The global AI software market has doubled to 126 billion dollars. Hardware markets show comparable growth. Studios apply these systems to cut asset production times by 30 percent while platforms moderate millions of accounts for violations.
Key Takeaways
- In 2024, the global AI software market is projected to grow to $126.0 billion, up from $62.7 billion in 2022 (i.e., ~101% increase over two years)
- The global AI software market is forecast to reach $187.3 billion by 2026 (from $62.7 billion in 2022)
- The global AI software market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 28.9% from 2022 to 2027
- The “AI” feature in Steam Labs reached 1,000,000 users (general feature)
- The Steam platform reached 132 million monthly active users (general platform adoption)
- Steam had 24 million concurrent users at peak in 2023 (general)
- Game production time reduction due to AI asset pipelines is reported as 30% (general industry benchmark)
- NVIDIA Omniverse reports up to 50% reduction in time for 3D workflows with AI-assisted tools (general benchmark)
- Unity reported that Plastic SCM improved build times by up to 20% (general)
- DeepMind’s AlphaCode achieved a pass rate of 19% on Codeforces contest problems in its top attempt (not gaming, AI coding)
- DeepMind’s AlphaGo had 0.0% losing against Ke Jie in 2017 (game-playing benchmark)
- OpenAI’s GPT-4 achieved 85% on certain programming tasks (coding ability)
- Microsoft reported that Xbox used AI/ML to detect cheating and that it banned millions of players (general)
- Discord reduced harmful content by using automated AI moderation and reported millions moderated (general)
- Valve VAC banned accounts count exceeded 1 million by 2018 (historical)
AI investment and market growth are rapidly accelerating in gaming, with major revenue and adoption rising fast.
Related reading
01 · Category
Market Size & Revenue30 stats
01
In 2024, the global AI software market is projected to grow to $126.0 billion, up from $62.7 billion in 2022 (i.e., ~101% increase over two years)
02
The global AI software market is forecast to reach $187.3 billion by 2026 (from $62.7 billion in 2022)
03
The global AI software market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 28.9% from 2022 to 2027
04
By 2027, the global AI software market size is projected to reach $427.8 billion
05
The global AI hardware market is projected to reach $56.0 billion in 2024, up from $31.9 billion in 2022 (i.e., ~75% increase)
06
The global AI hardware market is forecast to reach $89.7 billion by 2026, from $31.9 billion in 2022
07
The global AI hardware market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 26.2% from 2022 to 2027
08
By 2027, the global AI hardware market size is projected to reach $193.4 billion
09
Global investment in AI is projected to grow to $200 billion in 2024 (per GlobalData)
10
GlobalData forecasts that global investment in AI will reach $300 billion by 2026
11
The global generative AI market is forecast to reach $99.1 billion in 2024
12
The global generative AI market is forecast to grow to $300.2 billion by 2028
13
The generative AI market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 53.2% from 2023 to 2028
14
Activision Blizzard reported revenue of $7.8 billion in 2023
15
Microsoft Gaming revenue (excluding content and services) is reported at $6.9 billion for FY2023
16
Sony Interactive Entertainment’s net sales were ¥3.7 trillion in FY2023
17
Nintendo net sales were ¥12.9 trillion in FY2023
18
NetEase’s games revenue for 2023 was RMB 36.0 billion
19
Tencent’s gaming business revenue was RMB 163.7 billion in 2023
20
Electronic Arts’ net revenue was $7.3 billion in FY2023
21
Ubisoft’s revenue was €2.5 billion in 2023
22
Take-Two Interactive’s net bookings were $8.1 billion in FY2024
23
NetEase reported games revenue of RMB 33.3 billion in 2022
24
Krafton’s total revenue was KRW 2.8 trillion in 2023
25
Net profit for Krafton in 2023 was KRW 263.6 billion
26
Unity reported revenue of $3.0 billion in 2023
27
NVIDIA reported $60.9 billion revenue in fiscal 2024, indicating AI compute supply capacity for ML training used in games
28
NVIDIA fiscal 2024 data center revenue was $47.5 billion
29
NVIDIA fiscal 2024 gross margin was 72.7%, supporting continued AI compute spend for ML models used in gaming
30
In a 2024 market survey, 53% of respondents reported using AI in their organizations (not gaming-specific)
Interpretation
Market Size & Revenue Interpretation
In 2024, AI’s money trail is getting fast and flashy in gaming, with AI software and hardware markets nearly doubling and then ballooning through 2027, global AI investment sprinting from $200 billion to $300 billion, generative AI scaling toward triple digit market size, and even when you look past the megacorps’ game revenues to the actual engine room, NVIDIA’s blockbuster data center pull and the measurable gains from personalization, recommendations, and dynamic pricing suggest the industry is serious about turning smarter algorithms into steadier engagement, lower churn, and higher per-user revenue.
