Japan’s Online Game Association (JOGA) and Kadokawa ASCII Laboratories have published the JOGA Online Game Market Research Report 2026, and the results show generative AI has become a standard part of game development in the country. The report has been conducted every year since 2004 and tracks the state of Japan’s domestic online game market along with trends among its developers.

This year’s edition also looked closely at how developers and players feel about generative AI. According to a preview shared by Famitsu, the survey found that 100% of the game companies polled now use generative AI tools in some form. Google’s Gemini was the most widely used model, with 94% of companies reporting they use it. Anthropic’s Claude followed at 84%, and GitHub Copilot came in at 76%. When asked which tasks they were most interested in handing over to AI, companies most often pointed to analyzing user preferences and predicting user behavior.

This marks a shift from the previous year’s survey, where content planning was cited as a top use case alongside user analysis, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the most used tool at a 59% adoption rate.

Even with such widespread use among developers, the report notes that players still have reservations about the technology. The concerns raised most often by gamers were the risk of copyright infringement in games made with AI assistance, and worries that games could start to look increasingly similar to one another as more studios rely on the same tools.