Game engine maker Unity has published its 2026 Unity Game Development Report, which surveys developers who use Unity software to make their games. That includes developers like The Game Bakers, who recently released the mountain-climbing game Carin, the team behind Outbound, Square Glad Games, and Mega Cat Studios, the developers behind God of War Sons of Sparta.
The report, which draws its data from developers across PC, mobile, web, social, XR, and console game makers who use Unity, as well as direct responses from over 300 game developers, includes five key takeaways while providing an insight into the section of the industry that more closely represents the majority of developers.
The biggest triple-A studios may be the ones generating the most revenue, but they are the smallest portion of the industry when you consider where most developers live. A quick look at the ‘Made with Unity’ tag on Steam shows you how many of the indies you’ve likely heard about are made with Unity. There will always be more indies than major triple-A teams, which is what makes Unity’s report particularly interesting to dig into.
In their broadest sense, Unity lays out the five key takeaways from its report to be:
Studios see big opportunity in small games
Studios are taking a prudent approach to AI tools
Studios are seeking out more ways to reach the right players
Cross-play and competition are driving player engagement
The business of games is broadening in scope
The first point is based on data that shows developers are prototyping smaller-scale games as a means of averting the risks of going for bigger projects that could end up shuttering the studio if they’re not instant successes.
“64% of respondents from studios with 10-49 employees say market conditions have led to a focus on smaller, more manageable projects,” according to the report. Landfall programmer Zorro Svärdendahl added, “Small teams can do really big things now compared to what they used to be able to do. That’s something we’ve felt internally at Landfall: Our ambition to make bigger things has gotten higher and our ability to execute on them is getting stronger.” If the name Landfall rings a bell, that’s because they’re the team behind one of 2025’s most popular games, PEAK.
A focus on smaller teams and smaller-scale projects has also, naturally, impacted the kinds of games Unity sees developers working on. Most studios are sticking to popular genres, with Role-Playing Games, Strategy, Action-Adventure, Shooter, and Simulation games being the top five genres. Within that, the top five themes that go along with those games are Casual, Fantasy, Historical, Mystery and Detective, and Story-Rich, which is “a response that broadly aligns with a growing appetite among players for less time-intensive, low-friction experiences, often with co-op,” according to the report.
The second point, and arguably the most interesting point, is how Unity sees its developers’ approach to using AI tools in their development pipelines. The majority of developers making their games with Unity (62%) use AI tools for coding assistance, with the second most popular use, writing and narrative design, at 44%. Only 5% of those surveyed responded with “I do not use AI.”
This data, in particular, is pulled directly from the survey, so it’s worth noting the sample size it comes from. It also doesn’t specify if any of the data is used for the final in-game versions of any of the pipelines mentioned. This could come from more developers using AI tools to prototype writing and narrative design work, only to use their own work for what actually goes into the game.
That said, the takeaways for how developers are using AI tools also seem to be in line with what we’ve heard from similar reports, like GDC’s State of the Game Industry report, which pointed to the biggest uses of AI tools falling on back-end tasks that do not make it into the game itself.
The report also adds that the teams with larger staff are the ones adopting AI tools into their workflow, and that “79% of polled devs with over 150 team members say that AI tools have helped them improve efficiency.”
As AI tools continue to improve, it’ll be interesting to see what reports like this and GDC’s annual State of the Game Industry bring in the next couple of years in terms of results. Public outcry against AI tools, and specifically GenAI tools, may continue, but it also may fall on deaf ears if developers are finding real efficiencies when using them in specific, targeted ways.
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