r/gaming • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 PC • 9h ago
Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dwarf-fortress-creator-says-the-industrys-in-shambles-over-ai-and-layoff-happy-ceos-everyone-i-know-their-bosses-are-slowly-getting-psychosis/1.2k
u/Urist_Macnme 9h ago edited 8h ago
Tarn is a GOAT
He slaved away for years just making the game that he wanted to make, never expecting to make “all the money”. And through sheer persistence and dedication, he’s made millions, and had a huge influence on the entire gaming landscape.
Without him, there would be no Minecraft.
I regularly made donations to Dwarf Fortress, even when it was a free game; because it was the game I wanted him to make too.
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u/Kenshirosan 8h ago
Dude survived off donations and selling crayon drawings of DF creatures to supporters and let me tell you I bought the steam version minute one, because if anyone willing to do that for 25 years doesn't deserve support, I'm not sure who does.
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u/Urist_Macnme 8h ago
I am the proud owner of one of said Crayon Drawings. It’s one of my most prized possessions.
You have no idea how happy a crayon drawing of a pink dinosaur (one of my most memorable Forgotten Beasts) makes me.
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u/Longjumping_Pen_2102 7h ago
And this to me is the biggest argument for why AI art isnt art.
You care more about a fairly bad crayon drawing than you ever will about an AI image because if the relationship between art and artist.
The whole point of art is that its an expression of something.
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u/Handsome_ketchup 1h ago
You care more about a fairly bad crayon drawing than you ever will about an AI image because if the relationship between art and artist.
Someone I know is into arts and crafts, and refuses to hear that what they consider to be their "worst" works are actually the best. Why? Because the good ones are nice but somewhat generic, and the "bad" ones are full of personality and charm. They capture your eye and invite you on a journey.
Art is not just technical competence, it's about the story it tells you. The technical side may or may not support the telling of that story. Some of the best games are pretty disastrously made, but that's not the point, and at times can even enhance the charm.
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u/Saint_of_Grey 1h ago
And this to me is the biggest argument for why AI art isnt art.
I've always considered it bootlegging. You get the visuals without any of the other things behind them, it just ain't legit.
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u/Kenshirosan 7h ago
Many a late night hour was spent staring at ASCII and I'm very happy for them finding success.
My favorite forgotten beast is was this like giant naked mole rat looking one that I kept locked in the lowest part of the caves that single handedly killed like 6 other FBs and also one incredibly unlucky cave raiding event that spawned on the border of the map it shared with the monster.
Made for good entertainment though.
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u/GrimDallows 4h ago
My favourite forgotten beast was one made of water, who poped like a bubble on the way to my fortress by one random bee.
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u/Kenshirosan 4h ago
Did the bee get a tomb worthy of a slayer of ancient terrors?
At the very least I would demand a stone carving of a bee laughing at the forgotten beast.
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u/GrimDallows 2h ago edited 1h ago
Sadly, no, my fortress was a mess back then. A guy in a strange mood killed a ghost and then bricked and went insane. Things got downhill from there pretty fast.
EDIT:
The explanation of the bug:
Dwarves can enter a "trance" state where they gather materials and create a treasure randomly. If they fail to gather the materials to craft their work of art then they go insane but if they do it is a priceless artifact.
There are multiple types of "strange" moods. Fey and Secretive moods just make your dwarf make a thing (Secretive means he hides what he is making). Possessed means a ghost took over him, and the dwarf will not recall anything he did. A Macabre mood uses bones, etc to make art.
A -Fell- mood happens only in stressed dwarves. They will kill a citizen and use their body to craft something, then move on with their lives.
In my case a dwarf got a Fell mood, and he locked into a ghost that was passing by and killed him. Dead ghosts leave no corpses, so the Fell mood dwarf couldn't craft anything, nor kill another guy, and slowly went insane and then picked up an axe and started killing people.
