AI adoption is becoming a loyalty test, and players are left out

What does it mean when 94% of studios "use AI"? Almost nothing, and that is exactly the problem. Vandal ran that number on the same day as the remarks of an Xbox executive who said developers who refuse AI shouldn't be in the business. Put the two together and you get a debate that stopped being about tools and started being about loyalty.

The 94% is a headline, not a diagnosis

The figure comes from Vivrato's VAIA Report 2026. As Vandal reports, the consultancy ran 101 confidential interviews with studio leaders in Europe and the US between April and September 2026. Each interview used the same 44 questions across nine production phases. As GamesIndustry.biz summarizes it, 97% of leaders said they had used AI in some form, and 94% said they had used it in at least one of those nine phases.

The same study undercuts its own headline. When asked to rate from 1 to 10 how integrated AI is in their development, 52% answered 3 or lower. In plain terms, it looks like most of these studios have AI at the edges of the pipeline, not at its core. Vivrato's CEO, Adam Boyes, said the interesting question is no longer who uses AI but where, what it changes and where teams still struggle.

We agree with that, and it is the part that tends to get lost. "Uses AI" can mean a programmer asking an assistant for a snippet, or it can mean generated art in the shipped game. The study does give one hint of that gap: 70% of European studios reported using AI for art, assets and animation, against 53% in the US. Those are very different things to a player, and a single percentage flattens them.

Telling holdouts to leave is a loyalty oath

Then there is Brandon Stirrup, Microsoft's senior business strategy lead. According to Vandal's report on his comments, he said he vibe-coded a bad but improvable game in two days, with three hours of active work and no prior development experience. He concluded that anyone can make a game, and that a developer who refuses to believe AI has a place in their future shouldn't be in this business. He also said hundreds of Xbox employees already use AI. Vandal notes these are his personal views, not Microsoft policy. He deactivated his X account in under 24 hours, and an Xbox source attributed that to the volume of replies.

Credit where it's due: he has a point about candor. Hiding use of a tool that most of your peers use is not a healthy position, and Stirrup himself argues the industry is reluctant to acknowledge its use publicly. But the leap from "be honest" to "believe or leave" is where we part ways. A bad game built in three hours shows that anyone can ship something. It doesn't show that craft is obsolete, and it says nothing about whether a team with a different workflow deserves a place in the industry.

It is also worth noticing who gets to say this. An executive at a company that has recently created Xbox Labs, an initiative to experiment with new development tools, is not a neutral observer. We think that is context, not an accusation, but readers should weigh it.

Players deserve a label, not a side

The two-camp framing, true believers versus holdouts, serves nobody. The loudest voices on each side want players to pick a flag. What players actually need is simpler: to know what "uses AI" means for the game in front of them. Was it used for code assistance, for placeholder assets, for final art, for voices? Those are different questions, and many people will answer them differently.

Our recommendation is for studios to publish a short, specific statement of where AI was used, with the same matter-of-factness as a credits roll. The Vivrato data suggests the answer will often be "lightly, in a few places," which is hardly scandalous. Transparency would probably defuse more outrage than any defensive silence, and it would take away the leverage of executives who treat adoption as a badge of seriousness.

The verdict: the 94% is real but shallow, and the line that holdouts don't belong in the industry is bluster. Judge studios on what ships and on how honestly they describe how it was made. Not on a loyalty test.