r/gaming • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 PC • 10h 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/
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655

u/Kuunkulta 10h 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..

416

u/Magmaul 10h ago

A non-profit in a market saturated with heavily monetised games? That just screams like some sort of scam.

250

u/Kuunkulta 10h 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/DangoC 9h ago

nobody in the team ever stood up and said "we are peeing in the grave of a dead kid"?

52

u/Kuunkulta 9h ago

Nope but it did start to feel like that

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u/Kuunkulta 10h 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

36

u/BillTheBeastBSS 9h 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.

24

u/Kuunkulta 8h 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.

9

u/Railboy 8h ago

I gotta know what this project is.

32

u/Fedoraus 8h ago

Star Citizen

10

u/animedeathspiral 8h ago

The aristocrats!

1

u/Irregular_Person 1h ago

maybe "ALT Zone"

16

u/Nick_Gaugh_69 PC 8h 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.

8

u/Kuunkulta 8h ago

Non-profit so at least no one's getting rich off of it

14

u/the_web_dev 6h 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?

4

u/BillTheBeastBSS 5h ago edited 5h 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".
Heck the project likely would be basically dead already if I wasn't there to force it forward.

1

u/the_web_dev 5h ago

Thats rough. But its good experience - protect your sanity, be applying to other roles in better working environments, keep your skills sharp while everyone goes crazy with the AI nonsense

2

u/Uebelkraehe 4h ago

I work for a non-profit and there are definitely people getting rich of it. Feels like an ATM for upper management.

1

u/Nick_Gaugh_69 PC 7h ago

For now, at least.

1

u/Sorlex 4h ago

Education and AI, a deadly combo.

7

u/pleasetrimyourpubes 8h ago

Have you never worked for an NGO?

3

u/dodrugzwitthugz 5h ago

Non-profit is a taxing status, not a business model.

1

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 3h ago edited 3h ago

Maybe you don't understand what a non-profit means? A non-profit has nothing to do with video game monetization.

For-profit companies give the profits to the owners. Non-profit companies can't give profits to the owners and instead have to use the profits to invest back into the companies operations, or save them as reserves like a rainy day fund, or spend the profits on charitable reasons like donating to charities or spending it in some way that aligns with the nonprofit's mission.

Nonprofits don't have owners. They can't. Instead, they are required to have a board of directors whose job it is to make sure the nonprofit is using their profits in the way they required by the IRS. One of the benefits of being a nonprofit is that you get tax breaks from the IRS, but there are also big disadvantages such as not being allowed to have owners mean it is way harder to get funding since you can't rely on things like venture capitalists or the stock market.

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u/Pale-Try-4802 10h ago

data-analysis

I got bad news for you there.

29

u/Kuunkulta 10h ago

Yeah I'm 100% sure it's all AI now but at least it's not called art

-16

u/momojabada 9h ago

Hentai is sometimes called art you know

25

u/Kuunkulta 9h ago

Well it is art

12

u/WantToSeeTits4545 9h ago

It is art. It's used to express eroticism, sexual tension and explore taboos, just like non-sexual art expresses different feeling and emotions. Pornography is always art, as long as there's acting involved, and not just people filmed with hidden cameras (which is illegal anyway).

2

u/makesufeelgood 4h ago

Disagree, I'm a data engineer that supports a bunch of analysts and the people that know how to model data and think through and set up sophisticated data analyses are miles ahead of the folks who immediately turn to an LLM and churn out some slop. Some of it is barely functional and a lot of it is wrong.

The 'data field was killed by AI' sentiment is some weird parroted messaging from people who have no idea what is actually happening in reality or just want to farm upvotes

1

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 3h ago

I'm a data analyst and if someone is failing to get something like Claude Code to create data visualizations faster than a human can do manually then that person using Claude Code is bad at using Claude Code. Legit skill issue. It produces great results and not "slop" if you prompt it well. I always can see in mind exactly what I want the final data visualization or data reporting to look like, so it's mostly trivial to prompt Claude Code to generate what I want. I know I'm done when the output matches what I had in my mind.

There's just no way that the vast vast majority of data analysts can't greatly benefit from using some agentic AI tool like Claude Code. Typing python or JavaScript (d3js) by hand is just way slower even if your starting point is copy and pasting code you used before.

1

u/Sharpshooter_200 2h ago

You don't want AI to be handling people's data, trust me lol

1

u/Aware-Individual-827 8h ago

AI is terrible at it if you do not direct it well. Like for everything it is confidently wrong often enough that it appears good.

1

u/CivilTechnician7 6h ago

Or it just hallucinates something, because it can’t figure it out.

13

u/beigemore 8h ago

Wtf is a mobile gaming non-profit?

2

u/GigaSoup 8h ago

An oxymoron.

3

u/Admirable-Ad7152 3h ago

That's extra depressing, how tf does one have a theater background and no respect for art itself????

1

u/UnknownAverage 7h ago

All it takes is some marketing research person to say "this is what consumers want, give them this or you'll fail" and that's what we get.

Like how that Linus guy makes stupid faces in his video thumbnails that make me think he's an idiot. I know he's not. Research shows that works so he does it, no questions asked. Just people being stupid all over the place. We've lost the script as a species.

Be true to yourself and your work, not what the money-loving people say makes the most money.

-15

u/Senior_Boot_5842 10h ago

Artist slop has always existed. Hotel art is a thing

22

u/FoxDanceMedia 10h ago

Not looking forward to one day being wheeled into a nursing home full of AI slop paintings on the walls

13

u/Kuunkulta 9h ago

I'd rather kill myself before I end up in one of those and you just gave me another reason. Fuck that's 100% going to be a thing

0

u/Greyshirk 8h ago

"Whoopsie daisy Grandpa is about to trip down the stairs"