From keynote halls to expo booths, AI dominated the Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco, a major professional gathering for the video game industry.

At GDC 2026, held from Monday to Friday, flyers for AI companies and AI tools were common, and the exhibition floor was thick with both startups and established companies promoting how the technology could transform game development.

Chinese companies were among the most visible presences at the show, delivering dozens of talks, showcasing proprietary tools and eyeing expansion in the competitive US market.

For Nathan Chen, head of technology at Tencent Games, AI has become a central focus of his work.

During a talk at the expo, he recalled that at the close of 2024 the industry was still weighing whether to invest in 3D generation. By 2025, momentum had shifted dramatically and AI was already showing clear, tangible progress, he said.

Tencent Games ran more than 20 sessions and presented a suite of AI-powered tools at the show. Its booth featured VISVISE, a tool that supports both 3D animation and modeling generation for game developers, which the company describes as the industry's first independently developed animation generation model.

MoreFun Studios, a subsidiary of Tencent, presented AI-generated kung fu motion systems and advanced 3D character pipelines. NetEase Games also made a significant showing, delivering five talks that covered pipeline updates for open-world games and mobile game art production.

Democratizing 3D creation

At GDC 2026, accessible, user-friendly AI 3D creation tools made a significant presence, aiming at smaller developers, a market segment underserved by expensive, specialist-dependent workflows.

"What once took weeks and cost $1,000 now takes just two minutes and $1," Faye Pan, head of marketing for Meshy, a 3D generative AI company, told China Daily.

The platform allows users, both professionals and hobbyists, to generate 3D assets from text prompts and images, without requiring expensive software or specialized training. Pan said the tool is aimed primarily at small and medium-sized studios on tight budgets without dedicated 3D artists on staff. Meshy also offers 3D printing of user-created models.

Tripo AI, a Beijing-based company, used GDC 2026 to launch Tripo P1.0, a 3D model generation system built for direct integration into game engines and other 3D applications. The company has now generated nearly 100 million 3D models since its founding.

"As production-ready asset generation lowers the barrier to creating interactive content, the developer ecosystem around AI-generated 3D content continues to expand," said Wang Yinyin, a spokesperson for Tripo AI.

AI 3D creation tools work by learning from vast datasets of objects, scenes and materials, enabling them to generate realistic models, textures and animations from text or image inputs, dramatically reducing manual modeling time.

According to a December report by The Business Research Company, the global AI 3D asset market is projected to grow from $1.89 billion in 2024 to $7.21 billion by 2029, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 30.7 percent.

Building the ecosystem

As AI tools accelerate the growth of small and independent game developers, demand is rising for the broader ecosystem infrastructure that supports them, including payment processing, analytics and live operations platforms.

PingPong, a cross-border payment services company, attended GDC for the first time this year with a direct goal of breaking into the US gaming market. The company's unified checkout platform supports multiple terminals, including mobile devices, PCs and game consoles, and recommends optimal payment pathways, which the company says improves payment success rates for game transactions.

ThinkingData, a mobile game product analytics platform headquartered in Shanghai, was also at the show. The platform enables game developers to track user behavior, optimize game performance and drive monetization in real time across mobile, PC, console and web games, according to the company.

It opened a Silicon Valley office last year as part of its push into the US market. Han Pan, who heads US operations for ThinkingData, acknowledged the difficulty of the US market but remained undeterred.

"The US gaming market is mature and competitive, and it's challenging," Han told China Daily. "But it's also a huge market. Building on our in-house technology and the success we've had in other markets, we're looking to expand our footprint here."