2026 GDC Takeaway

My biggest takeaway from GDC this year was that the FOMO around using AI to make games was palpable.

Over the last 6 weeks I built a demo with a friend that I'm pretty proud of. When I showed it to people at GDC and talked about how much it would take to finish and polish the game, almost everyone had suggestions about how I could use AI to finish it faster.

"Just use AI for the art."
"You should be able to vibe code the rest in a few months."
"Use AI to polish it and get a marketing test up as soon as possible."

Whenever I asked which games are actually being built this way and finding success with players, I didn't get clear answers (very open to case studies if people have them).

On the other hand, I spoke with several studio heads who are actively trying to implement AI internally. The pattern was pretty consistent: everyone feels like they should be doing something with AI, but it's still unclear what actually works in a real production pipeline.

A few quotes I heard multiple times:
"We need to be doing something with AI."
“My team isn’t really using it fully yet.”
"I'm bringing on someone to help integrate AI into the company more deeply."

The question I’m working through now is how to transition from AI-accelerated prototypes to launching polished, successful games in a gaming market that’s extremely capital constrained.

I’ve been experimenting pretty heavily with AI coding tools while building this demo over the past six weeks and they’re genuinely useful, but the full production-quality workflow is still unclear.

I'll be sharing updates as production continues for my current project and would love to see the tools others are using, and the results they are getting.