This was all very weird, as the dead "Ghost of Urist McBooze" then spawned a "Ghost of the Ghost of Urist McBooze". I then buried the corpse of Urist McBooze, who had drowned in a river, to put it to rest. However as the "Corpse of Urist McBooze" was not the "Corpse of the Ghost of Urist McBooze", I couldn't bury him to put the squared ghost to rest and it kept haunting my fortress.
Things kind of spiraled downwards from there.
For the record, if this happens to you and lack a corpse, you can do a wireless exorcism by just setting up a tombstone with it's name. But make sure it is to the name of the murdered GHOST not the old living guy.
Not the weirdest thing that has happened to me in Dwarf Fortress, but it ranks up in the list. Probably second.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2h ago edited 1h ago
My very first encounter with a megabeast; a wandering plains titan in the form of a Giant RibbonWorm made of Water. My woodcutter was at the map edge where it spawned. One swipe in the combat log, and it disappeared . I was very confused at first, till I noticed the puddle of water where it died.
I then felt guilty at having slaughtered such a wondrous creature from the time before time.
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u/MarkdownUpdog 6h ago
I I am the proud owner of one of said Crayon Drawings.
I hope it's of the highest craftsdwarfship?
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u/a404notfound 5h ago
I have one as well, framed above my monitor. "This is a masterwork crayon drawing of two dwarves. The dwarves are playing chess. The The art menaces with spikes of gems."
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u/InvadingEngland 8h ago
I could never quite get into DF but I loved the stories and the programming. I purchased day 1 because it's brought me loads of entertainment over the years even if I only put in 20-odd hours of play time. Fascinating game, good people, why wouldn't you support what they're doing?
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u/Wise-Dust3700 7h ago
Same, as soon as it hit steam I bought it. So many hours spent in that lovely game. Owe the devs a pint too if they ever come to Ireland :)
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u/SomeDumbDoggo 5h ago
same. the OG version was always a bit too intimidating for me to pick up but i lived vicariously through the stories others shared online back in the day. was a day one purchase when it hit steam and i've sunk close to a thousand hours into it and enjoyed every one of them. can't think i can say that about any other game
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u/trib_ 8h ago
Tarn absolutely is the GOAT and deserves all the praise along with Zach, but in regards to the money they got for the Steam release, in the grand scheme of things it wasn't that much.
As Tarn pointed out, even though they did make millions with the Steam release, "when you divide that by 20 [years], you're kind of back down into normal tech salary range. Which is still pretty high, obviously."
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u/Urist_Macnme 8h ago
Yeah. But he’s doing what he loves, and there’s no sign of him stopping.
I’ve been playing since 2008, and still play it. And every time I play, I see something new I’ve never seen before.
When the steam release came around, I bought myself and three friends a copy; just to evangelise the game.
I’ve actually spent more on Dwarf Fortress than any other game: and that’s with no DLC or Microtransactions; just because I love the game so much.He deserves all the success.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 8h ago
How did they get by in those twenty years? Wasn't the game bringing in some kind of income then as well?
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u/Urist_Macnme 8h ago
It was a free game (and the basic ascii version is still free).
They survived purely from donations from players.23
u/LakyousSama 7h ago
And they only started a donation page some years later after Zach got sick and they needed money for treatment. They were doing it for nothing before that.
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u/geeiamback 7h ago
According to this interview from 2010 they've been taking donations since release in 2006:
PC Gamer: You rely on donations from the community to fund ongoing development. When did you reach the tipping point where you knew you could do that? How did that feel?
Tarn Adams: It was the summer after the first year of my math postdoc in 2006 when I decided I needed to focus on DF full-time, but we didn't really have hope for donations at that time. DF hadn't even been released yet. I was just thinking I'd burn off my savings for a year and then get a job. When the game was released in August, we were making around a thousand dollars a month, and that was enough to build some hope, and the average kept going up. There wasn't really a tipping point... or if there is, I still don't feel like I've reached it. This year has been good so far, but there was the unusual 19-month delayed release in April which led to a large bump. Now we're stabilizing back down around treading water again. It's good though, since I'm able to work on the game full-time as it stands, and that's satisfying.
https://www.pcgamer.com/community-heroes-tarn-adams-for-dwarf-fortress/
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u/trib_ 8h ago
Donations from players. They posted monthly totals of their income up until the Steam release. This is the last one where it includes the income from the launch, you can go back however long you wish to look at their income in the forum
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u/justly_silver 7h ago
His independence is why he can speak so openly about this stuff. No board of directors or shareholders breathing down his neck demanding line-go-up quarterly reports.
