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2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.
People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can.
The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like. In a cinema, on a DVD, on a streaming site etc.
You've pointed it out yourself, we have these old notions of economics that we apply to a new world where it simply doesn't make sense.
Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.
Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.
This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.
Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.
Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.
Blizzard
The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but Iâm not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly theyâre stellar examples of âgreed minmaxersâ but not so much of âprofitable incompetence through financial engineer takeoverâ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?
If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.
Happy days :D
We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.
BYD will dominate, not GM.
They've never been well-ran, but the laws of physics and economics put hard limits on the amount of stupid bullshit that they could produce.
Now that those limits have been largely removed, an exec at the head of a company in the post-AI age is a chimp with a machinegun.
Anything they ask for can and will be built.
And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.
The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform.
You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives.
In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
This doesn't happen anymore, it's actually relatively good at sorting bad comments to the bottom now. The current problem is it's full of wannabe LinkedIn influencers with "Building for AI agents in business in public" in their profile using LLMs to reply to everything.
As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase.
As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.
My point is that its hard to ignore just how in-tune and well-coordinated all these people are, and I don't think it's a coincidence. If CEOs were responding to actual political, economic and company developments, you'd see far more diversity of opinion. Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon. Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
There is an insatiable appetite for increasing profits. Eventually that means raising prices and/or cutting costs and the most significant cost is labor.
Game studios can only sruvive and keep excelling as long as they can maintain their culture and key talent and avoid getting finance people and accountants in charge. This is one reason why acquisitions usually mark the beginning of the end.
We're coming up on the much-ancitipcated release of GTA6. People might say that Rockstar has thus far avoided this rot but I kinda disagree. What made GTA magic for me was the social commentary and satire. I personally thought GTA5 lost its soul. Every previous GTA game I'd replay just to have fun, even if it's to do dumb stuff like causing mass pileups and explosions on the freeway in GTA:SA. I can honestly say that I never once played GTA5 again after finishing the main story and I also almost quit before I did. I have zero interest in the online crap but it's a huge cash cow for Rockstar.
So I imagine GTA6 is going to be visually stunning and I'm sure many will enjoy the new era of online gameply but I am fearful it will be even more soulless.
So, back to your point, I think the real problem is that the game devs need to own the studio. That's the only sustainable model. One could even call that the workers owning the means of production.
So, the game development industry really hasnât changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed.
Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation.
Things werenât easy and running companies had always been hard. We didnât think in terms of âemployees just collapseâ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didnât expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives.
There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didnât collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years itâs very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.
So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side.
As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.
I am personally no longer interested in the same shitty nostalgia rehash of previously garbage marvelslop and the same 15-20 actors on my screen and that has started to change because I have way more choice.
Making things previously impossible possible? That's the business I joined.
Destroying people's livelihoods without care for the consequences while pursuing monopolies, capturing the value as rent seekers, and ultimately enshittifying entire industries?
Yeah, no, I know I didn't sign up for that, thanks.
And if you're thinking "wait that's not AI". Yes. That's precisely what these companies are trying to do.
It's a part of the culture. You can say that isn't what you signed up for, but I find it hard to believe that you don't know it's part of the culture you're participating in, which is the "we" here.
Because if this a case of "well you use a computer so you're part of the system, man" then I probably won't waste my time. Cynical fatalism usually involves moving goalposts IME.
Some of the most meaningful and engrossing gaming experiences of my life have come from 1-3 person teams, especially over the past few years. Meanwhile, the vast majority of AAA titles just feel like time-filling entertainment chow to me: fun-shaped but ultimately pointless. I would strongly argue that artistry and auterism is nearly impossible to preserve beyond a certain game size; the experience can't be focused by definition.
In any case, many of the most talented indie game devs are rejecting this technology outright.
The current use of AI for LLMs is a lot closer to the original intent that the "AI" in games ever was. It wasn't hijacked. It was retaken.
I haven't been able to use it for more than events since the tokens per second aren't high enough - I would like to use the models to e.g. generate actions for characters based on their history of interactions with other characters, but that ends up taking so much time that the player never gets any events.
