Global survey from Perforce and JetBrains finds that nearly 20% of respondents now work outside of gaming industry.
A global survey of 521 leaders and creators suggests more organizations are starting to make use of gaming engines within larger digital business transformation initiatives.
Conducted by Perforce and JetBrains, the survey finds 18% of respondents now use game engines for virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) applications, followed by visualization and simulation, (14%), 3D art creation (14%) and film and television applications (12%). In contrast, 83% of respondents are working specifically on gaming applications, with gaming engines from Unreal and Unity being the most widely used.
The survey also finds that regardless of which vertical industry or use case, 70% of respondents also reported they are integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools into their workflows, with code generation, reviews and testing (28%), content creation (26%), imaging and prototyping (21%), research and development (19%) and data analytics (14%) being the top use cases.
The most widely used tools are ChatGPT (46%), followed by Google Gemini (15%), Anthropic Claude (11%), and DeepSeek (10%), the survey finds.
In general, the survey suggests that the development of applications and associated content is becoming more automated using best practices, says Chris Perez, director of product marketing for Perforce. In fact, the survey finds that 86% of respondents are using some type of version control platform to manage development projects. The top three Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) in use are Microsoft Visual Studio (52%), Microsoft Visual Studio Code (42%), and JetBrains Rider (25%). The most widely used continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform is Jenkins.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations are embracing a wider range of technologies to drive innovation but it’s clear interest in using technology developed for one sector such as gaming is now, for example, being used in the automotive or aerospace sector to drive, for example, a training application. The challenge and the opportunity for Digital CxO is to identify innovative use cases within their own industry that could be addressed using technologies that were developed for a consumer application such as gaming, notes Perez. “There is a clear opportunity to expand our horizons,” he says.
Nevertheless, challenges remain, including finding funding for initiatives (31%), collaboration (29%) and finding the time needed to innovate (18%). As a consequence, Digital CxO will need to choose projects carefully, especially if their application development team, for example, lacks gaming engine expertise. Fortunately, there are many developers of gaming applications that might be willing to consider working in another field if they might be able to command a higher salary. The challenge, of course, is reaching out to those individuals on the online forums where they currently work and play because it’s unlikely they will engage with, for example, an automotive company or aerospace conglomerate unless specifically invited.
Hopefully that cross pollination of expertise will result in the development of more engaging applications. After all, the one thing developers of gaming applications intuitively understand better than most anyone else is how to keep end users coming back for more.
