DOMINATE Game Dev in 2026 with this knowledge!

Hello and welcome. I'm your Coder Mikey. One of the really awesome things that Unity does every single year is this, their Unity game development report. This is usually a super detailed report with an insane amount of data. They tend to do this basically once a year. I covered one from last year in this video, which incidentally I just tried to actually read it and suddenly it seems you can't do it. If I go to the previous link, it really just goes to the 2026 version. So it would be nice to have some kind of library so we could see previous reports. But anyways, what matters is what exactly is going on this year? What are the trends for game development? Whether you're a solo indie or working at a AAA company, it definitely helps to know what is currently going on in the industry. They start off by pointing out what are the five main trends shaping game development in 2026. And the first one is actually something that I'm constantly talking about and I'm actually surprised to see it here, or slightly surprised I suppose, which is how studios see big opportunities in small games. The reason I'm surprised is because I'm only starting to question, okay, who exactly is the target audience for these reports? Is it like AAA devs or solo devs? Cuz the industry as a whole is actually pretty massive. So what works for AAA isn't necessarily what works for indie devs. But still, it is great to see this. This is definitely my advice for indie devs, definitely make small games, make lots of small games. They are great both for learning as well as for having better odds of finding success. So it's great to see how this one is number one. So we're going to see this in detail in a little bit. Then trend number two is how studios are taking a prudent approach to AI tools. Previously, last year in 2025, AI was basically just coming out or just starting to be useful, so a lot of people were trying to use it. It seems right now it is still mostly the same thing, mostly developers trying to figure out the best ways to use these tools, but use them in a positive way as opposed to a negative way. So like it says here, so the main goal is use them to boost productivity and increase agility. So they're using AI tools for more back-end development and planning tasks as opposed to doing things like AI generation, which is more player-facing.