I also did a demo of an LLM-powered NPC, I think the issue here is that you need more than just the LLM in e.g. a 3D RPG where you can actually go up and talk to the character. You can generate the text, but from there you also need to generate speech, from that you need to dynamically generate realistic facial and body animations that match up with it - this means you need 3 or 4 models chained together in a pipeline.
There is probably some limited utility for using ML in games, lifelike multiplayer bots trained on behaviour of different types of players.
I think in most scenarios good gameplay comes from iteration which comes from tweak-ability, you see players get stuck in area x so you do a minor or major adjustment to area layout, enemy composition, or give the players more tools. If something is controlled by an LLM it becomes unpredictable and hard to reason about for both player and designer, and consequently also hard to adjust.
I think it is possible there is some role for LLM's in games, like how Left 4 Dead had an AI (this is classic AI not ML) director who would decide how to structure enemy waves and for example send a boss after a player who strays too far from the rest. But even there rules based AI is probably easier to adjust for the designer.
Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer.
There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.
The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville/ [2] https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/
There have been a number of games that have tried AI conversations, but you're basically trying to sell a Chat GPT prompt, and many players are aware they don't have to pay you to get a similar result on their own.
> While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper
And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says:
> It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right
Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY.
Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as bad as they've ever been.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4...
edit: Tarn Adams is also an indie game developer, not a game journalist. Dwarf Fortress is highly influential in the indie game scene.
https://www.matthewball.co/all/presentation-the-state-of-vid...
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
Is AI the reason? I somehow doubt that AI caused the revenue to stall in 2021. In 2021 AI could not even draw hands, least write decent code. What we had around that period was a lot of M&A in the industry. Insane capital went into buying up game studios and even publishers like Zenimax and Activision. Embracer alone acquired ~200 studios in 2019-2022. If I wanted to know why the industry is fucked up now I'd be looking there, not at the AI.
Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else.
I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.
this is happening across all industries
(Spoiler: more than youâre comfortable with, yes they will)
It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.
The result was not regulated gambling but extermination of cash out options (well, and sometimes very obvious illegal gambling houses).
Any why always call critics "frustrated" in order to depict them as weak and spiteful? Isn't the Dwarf Fortress guy independent anyway?
An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
100% not. To equate fun to play to people buying the game is 100% not how you should say making more money is more people buying the game. Money is money. If the game is mediocre but it is fun enough, it can get more money than a game that is more fun but doesn't have as many opportunities to spend.
This is why things like dark patterns exist that try to get you to spend money through FOMO and other mechanisms like loot boxes.
You can argue that all of these things are people having "fun," but I wouldn't define that as fun to play.
Finally, none of these necessitate people buying the game, but rather spending money in the game. Usually, it's free games where people buy a secondary currency to spend on virtual items. Mobile apps, for example, are huge with this.
So the real answer to your question on multiple grounds is no.
Edit: Now, I will give you that people do have to make a choice, but that's like saying that gambling addiction is not real and it's a choice, or drug addiction is real and it's a choice. The reason for alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous is bogus because it's just a choice, but it would be dangerous to classify it as just a choice.
This is part of the reason why we see endless games as a service despite 90% of them failing. Teams have to do the bidding of the rich, but the rich don't know what's 'fun'.
If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor?
The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
>Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand.
I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.
There will just be a lot more workers competing for those blue collar and service industry jobs in the future which will drive down their wages.
The day AI goes good enough to work in place of a principal engineer, and 10.000 people get fired, is the day when 10.000 new 1-person companies will appear that will make you whatever software you want at a fraction of the cost the big companies want to rent it to you.
Software is becoming a true commodity. Data, Hardware, specialised knowledge, good taste and engineering practices, and connectivity. Those might be key points that might keep people on a certain infrastructure, not just the software.
Back when everyone was a farmer, yeah sure everyone understood the job
Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
The premise that the only thing holding it back is not using an AI seems far fetched. How much game code have you looked at? If it shipped, chances are it's a goddamn mess. People made memes about Undertale's thousand-line switch statement. But it isn't the code quality that makes a game (unless it breaks, if it works literally no one cares) but the design and intent behind it. Using an AI wouldn't result in anything as unique or as innovative as Dwarf Fortress. It would just get something forgettable and mediocre to market faster.
> Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.
Well, that is an assumption. You have to demonstrate this claim. Right now I do not believe that claim.
"in shambles because of AI" no. It's the same as it always was.