little.
Weigh a studio's adoption claim against its own depth score. Pride in 94 percent use can still sit beside a 3.
By the numbers
- 101: senior studio leaders Vivrato interviewed across North America and Europe, April to September2.
- 97%: share who told Vivrato they had used AI in some form1.
- 3: the median score leaders gave their own pipeline's AI depth, out of 101.
- 4.2 versus 3.5: Europe's average integration score against North America's, on the same 10-point scale15.
- 57%: leaders reporting AI use in QA and testing, the stage closest to what a player finally touches1.
- 2,300: game industry professionals GDC surveyed for its own January report3.
- 52%: the share of GDC's respondents who called generative AI's effect on the industry negative3.
What to watch
Watch Vivrato's next round of interviews for whether that median score moves past 3. Check GDC's 2027 survey too, since sentiment moved before deep integration did this time. A rising depth score paired with calmer sentiment would be the clearest sign the two trends finally agree13.
Sources
- Jamie Hore, "Industry Report Says 94% of NA and EU Leaders Use AI in Game Production Pipeline," This Week in Video Games, Oct. 21, 2026, https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/industry-report-says-94-of-na-and-eu-leaders-use-ai-in-game-production-pipeline/
- Dean Takahashi, "Adam Boyes' Vivrato issues report based on 101 game leaders' views on AI in gaming | exclusive," GamesBeat, Oct. 20, 2026, https://gamesbeat.com/adam-boyes-vivrato-issues-report-based-on-101-game-leaders-views-on-ai-in-gaming-exclusive/
- Maddie Agne and Edmond Tran, "52% of Game Developers Say Generative AI Is Having Negative Impact On Industry, Says 2026 GDC Survey," This Week in Video Games, Jan. 27, 2026, https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/gdc-state-of-the-game-industry-survey-2026-generative-ai-unionisation-us-immigration-policy/
- Peter Glagowski, "Game industry report suggests 94% of studios are using AI, but less than half have deeply integrated it into production," Nintendo Wire, Oct. 20, 2026, https://nintendowire.com/news/2026/10/20/game-industry-report-suggests-94-of-studios-are-using-ai-but-less-than-half-have-deeply-integrated-it-into-production/
- Chris Scullion, "Report finds that 94% of studios use AI, but more than half say it isn't deeply embedded into production," VGC, Oct. 20, 2026, https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/report-finds-that-94-of-studios-use-ai-but-more-than-half-say-it-isnt-deeply-embedded-into-production/
- Google, "Google Trends: video game studios ai adoption stats," accessed Nov. 4, 2026, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=video+game+studios+ai+adoption+stats&date=now+1-d&geo=US