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u/Urist_Macnme 7h ago
Well, there is Kitfox, but they also have the right idea. Let these mad geniuses cook.
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u/memoriten 8h ago
He really is, and you can see the passion he has for the project. I keep donating even after the steam release.
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u/HandsomeHeathen 9h ago
Ironically, CEO is probably the one job in the tech sector where an LLM could fully replace a human. I mean, they can't do a worse job.
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u/Lambdafish1 9h ago
Unfortunately it would do exactly as it's told and calculate the path that gets the board the absolute most short term money, without taking into account product experience.
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u/Almechik 9h ago
So no change
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u/talspr 8h ago
Big change, millions saved in CEO pay
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u/Gasparde 8h ago
Considering rising token costs, probably not saving all that much money tbh.
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u/BloomerBoomerDoomer 5h ago
Even with rising costs, that CEO yearly wage of millions would definitely not be a thing anymore.
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u/RateMost4231 7h ago
You can't beat a LLM to death in front of its kids, so you can't have one run a business.
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u/Askolei 9h ago
Would we notice a difference?
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u/Pentaras1977 9h ago
Well actually, done properly, maybe. You have to feed all the Vision, Strategy, Values , Environmental Targets and other things that Companies have to express their goody good side only to ignore. If fed to the AI, it would adhere it to the last sentence. That and minus the narcissist behavior.
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u/JeveGreen 8h ago
So maybe, but probably not?
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u/Antique-Coach-214 8h ago
Depends. Tell the AI to preserve a mix of long and short term growth, and not to maximize profits at the expense of long term existence.
That nets to a far different scenario than a majority of companies now.
You’d see a lot of people fired preemptively based on possible legal violations as well
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u/cross_the_threshold 8h ago
They'd do a far better job, CEOs are basically a shitty LLM at this point with the overriding instructions of "fuck everyone beneath me."
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u/DisillusionedHobbit 8h ago
No, because the prompts would be written by idiot C-levels seeking validation for whatever dumbass schemes their cocaine habit dreamt up.
See: the publisher trying to screw the Subnautica devs out of their bonus
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u/FlamingWeasel 8h ago
What's really funny there to me is he tried to get chatgpt to find a reason to not pay and even it was like, nah you gotta pay. What a dumbass.
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u/ErikT738 9h ago edited 9h ago
A computer might not gamble they'll be the company whose live service game is actually successful.
Edit - I asked an LLM and it basically told me to make Helldivers 2 without naming Helldivers 2.
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u/frequenZphaZe 6h ago
A computer might not gamble they'll be the company whose live service game is actually successful.
maybe not in the first response. LLMs aren't strongly opinionated, so the prompt can just keep asking "but wouldn't a live service gamble be better?" and after two or three turns, the LLM will just say "Yeah, you're right. Let's try a live service gamble. That seems like the correct approach"
LLMs aren't truth machines. they aren't search engines. they're platitude generators. they just need a couple tries to figure out what you actually wanna hear
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u/PrimalZed 8h ago
LLMs don't calculate. It would bullshit something that looks maybe plausible.
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u/amurica1138 8h ago
Yeah, but can an LLM golf with the other LLMs running the other multi-nationals?
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u/Lupushonora 8h ago
As well as what has already been said, IIRC a big part of the CEO role is accountablility, to be the fall guy when the company messes up big time. They take all the blame, get fired with a cushy exit package and then get replaced by the real decision makers, the board of directors.
An AI can't be reliably be held accountable, so eventually responsibility could potentially fall on the people who put it in place, defeating the point of having someone to publicly take responsibility for most of the companies decisions.