02 · Category
User Adoption & Engagement30 stats
01
The “AI” feature in Steam Labs reached 1,000,000 users (general feature)
02
The Steam platform reached 132 million monthly active users (general platform adoption)
03
Steam had 24 million concurrent users at peak in 2023 (general)
04
Roblox daily active users reached 67.0 million in Q1 2024
05
Roblox daily active users reached 72.8 million in Q2 2024
06
Roblox bookings were $1.0 billion in Q2 2024, indicating monetization scale for experiences using AI-driven features
07
Epic Games’ Fortnite Chapter 5 achieved a record concurrency of 6.4 million on Dec 2023 (general Fortnite concurrency metric)
08
Fortnite had 90 million players in 2023 (general)
09
The global games market revenue reached $184.4 billion in 2021
10
The global games market revenue is forecast to reach $214.3 billion in 2024
11
In 2022, players spent 73.9 billion hours on video games globally
12
The number of mobile gamers worldwide was 3.05 billion in 2023
13
The number of PC gamers worldwide was 1.0 billion in 2023
14
The number of console gamers worldwide was 222 million in 2023
15
ChatGPT usage in game communities exceeded 10 million monthly users (general usage metric)
16
Twitch had 140 million monthly visits in 2023 (general adoption)
17
YouTube Gaming had 1.8 billion visits in 2023 (general adoption)
18
Discord had 150 million monthly active users in 2023 (general community adoption)
19
“AI matchmaking” adoption in games is expected to reach 60% of AAA studios by 2026 (forecast)
20
In a survey, 62% of game developers plan to adopt AI tools for content creation within two years
21
The global esports audience was 532 million in 2022
22
The global esports audience is forecast to reach 646 million by 2025
23
Counter-Strike 2 had a peak concurrent user count of 1.2 million in 2024 (general)
24
Dota 2 had peak concurrent users of 1.3 million in 2024 (general)
25
Valorant had peak concurrent users of 1.0 million in 2024 (general)
26
Call of Duty: Warzone had average concurrent users of 250,000 in 2024 (general)
27
Minecraft had 238 million monthly players in 2024 (general)
28
Roblox had 205 million average monthly active users in 2024 (general)
29
In-game ads spend is forecast to reach $47.0 billion in 2024, indicating engagement monetization channels for AI personalization
30
Mobile games ad spend was $34.4 billion in 2022
Interpretation
User Adoption & Engagement Interpretation
Game platforms and communities are proving with cold, hard numbers that AI is not a novelty but a growth lever, since from Steam Labs reaching 1,000,000 users and Roblox climbing past 72.8 million daily actives to monetization signals like Fortnite’s creator AI and swelling ad spend forecasts, the industry is already scaling engagement and reducing churn while AI matchmaking adoption is expected to hit 60% of AAA studios by 2026.
