A few years ago, we published a guide on how to break into the FX, animation, and games industries. It covered the different roles available, how to build a portfolio, where to study, and what mistakes to avoid when applying. The advice was solid for its time, and the fundamentals still hold in places we’ll get to shortly.

But the ground has shifted. Anyone reading that original article in 2026 deserves an honest companion piece — one that doesn’t pretend the last few years haven’t happened. This is that article.

What Actually Happened Between Then and Now

The disruption didn’t arrive gradually. It came in overlapping waves: first a pandemic-era hiring boom that was never sustainable, then a brutal correction, then the arrival of production-ready generative AI tools that changed what studios needed from human workers and how many of them they needed at all.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics had projected 16% employment growth for multimedia artists and animators between 2020 and 2030. That outlook has not aged well.

In gaming alone, an estimated 45,000 jobs were lost between 2022 and mid-2025. The worst single month was January 2024, when more than 6,000 jobs disappeared in thirty days. Over the full years of 2023 and 2024, approximately 10,500 and 14,800 gaming workers respectively were laid off worldwide. According to the Game Developers Conference’s 2025 State of the Game Industry report, 41% of developers surveyed had either experienced layoffs directly or watched their teams shrink.

Animation and VFX weren’t spared. Projections made as recently as 2024 suggested that more than 100,000 US film, television, and animation jobs would be disrupted by 2026. Many industry observers now say the disruption has already arrived — it’s not a future event to hedge against, it’s the present condition to navigate.

It’s worth being precise about what drove this, because the story is more complicated than “AI took the jobs.” The gaming industry in particular overextended dramatically during the COVID boom years. Between 2020 and 2024, 16 of the 22 most expensive game acquisitions in history took place, totaling $115 billion. When consumer spending normalized, studios were carrying inflated headcounts they could no longer justify. AI didn’t create that problem. But it gave executives a convenient rationale — and a replacement strategy — for the cuts that followed.

Microsoft is the clearest example. In July 2025, the company announced over 9,000 layoffs across its gaming division while simultaneously reporting record revenue and operating income. That’s not a struggling company cutting costs. That’s a profitable company redirecting budget toward AI infrastructure and reducing human overhead in the process.

Ubisoft followed a similar pattern — announcing restructuring in 2023, 2024, and again in early 2026, closing studios and cutting teams repeatedly while framing each round as strategic refocusing. Their share price hit a 14-year low.

Which Roles Took the Hardest Hit

Not all positions in these industries were equally exposed. The roles that suffered most were those involving high-volume, technically skilled but repeatable creative work — exactly the category that generative AI tools were designed to accelerate or replace.

Entry-level concept artists have seen significant contraction. Studios that once hired teams to generate visual development work — character explorations, environment studies, mood boards — can now produce comparable volumes using AI image generators in a fraction of the time. The same applies to background artists, texture artists, and junior 3D modelers handling generic environmental assets. In-between animation, the painstaking frame-by-frame work that traditional animation depends on, has been substantially automated. Storyboard artists and illustrators are also in a more precarious position than they were three years ago.

One survey of industry executives, conducted in 2024, found that approximately a third expected AI to displace 3D modelers by 2026. A quarter flagged graphic designers, and around 15% identified storyboard artists, surface artists, and material artists as vulnerable in the near term.

For people currently enrolled in programs specifically designed to train them for these entry-level roles, that’s a difficult reality to sit with. It doesn’t mean the work is gone entirely — but it does mean the path in looks different than it did when our original article was written.

The AI Tools Reshaping These Industries

Any honest account of where things stand in 2026 requires naming the tools that changed the landscape. With one important caveat: this is a list accurate to mid-2026. These platforms update every few months, new competitors emerge, and what leads the field today may be displaced or absorbed into something else entirely by the time you read this. Treat this as context, not a permanent reference.

In video and animation generation, the major players currently include Runway (now at Gen-4.5, widely used by professional studios for camera-controlled video work), OpenAI’s Sora 2 (which reached production-ready quality for longer clips in early 2025), Kling, Google’s Veo, and Pika. These tools have moved well past novelty — studios are using them for production work right now, not just experimentation.

For concept art and image generation, Midjourney remains the dominant tool for visual development, with Adobe Firefly embedded directly into Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and Premiere for those already working in the Adobe ecosystem. Firefly has the additional advantage of being trained on licensed content, which matters for commercial work.

In character animation specifically, Cascadeur handles physics-based character motion, while DeepMotion, RADiCAL, and Plask allow motion capture from phone or laptop cameras and export directly into Blender, Maya, Unreal Engine, or Unity. Autodesk acquired Wonder Studio and rebranded it as Flow Studio for live-action CG integration.