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u/Ok_Cardiologist_3675 7h ago
I’ve had good and bad CEOs. A good ceo you never hear about at the grunt level unless they’re getting the company additional business. Which unfortunately an AI can’t attend parties and get drunk with other CEOs to get deals signed.
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u/errorsniper 3h ago
I mean I get what you are saying. But an LLM ordering 13 trillion bolts after liquidating the companies stock holdings breaking countless laws and not paying any taxes on the proceeds because someone asked what it means to "bolt home?" would be worse.
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u/JerryOne111 9h ago
Sadly, CEO are mostly just for the networking they have to reach the unreachable. LLM aint gonna make other CEO able to pickup their phone the moment they saw the phone number.
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u/Pale-Try-4802 9h ago
2 LLM ceo's would, though.
Faster, more efficient and without expensive "networking" golf trips.
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u/Khaldara 8h ago
“Sir the LLM has somehow begun to sexually harass applications that are still in beta.”
‘Finally they’re indistinguishable from human leadership!’
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u/Monte924 7h ago
"We just got an HR complaint about the LLM sending explicit texts to the secretary"
"Didn't we replace the secretary with an Ai"
"Yes..."
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u/rzenni 9h ago
I mean, half the customer service I deal with is bots at this point
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u/BrotherRoga 9h ago
And the rest are underpaid, overworked and can't even access the required places to actually do what you ask because the systems are from the 1950s.
If the customers saw what their customer service locations are like, every location would close within the week. The proverbial sausage is made in a putrid place indeed.
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u/FirstSurvivor 8h ago
There is zero chance of ego, nepotism or favoritism
Aren't LLMs notorious for having the exact same biases as the training data, and recruitment LLM firms being sued for discrimination exactly because that that?
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u/Badbullet 8h ago
They need to train from the employee handbook and the 3 hour long discrimination and sexual harassment videos I had to watch last month.
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u/Mknalsheen 8h ago
If boards weren't also bestie with CEOs and getting kickbacks/favors from them, this might be true.
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u/yoberf 8h ago
They’ll use evidence-based best practices instead of gut instincts in every decision
You mean the technology that is frequently confidently wrong about easy to look up facts will definitely be reliable in picking best practices? Ok buddy.
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u/GoblinToHobgoblin 6h ago
When you realize that the CEOs job is to get as much money as possible in the short term, you realize that they are actually quite competent most of the time unfortunately
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u/Kuunkulta 9h ago
Did my internship at a mobile gaming non-profit, my boss came from theatre background and she just went head-first into the ChatGPT slop bucket over last winter. Art direction was changed to look like slop even when it was actual artists making it. Everything just started being slop-like... I was in production so I was working with on almost daily basis. In retrospect wish I'd gotten a gig doing anything else, data-analysis or something but the job market even for internships has just gone belly up..
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u/Magmaul 9h ago
A non-profit in a market saturated with heavily monetised games? That just screams like some sort of scam.
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u/Kuunkulta 9h ago
It was aimed to be an education tool for grade schools based on a dead kid's idea using interns and volunteers as the work force. It was barely functional and I don't really know whether the programmers were getting beneficial or detrimental experience. I spent most of the time just trying to organise shit better and writing manuals and directing others.
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u/Kuunkulta 8h ago
And let me just went a little because the game was about emotions, but my boss was adamant that it was 100% about art. All the content was about emotions and trauma and emotional skills. But no it was about art, don't anyone anywhere in the material say it's about emotions. Like what? It was not a well managed project and I mean I guess realising that and learning to deal with it is the kind of skills you do need in a real job, but boy was I tired every day from dealing with it so closely
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u/BillTheBeastBSS 8h ago
Yeah that project is an effing mess from the vision and direction point of view. (I'm the "lead UI programmer") And every time the lead start to talk about training the AI for the art I just tune out completely.
Thankfully I'm on the programming side of the project and can't mostly just ignore the slop creation process itself. But if it was me I would return the project a lot closer to the design that was there when I started cause the extra completely unnecessary baggage the lead decides to add to it is just so effing tiring. I'll do what was asked cause often adding some weird system into place is still an learning experience.
