The Japan Online Gaming Association (JOGA) has announced the preliminary results of the annual JOGA Online Gaming Market Research Report 2026. The results show that all surveyed companies active in the online gaming sector use generative artificial intelligence in their workflows.
According to the survey, 100% of respondents confirmed that they use AI tools in some part of their development and business operations. The most popular service was Google Gemini, used by 94% of businesses. This was followed by Anthropic Claude (84%) and GitHub Copilot (76%).
The authors of the report make it clear that the study concerns exclusively the online gaming market, i.e. projects operating via the Internet, regardless of platform. This sample does not include offline games for PC, consoles, or mobile devices, so the results cannot be extrapolated to the Japanese gaming industry as a whole. JOGA has not yet disclosed the number of companies that participated in the survey.
Compared to last year, the usage status of AI has changed significantly. The 2025 report found ChatGPT to be the most popular tool with an adoption rate of 59%, with content creation and planning listed as the main application areas. Companies are now increasingly looking at generative AI as a data analysis tool. The most in-demand tasks are supposed to be researching user preferences and predicting player behavior.
Major gaming companies continue to adopt different approaches when it comes to using technology. Capcom has previously stated that it has no plans to directly incorporate AI-generated game content into its projects, but that it is actively using generated AI to speed up internal processes. CD Projekt takes a similar position, stressing that games are still created by humans and that AI is only used to improve development efficiency.
At the same time, Nintendo remains one of the few major companies that openly refuses to implement generative AI in its games. The company believes this is due to concerns related to intellectual property and copyright.
