THE CRUNCH
A new industry report suggests AI is nearly universal in game development, but far from central to how games actually get made. The VAIA Report, produced by consultancy Vivrato, drew on 101 confidential interviews with senior studio leaders, mostly at studios headquartered in North America and Europe, conducted between April and September using a standard 44-question guide across nine production stages.
The numbers show broad but shallow adoption. 97% of those interviewed said they had used AI in some form, and 94% said it featured in at least one production stage, from concept and pre-production through to live ops and monetization. Yet when asked to rate out of 10 how deeply AI was built into their production pipeline, 52% scored it at 3 or lower.
There were regional differences too: 70% of European studio representatives said AI was used in art, assets and animation, compared with 53% in North America, with Europe reporting deeper adoption overall.
Vivrato founder and CEO Adam Boyes, a former PlayStation executive, argued the debate defaults to generative AI such as chatbots, image generation and synthetic voices, while studios also use machine learning to predict player churn and rules-based automation in testing. He said the interesting question is no longer whether studios use AI, but where, what is changing and what is actually helping.
IN NUMBERS