But there have been times where I have thought if I should just grab some of the coders and artists and just try to start a separate project cause this is effectively just spinning it's wheels.25
u/Kuunkulta 7h ago
Ahaha hello there! I always perked up in the meetings to hear you argue back 😄 It was refreshing to hear from someone who does know what they're doing. If you do decide to start a project let me know if you need someone to come up with ideas and manage the boring stuff programmers hate.
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u/Nick_Gaugh_69 PC 7h ago
> using interns and volunteers as the work force
Yikes. That screams “no labor costs” to me. All it takes is one business decision, and they can use all that dead-kid goodwill to make a pretty penny.
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u/Kuunkulta 7h ago
Non-profit so at least no one's getting rich off of it
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u/the_web_dev 5h ago
Nonprofits can pay executives whatever they want, so the leader of a well capitalized nonprofit makes bank.
Then theyre also networking hella as the “CEO” so they get loads of opportunities after even if the project crashes out and theyre totally incompetent. Theyre still “former CEO” and know how to mask the failure.
Did this CEO have any experience in game dev before raising the money and soaking up years of volunteer time and donations?
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u/BillTheBeastBSS 4h ago edited 3h ago
At least in this particular case the "project lead" is just a naive idealist who very obviously believes that she is doing something good but has no proper idea on how to make it happen.
And is also against taking investors because "they would cause the project to lose it's identity due to interference".
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u/Pale-Try-4802 9h ago
data-analysis
I got bad news for you there.
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u/Kuunkulta 9h ago
Yeah I'm 100% sure it's all AI now but at least it's not called art
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u/24_August_1814 7h ago
"They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."
I mean, that's pretty much the entirety of late stage capitalism in general. Pay as few workers as possible as little as possible, while relying on everyone else paying their employees enough to afford your shit.
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u/DurgeDidNothingWrong 6h ago
In the end, the only people who people will buy from is the food company, the water company, and the landlord.
And it just so happens they're all the same person, and also your employer!You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go,
I owe my soul to the company store13
u/scoobyjoo 3h ago
I was born one mornin when the sun didn’t shine.
Picked up my shovel and i walked to the mine.
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u/Scoobydewdoo 8h ago
It's the businessification of the video game industry. Instead of people who know what they are doing more and more video games studios are being run by business people who only know how to manipulate markets. They're great when things are going well but if a game doesn't sell as well as expected these business CEO's don't understand how to right the ship, they only know cost cutting. AI is just their excuse for incompetency.
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u/PurpleV93 9h ago
The entire world is in psychosis. Everyone is turning off their brains, people use AI shit to generate their own reddit posts for them. It's insanity in full display. Meanwhile, our planetary ecosystem is falling apart, but nobody cares enough.
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u/PsyOpBunnyHop 9h ago
Plenty of people care. It's just that they have so little power on their own.
The people in a position to do any good are only in that position because they were seeking power so they could exploit it.
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u/Aware-Individual-827 7h ago
It's why social media is the bane of society. Getting together is what makes power and social media isolate one from another.
The change we want are only achievable if we pool together our means. United we stand, divised we fall.
(Ok it looks like seizing the means of production after writing it, but the essence remains true).
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u/ronarscorruption 8h ago
Exactly. 1% of people have 90% of the power. It almost doesn’t matter what the other 99% think except in how we affect those 1%
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u/Arclite83 7h ago
We have issues as a species with "scale". About every 3 zeroes (x1000) is a new "universe". You live at 2m, an ant lives at 2mm, etc, up or down.
In money, that means beyond especially a million (x2) we are bad at appreciating a billion or a trillion. At this point you aren't a "citizen" if you don't have 5M, you're the great unwashed. There are 26M millionaires in the US - and they're not above the water line on this.
It's not the 1%, or even the 0.1%. And they don't control 90%, or even 99%. The degree at which we've exceeded "unfair/biased" is such that it was already "bad" half a century ago. Today it's just broken. The shell companies have shell companies. The Panama Papers did NOTHING to stop or even slow that kind of global money laundering. We like to rail on Citizens United here, but the money going INTO those PACs is also from these same sources.
