At Tokyo Game Show 2026, a survey of Japan's leading game studios revealed that generative AI has moved from curiosity to cornerstone in just twelve months — adoption nearly doubling to 85.8% of developers, with most using it daily. The shift reflects not a love of novelty but the relentless arithmetic of production: shorter cycles, tighter budgets, and the quiet hope that a thinking partner in the pipeline might ease the pressure. Yet even as the tools become infrastructure, the industry knows that efficiency and accountability are not the same thing, and the questions of copyright and creati