2026 State of Real-Time Workflows Report: Game Technology & Beyond

A year ago, the AI conversation was about speed: who was adopting it, how fast, and whether it was ethical. This year, it's about cost. 

Speed is no longer in question. Perforce's 2026 State of DevOps Report found that 72% of enterprises at high-maturity organizations now report that AI is deeply embedded in their processes. This expansion is exactly why the cost conversation is surfacing now, as organizations are investing heavily in AI and leadership is now asking what that investment is actually buying. 

That question doesn't have a simple answer, and it's the tension at the center of this year's report. Teams told us AI is saving them real time in some workflows while raising real concerns about job security, output quality, and where human judgment still fits in. The 2026 State of Real-Time Workflows Report: Game Technology & Beyond follows both threads across three sections: where AI is paying off, where it's straining teams, and where game technology is quietly becoming infrastructure far beyond the games it was built for. 

Key Findings

AI adoption is no longer the story—AI impact, and its cost is. 

50% of respondents report job insecurity or fears of role redundancy. Nearly the same share, 49%, cite poorly produced or inaccurate AI-generated content. 48% report ethical or compliance concerns, and 36% say AI has reduced creativity or human input in their workflows. The conversation has moved from, "How fast can we adopt" to, "What is this costing us?" 

The industries adopting AI most aggressively are also seeing the greatest gains. 

Media & Entertainment and Automotive & Manufacturing respondents report the highest levels of AI usage and workflow acceleration. M&E led adoption in last year's report, where 86% of respondents already leveraged generative AI. The results are clear: AI is delivering its strongest measurable productivity gains in the industries that have integrated it most.

Version control systems and game engines are the industry's quiet infrastructure, and their reach keeps expanding. 

Version control adoption hit 94% this year, up from 86% in 2025. Game engines are following the same trajectory, with use cases extending well beyond gaming and this year's data showing the clearest cross-vertical penetration to date.

On behalf of our entire team at Perforce, a special thanks to everyone who contributed to the survey and provided insight into the changes we’re seeing across every industry. We look forward to the conversations and ideas that will be sparked from this year’s report.

Brent Schiestl
Senior Director of Product Management  
Perforce Software 

Table of Contents

• The Cross-Industry Impact of Game Technology
• Godot Adoption in 2026: The Data Behind Gaming's Third Option
• Version Control is Foundational in Today’s Real-Time Workflows
• Infrastructure Evolution: Hybrid Is the New Normal
• The Gaming Workforce on AI
• The Challenges Impacting Teams Across Industries

Last year, we explored how game technology was driving innovation across a wide range of high-growth industries. This year, the data confirms that shift has staying power: game technology continues to serve a critical role across workflows in non-gaming industries. 

Media and Entertainment respondents put that plainly. They use game engines throughout several production pipelines—most heavily for film and television (55%), but also virtual production (32%), online streaming content (26%), and even marketing and advertising (22%). These trends suggest the technology is no longer specialized towards a few niche use cases but has instead expanded into the core of how content gets made. 

Nickelodeon's Max & the Midknights is a prime example of what that shift looks like in practice. Since production began in 2021, the team has run a hybrid pipeline, keeping modeling, rigging, and animation in Maya while handling virtual production, lookdev, lighting, and final-pixel rendering in Unreal Engine. As the team saw what real-time workflows unlocked—flying through fully-built environments before a single shot was animated, adjusting cameras and lighting details all the way up to final render, and starting the lighting pass before animation was even locked—they pushed Unreal as far downstream as they could. The result: renders that dropped from as much as two hours a frame in a traditional pipeline to roughly 30 seconds, camera and lighting fixes that could ship same-day instead of waiting on a producer conversation, and a production team that could review near-final lighting and animation together instead of only seeing the finished result at the very end.

Automotive and Manufacturing shows the same pattern from a different angle. Nearly one in five respondents in this sector (19%) now use game engines for digital twins, visualizations, and simulations. Toyota's announcement in early 2026 shows just how far that commitment can go. Rather than license an existing engine, Toyota's engineering team spent real development resources building a purpose-made one, named Fluorite, then open-sourced it, a bet that real-time 3D is now table stakes for automotive UI, not a nice-to-have. That kind of investment isn't unique to Toyota, either: 14 percent of respondents now build their own game engine, flat versus 2025 but up slightly from 11 percent in 2024. 

Unreal and Unity remain the dominant commercial game engines, with their lead largely intact from 2025. The more interesting movement is happening below the top two: Godot has cemented its position as a meaningful third option, with 10% of respondents reporting they use it. 

Steam release data reflects that shift. Godot games shipping on Steam have nearly doubled year over year: 378 in 2023, 828 in 2024, 1,380 in 2025 and 2026 is already on pace to surpass that, with over 900 titles shipped by mid-year alone. Global Game Jam data tells a similar story: 25% of 2026 participants built their projects in Godot. 

Proof in point, Slay the Spire 2 was built entirely on Godot, with developer MegaCrit abandoning Unity after the studio's licensing fee controversy. In its first week of early access following the March 2026 launch, the game hit a peak of nearly 575,000 concurrent players, sold an estimated 1.5 million units, and generated roughly $55 million in revenue. 