It has fundamentally changed global politics. Corporations are world powers. Individuals are world powers. Countries that curtail that do so through oppression/ideology, but a good portion let the Musks and Bezos and Rockefellers and IOCs of the world rise and fall. It's why regulations need to sit over capitalism or you get private islands and "human rights optional" spaces (where's Shelly Miscavige? Ask Milan Kundera).
The US has been starving that particular beast for a long time now, deregulating, etc - mostly in the name of "don't look up" survivalism at the end of Pax Americana, so it's not like any one person or President COULD solve these things. It's holding patterns, reinvestment, Calvinball government to keep the plates spinning. We won't starve or run out of TP. But not much can stop this new Gilded Age, especially now with AI as it is.
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u/Rejusu 6h ago
Yup. This is so true of many things but money especially because it's much more abstract than size. People don't even have to be that poor, you can be making good money and still have zero appreciation for what being a billionaire means. I've almost given up pointing this out to people who think the money Rowling gets from various Harry Potter projects actually matters. To them it's still funding transphobia despite the fact Harry Potter could disappear off the face of the earth and she'd still be so rich that she could fund her campaign of hate until she dies and it wouldn't scratch the surface of her wealth.
I can respect avoiding it because of how you feel on the subject but anyone who thinks it makes a practical difference just can't appreciate scale.
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u/ProxyMuncher 7h ago
Every day my horrible superiority complex about not using AI in any way shape or form is validated.
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u/Dairunt 6h ago
I'm doing an AI course for work and it feels like joining a cult. They quote Altman word for word, and the guy says AI can be your lawyer, your accountant, your therapist and you will stay behind if you don't comply and hook your data and accounts to Gemini.
The AI space reeks of snake oil and it's making me feel disengaged on my career. (Software developer). Seeing slop everywhere it's making me numb at this point.
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u/soshibemuchwow 9h ago
not just the gaming industry...
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u/NightSpaghetti 7h ago
I don't know if it's just me but the wind is turning really fast on LinkedIn. 6 months ago no one dared utter a word against AI in fear of being left behind. Now all I see is posts about how everyone is dead tired of AI and the workflows that go with it.
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u/TheOnesWhoFollow 9h ago
It's going to cripple the industry. You are going to have devs and staff tired of the rat race and move to other more stable careers leaving a void in the industry. I think this is when we will see one person or very small dev teams thrive. My only concern with that will be that quite a few indie devs over promise which can sink a project rather quickly.
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u/ProtonDream 8h ago edited 8h ago
Another concern is the second an indie developer releases something successful, it's gobbled up by dozens of ai's and converted in a stream of shovelware.
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u/DrAstralis 6h ago edited 1h ago
Omg this plague being set on the friend slop genre is maddening.. these are small studios trying to make a name and developing simple but "fun with friends" games. Its only unique for a few hours but its fun... then a week later come the 100 clones all trying to fit into this same tiny niche...
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u/chiagod 5h ago
We can see that already in youtube. Look at all the copycat AI slop history channels.
Some are pumping out a video full of innacuracies and shit everyday whereas a good creator may take weeks to put out a single well researched and illustrated video.
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u/Pale-Try-4802 8h ago
I'm an animator and I'm really fucking tired of the rat race.
I worked for Epic, I've worked in Mobile and in AA.
The absolute best place I worked was the AA studio, enough funds to not always worry, not so much AAA corpo bullshit and not so much scummy mobile bullshit.
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u/CyberSmith31337 7h ago
I also preferred the III/AA space when I worked in games.
True indie is just filled with con artists. Cheats, liars, and scammers who promise the moon but deliver nothing. Reddit portrays indie like it is some haven, but I have never seen more shitbags, but specifically unethical/immoral shitbags, than I did in true indie.
And let’s not even talk about Kickstarter projects. Might as well come with the label ”I’m going to fuck over my employees and my backers and steal from the company’s treasury!” tattoo’d on their forehead like a fucking Scarlet letter. A gigantic green “S” for shitbag.