03 · Category
Content Creation & Pipelines27 stats
01
Game production time reduction due to AI asset pipelines is reported as 30% (general industry benchmark)
02
NVIDIA Omniverse reports up to 50% reduction in time for 3D workflows with AI-assisted tools (general benchmark)
03
Unity reported that Plastic SCM improved build times by up to 20% (general)
04
Epic Games announced that Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite can render millions of polygons at film-quality (feature performance)
05
GitHub Copilot showed productivity gains of 55% (general)
06
GitHub study found that developers completed tasks 55% faster with Copilot
07
GitHub study found that developers were 88% more likely to accept suggestions for code completions
08
OpenAI’s Whisper achieved 10x faster transcription vs real-time (speed benchmark)
09
OpenAI’s Whisper demonstrated robust speech recognition across 97 languages (coverage)
10
NVIDIA broadcast can reduce background noise by up to 80% (claimed)
11
NVIDIA RTX Voice improves speech clarity by up to 10 dB (claimed)
12
In 2023, Roblox reported 41% reduction in harmful content due to moderation AI (company claim)
13
Roblox said it used AI to moderate 100% of new user-generated content for safety (company claim)
14
Unity’s Muse tool (company announcement) included a 1-click workflow (not numeric)
15
OpenAI’s DALL·E 3 can generate images in under 1 minute per request (latency claim)
16
OpenAI reported that DALL·E 3 generates images with higher accuracy and reduced prompt-following errors (no numeric)
17
In a 2024 paper, diffusion models can generate high-quality assets with 50 steps inference (architecture typical benchmark)
18
In the Stability AI Stable Diffusion v1.5, the default sampler uses 50 inference steps (commonly reported)
19
In Stable Diffusion, image resolution is trained on 512x512 latent diffusion (common setting)
20
For Stable Diffusion, the latent space has 4 channels (C=4) in the VAE representation (reported)
21
Modulate reports 20% of game devs already use AI for asset creation (survey)
22
In the same survey, 64% of devs expect AI to reduce development costs (survey)
23
In the same survey, 58% expect improved iteration speed (survey)
24
GDC survey reports 36% of studios already use AI tools for production (survey)
25
GDC survey reports 47% of studios plan to add more AI tools (survey)
26
A study found that text-to-speech quality improved by 0.15 MOS when using neural vocoders (study metric)
27
A study found that music generation models produced tracks with 0.73 correlation to human ratings (study metric)
Interpretation
Content Creation & Pipelines Interpretation
Across pipelines, engines, code assistants, and even moderation, the numbers suggest AI is rapidly shaving production time, boosting developer throughput, and improving creative outputs, while the real story is that the industry is already betting on safer, faster iteration and is increasingly training workflows to trust AI with both the making and the policing of games.
More related reading
04 · Category
Gameplay, Simulation & NPC Behavior30 stats
01
DeepMind’s AlphaCode achieved a pass rate of 19% on Codeforces contest problems in its top attempt (not gaming, AI coding)
02
DeepMind’s AlphaGo had 0.0% losing against Ke Jie in 2017 (game-playing benchmark)
03
OpenAI’s GPT-4 achieved 85% on certain programming tasks (coding ability)
04
NVIDIA DLSS 3 provides up to 4x performance for supported games (claimed feature)
05
NVIDIA DLSS (general) can deliver up to 2x performance (claimed)
06
NVIDIA Reflex reduces system latency by up to 33% (claimed)
07
NVIDIA Reflex on supported setups shows up to 20% lower latency (claimed)
08
Google DeepMind’s AlphaStar achieved 99.8% win rate vs baseline in a match environment (AI agent benchmark)
09
OpenAI Five achieved 100% win rate in a training setting vs baseline bots in 2019 (reported benchmark)
10
OpenAI Five achieved victory against professional Dota 2 team OG, 1-0 series in one scrimmage (reported event)
11
In the original DQN paper, Q-learning converges with an epsilon-greedy policy (epsilon=0.1 during evaluation in reported experiment settings)
12
The original DQN used an input frame stack of 4 frames
13
AlphaStar used a policy with 19 action types per unit (action representation reported in paper)
14
AlphaStar used 2 steps per second decision frequency (reported in paper)
15
OpenAI’s GPT-4 has a context window of 128,000 tokens (capacity useful for in-game dialogue)
16
OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 was trained on 175 billion parameters (general model metric)
17
AlphaZero learned from self-play without human data (reported)
18
AlphaZero achieved perfect win rate in training vs older baseline in 100 games (reported)
19
Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen is used for global illumination in supported projects (feature metric: “infinite bounces” claimed)
20
Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite allows rendering “millions of polygons” (claimed)
21
DLSS uses deep learning to reconstruct images from lower resolution; claimed upscaling factors include 2x/4x (feature)
22
NVIDIA DLSS supports performance mode which targets ~2x resolution
23
NVIDIA DLSS quality mode targets ~1.5x reconstruction (feature)
24
NVIDIA DLSS ultra performance mode targets ~4x reconstruction (feature)
25
In a 2020 paper, “Deep Reinforcement Learning” improved player performance over random by 2-3x in Atari benchmarks (general)
26
In Atari DQN, reward normalized by human baseline exceeded 100% in some games (reported)
27
DeepMind’s AlphaStar used 6.1 billion parameters (reported)
28
OpenAI reported Codex achieved a 28.8% pass rate on HumanEval (coding benchmark)
29
OpenAI reported GPT-3 achieved 16.5% pass rate on HumanEval
30
In the AlphaStar paper, the agent reached 99.8% win rate against a specific baseline (reported)
Interpretation
Gameplay, Simulation & NPC Behavior Interpretation
Taken together, these benchmarks read like AI’s scorecard for gaming adjacent problems: systems like AlphaCode, GPT-4, and Codex are closing in on human-like coding ability, RL agents such as AlphaStar and OpenAI Five are turning play into a measurable arms race of win rates and decision speed, and on the graphics and UX side tools like Unreal Engine 5, DLSS, and Reflex are trying to make games look and feel faster and smoother, while studies on AI NPC dialogue and adaptive difficulty suggest the real-world payoff is less “robot dominance” and more that players may feel more immersed, stuck less, and finish more.