Godot's appeal isn't just performance, but its economics are reaching a very different audience too. This year's survey also found that 20% of respondents are using Godot for educational and training projects. That's a telling number given the environment those institutions are operating in. As organizations across the education sector face significant budget cuts, Godot's open-source model and zero licensing fees make it one of the few game engines a cash-strapped school or training program can adopt without a recurring bill. 

The same cost logic is showing up elsewhere, too with 22% of respondents now using Godot for 3D art, a sign that individual artists and small teams are making the same calculation as institutions. With no licensing fees to plan around, Godot removes one more variable from an already uncertain budget. 

At the backbone of today's real-time workflows are version control systems. The 2026 data show version control adoption at majority levels, with 94% of respondents using a version control system, up from 86% in 2025 and 69% in 2024, a meaningful climb. Notably, this year Media and Entertainment (35%, up from 26% in 2025) and Public Sector and Education (44%, up from 27% in 2025) respondents demonstrated the highest increase in version control adoption. 

Version control isn't new to serious engineering and creative teams; it's been standard practice for decades. What's changed, across all industries, is complexity. As barriers to entry have fallen and consumer expectations have climbed, projects simply have to deliver more to stand out.  

AI is accelerating that trend, driving an exponential increase in the content, code, and assets a project has to store and a human must maintain. For instance, this year’s survey found that 36 percent of respondents are using AI for code generation, an increase of eight percentage points from last year (28%). According to The New York Times, one financial services company using the AI coding tool Cursor saw its monthly code output jump from 25,000 lines to 250,000 lines. 

That volume of change makes skipping version control close to impossible, and it's likely what's driving this year's adoption jump. It's also what makes version control foundational to real-time workflows more broadly as it provides a single source of truth for distributed teams, disciplines, and now AI agents; a traceable history of who changed what and when for compliance; and a safety net that lets teams experiment and move fast, knowing they can always roll back. As the volume and speed of change keep climbing, that combination stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the backbone everything else depends on. 

Although adoption of real-time technology and generative AI has been high, it has brought significant concerns and backlash along with it. Nowhere is this more evident in our research than in game development, where the incorporation of AI has introduced concerns over job insecurity (54%), ethical concerns (54%), and reduced creativity (39%)—while 37% of respondents report no measurable acceleration from AI at all. 

These aren't abstract fears. A 2026 UK study found that 76% of game development professionals are considering leaving the industry, citing redundancies and AI-driven uncertainty. That mirrors a broader pattern across tech: more than 150,000 tech jobs were cut across 300-plus companies in the first half of 2026 alone, with Meta, one of the industry's largest employers, cutting 10% of its workforce explicitly in the name of AI efficiency. Additionally, gamers themselves are protesting the use of generative AI in games, forcing studios to abandon projects after severe backlash from the very consumers they are creating for. 

As these trends continue, hostility toward AI adoption is growing in the gaming industry, and developers are increasingly hesitant to build it into their workflows, especially around creative work like 2D/3D visual assets and audio. The real challenge ahead isn't whether developers adopt AI, but whether they can do so in a way that accelerates their workflows without accelerating the very job losses and creative erosion they're already worried about. 

Consistent with our 2025 findings, Funding remained organizations' top challenge, rising to 33% (up from 31% in 2025), while Collaboration remained at second place at 28% (slightly down from 29% in 2025). Several also cited shifting market conditions, describing pressure "to chase trends over creating quality work." Meanwhile, 26% of respondents cited increasing pressure and scrutiny from leadership as a result of AI adoption, a finding explored in depth in Section 2 of this report. 

Taken together, these findings suggest the pressure organizations feel isn't just about tighter budgets. Rather, it's about being asked to do more, faster, with less room for error. How teams manage that tension may prove just as consequential as the funding numbers themselves. 

A year ago, our findings showed how far game technology had spread beyond gaming. This year the data gets specific: version control, game engines, and generative AI are no longer niche tools. They have become the infrastructure for complex projects across high growth industries, quietly running under production pipelines, digital twins, and simulations across the globe. But infrastructure comes with a price tag, and this year, the industries running fastest are also the ones asking hardest questions about what that speed is costing them. 

That's exactly where Section 2 picks up. We’ll go deeper into our findings on AI’s evolving sentiment and impact, including  AI's evolution from content generator to research partner, and the true cost of adoption. You’ll also see what areas Automotive & Manufacturing is pulling ahead, and why Aerospace & Defense is quickly becoming an industry to watch. 

Then, in Section 3 we turn the lens on Media & Entertainment alone. Last year we called it "Ground Zero for Generative AI" and this year's data shows why: 93% of M&E respondents now use GenAI in their workflows, the highest adoption rate of any industry, and nearly one in five (19%) say AI has sped up their workflows by 26–50%. We'll dig into what's driving that lead, and how the industry's deep integration of game technology continues to shape and accelerate its real-time workflows. 

About Perforce P4

Perforce P4 gives your global development and design teams a version control foundation for creating without limits. With an unrivaled ability to handle the expanding size and complexity of today’s projects, P4 accelerates production, eliminates file sharing chaos, and makes it easy to restore your previous versions. 

Whether your team is working across time zones or tackling tight deadlines, P4 empowers everyone to collaborate efficiently—anywhere, anytime.

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