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u/Peon-Hyjal 6h ago
Can't really blame Reddit, they only see indie from the success, not the failures.
It's kind of like how if you ask a Redditor what a gym is like, they'll tell you there's a bunch of influencers recording themselves everywhere.
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u/lavapig_love 5h ago
I helped write for an indie game about Hawai'i.
The dev team approached a whole lot of publishers, and they all turned them down because "nobody wants a game about Hawai'i". Except I'm Kanaka 'Oiwi. Do I want a game about my family and my history? YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT.
Did it do well? No. Did the people who played it love the concept? Yes. Did it introduce people who were unlikely to ever visit the islands, to a culture they were learning for the first time? Yes.
I'm proud I helped make it. If I want to pay bills, I can do something else.
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u/s8rlink 8h ago
What stable career? Does anyone millennial and bellow know what these worded mean?
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u/TheOnesWhoFollow 7h ago
I mean I have one in truck driving. The computer parts and dildos must be delivered. On time, every time.
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u/DelusionsOfExistence 7h ago
Developer here: The stable transfer positions are also being absorbed by AI. The most stable now is hope you have enough money and connections to be the shackleholder for the agents and not one of the unemployed.
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u/TheOnesWhoFollow 7h ago
It terrible everywhere but you guys are just getting slammed. I haven't seen the job market this bad since the 2008 financial crisis. Even friends who work in the call center industry are getting layoffs and that is one of the few industries that doesn't layoff around here.
With the game space in particular there is absolutely no way to build a stable life around it. People don't understand it isn't just you who suffers when you get a layoff, it is everywhere you spend your money as well.
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u/Owensey 8h ago
Maybe we're headed for a second video game crash? Last time it happened due to market saturation and waning interest. This time people aren't going to be able to afford the consoles to even run the latest games, and with AI slop taking over the market is just gonna get even more saturated. We're already seeing signs with the saturation of the extraction shooter genre, or even the battle royale genre.
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u/Krazyguy75 7h ago
Unlikely. What caused the crash was a lack of filtration. Good games and bad games were both being made, but there was no easy way to tell which were which.
Nowadays every site has review sections.
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u/TheOnesWhoFollow 7h ago
I think that's where we are headed, and I don't think it's going to be the same as the last one either. I suspect it's going to come down first to a lack of talent, second to the insane prices in the gaming space, and third the ever decreasing quality of games.
I have been gaming since the early 90s and it's been a steady decline since PS3 and 360. It's just everywhere now. Between console companies gouging for hardware and switching to digital, microtransactions in everything, day one DLC, games being released in a "good enough" state, and the ever increasing costs with the games themselves it's just bleak. I have switched how I purchase games now myself. If it isn't on sale I don't buy it now.
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u/The_Legend_of_Xeno 7h ago
Not in game dev but our big boss is completely clueless. Has no idea what he is doing and is just completely faking his job, and it's so bad it's super noticeable. They even hired an "Executive Coach" to come in and teach him how to do his job. He tried to frame it as the upper management is so impressed with him they are investing these resources (like a job coach) into him.
So naturally when AI took off, he latched onto it hardcore. All he ever talks about is AI. When we have our big department wide meetings, he asks everyone to please unmute and share their most recent AI use case. Nobody ever has anything to share. One time he himself shared that he asked Claude to analyze his son's grocery receipts to figure out where most of his grocery money was going. He said Claude churned for a few hours and couldn't do it, and just used up all his credits. What fantastic tech.
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u/GracefulFaller 6h ago
How stupid is your boss? How can he botch using Claude that hard?
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u/The_Legend_of_Xeno 6h ago
I'm not joking when I say he is completely clueless. He wasted like $8K of our funds on a Surface Hub for his office because he saw someone else had one and he thought it was cool. I had to set it up for him, and I told him that the side of his office where he wanted it didn't have a power outlet, so we'd have to have one put in. He said, "Well, it can still run on battery, right?" It's a 50" TV with a computer built into it. And he thought it ran on battery. They eventually ran power for him, and he used it maybe twice. It hasn't been used in years.