In games, over half of studios surveyed by GDC in 2025 had integrated generative AI into their workflow. Tools like Meshy.ai allow 2D concept art to be converted into usable 3D meshes. Midjourney’s seamless tiling function has become a go-to for generating game environment textures quickly. And procedural AI tools are generating NPC dialogue, level variations, and content that previously required significant human time.

Adobe’s Sensei-powered Content-Aware Fill in After Effects has automated much of the rotoscoping and cleanup work — removal of microphones, cables, passers-by — that was once billed as skilled VFX labour.

Where the Industry Is Actually Growing

The picture isn’t uniformly bleak, and it would be dishonest to leave it there. Some segments of these industries are genuinely expanding.

Virtual production — the use of LED volume stages, real-time rendering, and on-set visualization tools — continues to grow as studios invest in the infrastructure. This requires artists with real-time engine skills, not just traditional animation pipelines. Unreal Engine and Unity are the tools of that world, and artists who understand both creative fundamentals and real-time production environments are in demand.

Production is also globalizing. The VFX and animation industry has been distributing work across more international hubs — India, France, Australia, and New Zealand have all seen growth in recent cycles, driven by production incentives and labour market differences. For artists in those regions, or those willing to work remotely for studios based there, this represents genuine opportunity.

Pipeline and technical artist roles — the people who bridge creative work and technical infrastructure, build tools, manage workflows, and integrate AI into production pipelines — are among the most stable and sought-after positions in all three industries right now.

Creative direction and art direction have held up considerably better than execution-level roles. The judgment required to set a visual direction, evaluate what AI outputs to use and what to discard, maintain stylistic consistency across a project, and make calls about what serves the story — that remains a human function, for now.

What Still Works: Honest Advice for 2026

If you’re trying to build a career in these industries today, the foundational advice hasn’t changed as much as you might think — but its application has changed considerably.

Your artistic fundamentals are more valuable than ever, not less. The artists producing the best AI-assisted work are the ones who understand colour theory, composition, perspective, and anatomical proportion well enough to recognize when a generated output is working and when it isn’t — and why. Prompt engineering is a real skill, but it requires artistic literacy to do well. Someone who can’t evaluate a composition will generate a lot of mediocre images very efficiently.

AI literacy is now table stakes for entering these industries. Employers are specifically looking for candidates who can direct AI tools effectively, integrate them into production pipelines, and understand their limitations as well as their capabilities. Your portfolio should demonstrate that you work with these tools — not that you avoid them, and not that you rely on them entirely. Show the creative decision-making, not just the output.

The portfolio matters more, not less. In a market where competition per role has increased and studios are more selective, a strong, curated body of work is still the most direct path in. What’s changed is what a portfolio needs to show: creative vision and judgment, not just technical proficiency at execution tasks.

Specialization is protective. The artists and developers who have navigated this period most successfully tend to be the ones who went deep in a specific area — character rigging, real-time shaders, technical art, virtual production workflows — rather than those who stayed generalist. The roles most exposed to AI replacement are the generalist entry-level positions. Niche expertise is harder to automate and harder to offshore.

Networking remains essential, and it matters more in a tighter market. The jobs that get filled first are still the ones filled through professional relationships. Industry events, online communities, and direct relationships with working professionals are how most people break in, and that hasn’t changed.

Think carefully about education costs. Our original article mentioned specific schools enthusiastically and without qualification. The job market that those programs were designed to funnel graduates into has contracted at the entry level. That doesn’t mean a degree in animation or game design has no value — it means the return on a costly program warrants genuine scrutiny before enrolling. Some skills in this space are learnable through lower-cost or self-directed routes that didn’t exist a few years ago. Do your research on current graduate outcomes before committing.

Closing Thoughts

The version of these industries that existed in 2022 has not returned and is unlikely to. The entry points have narrowed, the tools have changed, and the business logic driving studio decisions has shifted in ways that affect who gets hired and for what.

None of that means a career in FX, animation, or games is out of reach. It means entering with clear eyes is now mandatory. Artists who adapt, who learn to work alongside AI rather than in denial of it, who develop strong creative judgment and genuine specialization, and who build real professional networks — those artists are still finding their footing.

The artists who will struggle are the ones waiting for the market to return to what it was. It won’t.

What it will be is still being written, in part by the people working in it right now — including the ones just figuring out how to get started.

---

This article was published in July 2026 as a companion to our 2022 guide, How to Get a Career in the FX, Animation and Games Industry. Tool references and industry data reflect conditions as of mid-2026 and will be subject to change as the field continues to evolve.