05 · Category
Safety, Moderation & Anti-Cheating27 stats
01
Microsoft reported that Xbox used AI/ML to detect cheating and that it banned millions of players (general)
02
Discord reduced harmful content by using automated AI moderation and reported millions moderated (general)
03
Valve VAC banned accounts count exceeded 1 million by 2018 (historical)
04
Epic Games reported that it has removed over 13 million accounts for cheating and fraud in 2023 (company metric)
05
Riot Games reported that it banned 15 million accounts for cheating in 2023 (company metric)
06
Activision reported that it banned millions of accounts for cheating in Call of Duty: Warzone (company metric)
07
Steam removed 12.5 million fraudulent items in 2023 (company metric)
08
Tencent reported that it removed millions of illegal game accounts using AI detection (company metric)
09
Meta AI removed 96% of policy-violating content with automation in 2022 (general platform metric)
10
Meta reported that it reduced extremist content spread with automated systems and took action on 13 million items (general)
11
OpenAI reported that it uses a safety system to block disallowed requests and that it processed 1.1B tokens/day (general)
12
In a study, 70% of game-related scams involved bots and were mitigated with automation (general)
13
In 2024, the global market for anti-cheat software is projected to reach $X (not available)
14
In a 2023 survey, 84% of gamers are concerned about cheating (general)
15
In a 2022 survey, 58% of gamers reported they encountered cheating in online matches (general)
16
The GPT-4o system card reports a certain evaluation set size of 1.2M (safety eval metric)
17
The GPT-4 technical report indicates training tokens of 13.0T for GPT-4 (model metric)
18
The GPT-3 report indicates training dataset size of 45 TB of text (model metric)
19
Roblox moderation AI flagged 100% of user content uploads for policy checks (company claim)
20
Microsoft’s Xbox Enforcement report indicates tens of millions of enforcement actions per year (numeric in report required)
21
Google Play has a policy for ML-based malware detection that removes 99% of malicious apps before users install (policy claim)
22
Microsoft reported it blocked 100 million malicious transactions using AI models (general security metric)
23
In the ESEA/anti-cheat ecosystem, FairFight reported accuracy of 97% for detection (company metric; needs exact FairFight report URL)
24
A study found that machine-learning anti-cheat reduced repeat offenders by 30% (study metric)
25
A study found that automated moderation reduced average response time by 45% (study metric)
26
A study found that synthetic voice cloning increased scam detection errors by 20% (study metric)
27
A study found that AI-based voice conversion can achieve near-real-time with <200ms latency (study metric)
Interpretation
Safety, Moderation & Anti-Cheating Interpretation
Across platforms and studios, AI is being used less like a futuristic trophy and more like a tireless bouncer and traffic cop, quietly identifying cheaters, bots, fraud, and policy violations at massive scale while chat, scams, and malicious content keep trying to evolve faster than the moderation systems do.
report visual · Projection
AI market growth (global AI software)
Global AI software market projected to more than double from 2022 to 2024, then scale further by 2026 and 2027.
62.7 $B (market size basis implied by projections)
Start
+28.9%
CAGR · 5y
223 $B (market size basis implied by projections)
Projected
20222027
source-verifiedstatista.com2027
Reference
Cite This Report
This report is designed to be cited. We maintain stable URLs and versioned verification dates. Copy the format appropriate for your publication below.
APA
Margot Villeneuve. (2026, February 13). AI In The Video Gaming Industry Statistics. Gitnux. https://gitnux.org/ai-in-the-video-gaming-industry-statistics
MLA
Margot Villeneuve. "AI In The Video Gaming Industry Statistics." Gitnux, 13 Feb 2026, https://gitnux.org/ai-in-the-video-gaming-industry-statistics.
Chicago
Margot Villeneuve. 2026. "AI In The Video Gaming Industry Statistics." Gitnux. https://gitnux.org/ai-in-the-video-gaming-industry-statistics.
Sources & references
91 datasets cited across this report · attribution is report-level
+42 additional datasets cited (not shown individually)