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u/st_heron 6h ago
Jesus christ I don't understand how these people get into leadership positions. Is it all just the sweet talking of charisma?
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u/enigmanaught 7h ago
I don’t think every game needs to be a labor of love but a couple of guys (at least initially) working on a game they want to see has turned out some pretty good games. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, the aforementioned Dwarf Fortress, etc.
I know No Man’s Sky has a large team, but the guy at the top has been pushing incremental improvements for the last 10 years with no loot boxes or pay to play. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s no surprise they have such a loyal following.
Most businesses (gaming and otherwise) have moved towards the “only the next quarter is important” and AI fits perfectly into that strategy. Infinite growth isn’t sustainable.
The Simpsons said it over 20 years ago:
Bart: “bubbles can burst!?”
Repo Man: “yeah, but it’s a golden age for the repo business, an age that will never end…”
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u/TheComplimentarian 7h ago
It's just Dunning-Kruger. The bosses don't understand the work. Because they don't understand the work, they think AI is a magic bullet that's going to solve all their problems. They fire people and go all in on AI...And now they're realizing they still have problems.
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u/Strange_Dust7128 6h ago
I hope video gaming is on a trajectory to be small and niche again.
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u/Phuka 5h ago
The people getting laid off have the skills, not the parasite CEOs or the investor class. We should be laying off middle and upper management.
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u/JeanLucPicardAND 6h ago
This is hardly limited to gaming. There is zero plan to deal with AI in any industry. They're just going to fire everybody and then be amazed when none of their customers can afford to buy their shit anymore.
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u/ERedfieldh 4h ago
not just gaming. it's every industry. if it doesn't see massive push back now...like RIGHT NOW...expect layoffs the like you never dream possible in the next five years followed by the collapse of nearly every industry as they can no longer make money as they fired all the people who could buy their shit LLM produced products.
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u/Locke03 4h ago
There is a huge pushback. People all over, across the political spectrum, are up in arms over AI datacenters being forced down the throat of every community that has a few dozen acres of open land and political leadership that will take AI industry bribes in exchange for tax incentives. The problem is that the powers that be have decided that AI datacenters are the most important thing in the universe, they will be built, and the technology will be integrated into everything possible come hell or high water and we are functionally at the point where public protest and polite civil action have reached the limits of their effectiveness.
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u/Sodacan259 5h ago
And in 10 years time, who is going to play the games if nobody outside of the 1% has a functioning computer because AI hoovered up all of the parts?
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u/thumbstickz 2h ago
Literally what drove me out of my industry I spent a decade in. I've landed in higher education running operations for a student union and I couldn't be happier.
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u/S1DC 6h ago
This is because C-Suite culture is totally separate from the culture of the producers in each industry. Making games or otherwise, the C-Suite is there to manage assets and make money. When new "ways to make money" are introduced, especially ones purported to be a panacea like AI, if they aren't weaving the new buzzword into their lexicon they seem outdated within the C-Suite zeitgeist.
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u/TheOneWithALongName Boardgames 3h ago
What I don't understand is why the AI haven't taken over the CEOs job. It should be the easiest task to replace.
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u/Number1BestYogurtBoi 9h ago
Capitalism is a broken system
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u/Lappora 7h ago
Every system eventually gets exploited to death by greedy humans.
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u/doublethink_1984 6h ago
Under what system then should game development exist under?
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u/MeowManMeow 9h ago
It was necessary to transition from agrarian to technological as a species. But it had been hanging around for about 80 years longer than needed. We have the CIA to thank for that.
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u/Cesspoolofhumanity69 1h ago
I have read multiple reports from mutiple outlets and whistleblower accounts that tech CEOs are ALL suffering from AI psychosis at one level or another because they’re absolute suckers for exactly the type of ego stroking sycophancy.
And so all the shit they’re doing.. all the mass expansion of data centers… direct result of consulting their hallucinating oracles.
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u/real_fake_cats 9h ago
Feels more like a sprint