Ready Player AI? Analyzing the Developer Experience for Next-Generation Mobile Gaming

Abstract: We provide a comprehensive analysis of the global Android gaming landscape, based on a survey of 1,249 senior developers, and reveal a clear and urgent demand for a new generation of mobile gaming centered on the transformative potential of on-device Artificial Intelligence. The findings show this highly experienced developer base is eager to innovate, rating on-device AI/ML features—from performance upscaling to NPU-accelerated game logic—as critically important for their future projects. Their ambition is to deliver higher fidelity and more dynamic experiences that push the boundaries of mobile entertainment. However, the path to this AI-driven future is currently obstructed. While the desire to innovate is strong, the adoption of advanced AI hardware features is primarily blocked by a lack of deep integration within dominant game engines and concerns about inconsistent support across a fragmented device ecosystem. This work explores how emerging technologies that offer hardware-level AI acceleration can provide a direct solution, creating a standardized and powerful baseline for developers. We will examine the advanced, forward-looking use cases this technology unlocks, including AI-accelerated procedural content generation to create near-infinite game worlds, generative texture compression to overcome asset size limitations, and even real-time Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) to bring dynamic global illumination to mobile devices. Ultimately, the data presents a clear call to action: bridging the gap between developer ambition for AI and the practicalities of the development platform is the critical next step to unleashing a new era of intelligent, truly next-generation gaming on Android.

Keywords: Gaming, On-Device AI, Developer Experience (DX), Human-Computer Interaction, Android Development, Artificial Intelligence

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006881

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