I'm not convinced the bad market is due to AI at all. That's just a convenient excuse to do layoffs without the bad PR normally involved in admitting you need to do layoffs.

Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.

For game dev, I believe that it is remiss to not include mention of the change in the gamer landscape. Ten years ago, it was console vs PC as the big game question... and various studios took bets on one or both sides of that.

Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.

Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).

As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.

Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.

Gamers are dying out(*) - Belluar News https://youtu.be/_80DVbedWiI

I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates than AI. This may change but I am deeply skeptical of massive RIFs being caused by AI at this point.

Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…

> I've been playing with SEO for this website, and I learned that Google prefers human content because (they are not gonna say it) it needs to train, it cannot train on what it has already trained on. Google's crawler is hungry for human content

This is the reason why you can hardly trust AI companies to not train on your code. If you care about privacy, I think it's best to use Antrophic models via a third-party provider like GitHub Copilot (business) or Amazon Bedrock.

Games imploded long before AI was in wide use. There were back to back worst years ever for layoffs in 2023,2024.

> I have never written a single line in Python. My only experience with it is Neetcodes tutorials. Before AI, you had to hire a Python programmer

I know that learning averse programmers exist, but even pre AI, many people in this position would just learn some python

>AI helps you with this, because it – increasingly instantly and well – turns English into running code. You can then react to it – "move the button there; make it bluer" – to get incrementally more precise about what you want.

I wonder if author left this as some kind of Easter egg or it's just another life is a simulation moment. In this paragraph he used semicolon and parentheses multiple times. After that only once.

Anyway love the article. It's nice to hear from time to time that one is not becoming obsolete that quick.

The topic has been done to death by now but this

> He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on.

The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.

This post inspired me to donate to the only video game I've played in years, PokeMMO. Btw if anyone here plays my username is ieatpears, send a friend request or whatever, I'd love to play with someone else!

It’s a little hard to believe when I remember game dev jobs already being a mess in 2019.

Idle thought. Not an economist. What if the current tech scene is like how the u.s. capitalist class took power away from blue color workers in the 80s, 90s by leveraging cheaper labor in foreign countries? Now, programmers, sysadmins, system engineers no longer have leverage (real or imagined) because the owners just point to AI.

No real idea why this bubbled to the front page, as it’s just another milquetoast subjective take from a single point of view recapping the same events from their context. Nothing added, no food for thought, just the same old, same old.

We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.

I have to wonder how GenAI would have fared if these LLMs had become available anytime before 2020, during the “normal” tech bubble. It feels like the faith in it is as much to slash costs while appearing to be cutting-edge (and thus, worthy of what little investment is still available), as it is because of its capabilities. Where would we be if the tech industry wasn’t in such a dire state due to the end of ZIRP?

There are many reasons, all layered, AI not being the decisive one.

1) Growth is gone and all expansion narratives have failed (VR/XR, NFT, etc) with no rescue in sight. That’s a death sentence in capitalism.

2) Demographic headwind - not only from age but also habits - short form video is attention intensive, highly addictive and doesn’t co-exist like a spotify or youtube clip in the background. And it’s wildly successful. New generations are not automatically gamers anymore, many just watch.

3) there’s plenty of cost competitive attention targets now all competing. A video subscription is easily competitive with most gaming options on price. It used to be games are THE cost effective way for people to be entertained.

4) The pacemaker is dead. Nvidia used to drive the industry forward with GPU expansion - new graphics capabilities offering better games and fantasies. By RDR2 this stalled, you can’t sell on “breathtaking graphics” driven by technicals anymore, all new experiences have to be gameplay based which is very very hard. 4k was already a bridge to far.

Worse, Nvidia abandoning the industry again (as with crypto) and the AI boom is massively increasing cost of entry for games as entertainment compared to other activities, cost of business (game studios do need a lot of GPU), kills attempts to shift the business model to streaming where you’d have expanded the audience by reducing hardware entry point (not a good use of GPU), murders new consoles whose marketing campaigns always provided strong market rejuvenation.

5) Competition with its own supply - especially because hardware stalled, 10-15 year old games look perfectly alright and run great. They cost 3.99$ in a sale and compete on time with new titles. Successful GaaS titles like PubG, Minecraft, Fortnite, Dota, Lol go strong and cannibalize a vast amount of attention.

Because Valve is privately owned and protective of their market, nobody can buy up the supply and remove it, which kills the proposition of game pass models.

6) There’s too much supply of games to allow all the companies in the space to make a living. It’s gonna get a lot worse with AI, which threatens to kill the artificially high entry cost to AAA by scaling down both talent and technical moats is another reason for investors to run away.

7) When supply goes up, GTM costs become the primary business problem. We already saw this in mobile which has zero barrier of entry, chinese and vietnamese shops will budget build your game to specs.

But like sneakers, anyone able to make a game doesn’t sell them because supply side auction costs go up trying to reach eyeballs.

Facebook killed and ate mobile gaming because app install ads became the primary way of user acquisition - the infamous fake game video trend was the result: The video sells the game, not the game itself and an entire industry jumped up making attention optimized videos to sell to game developers. CAC is extracting all profit from the industry and VCs abandoned it because the extraction makes their financial goals impossible.

Failure to enforce truth in advertising regulation means competition happens more and more on fakes and grifts which favors the grifter.

With AI commoditisation is going to move up the stack into the rest of gaming.

And crucially, any narrative of more games or cheaper games runs into simple physics - we maxed the available attention which is colonized by companies who have genetically engineered themselves to maximum addiction. Without new time (4 day work week), it’s a brutal red ocean game companies cannot hope to win in, given that the platforms own the attention algorithms.

More supply in a red ocean means less money for creators and publishers and their shareholders and more for the platform”, even if you cut creatives with AI

8) There is no credible future vision or narrative for gaming.

Yes AI will allow new experiences but nobody knows how they will look, IP protection is dead so even if you create one, there’s no way to do it at current economics.

Other uses like character.ai, again, A:B tested to maximum addictive/ sycophantic behavior seem like attention headwind.

All these PLUS AI investment having “better” bets (like betting on OpenAI to become a state sanctioned monopolist getting paid back by taxpayer money) means that there is no money, no lifeblood for the industry.

It’s going to burn down to a tiny shell before something can sprout from the ashes, in the tiny plot the attention platforms allow it to take.

AI adoption across the industry is anemic in effect. It’s impossible to build native AI studios because the ground and definition of native is shifting too fast. R&D risks and constantly shifting capabilities in the frontier are extreme, you can’t build a realistic financial projection. And even the cost savings that are there, theoretically, like voice over or asset generation are poison to an overwhelmingly negative to AI audience.

Overhiring is often cited as a reason and simultaneous cope to indicate temporary correction but games are multi year products and only a small segment of employers (platforms) engaged in it - there’s little evidence to support it.

ZIRP is also often paraded around, but ZIRP is short term and certainly a reason - but the tech industry, which had the same challenges, shows why that’s a cope and why the lack of narrative is terminal: There is no limit to the amount of investment you can collect on a good narrative. The industry has none.

Yes, AI narrative is killing the industry by choking and diverting oxygen, but technically AI has, for all intends and purposes, zero effect on gaming yet.

Source: Industry veteran in AAA and Big Tech.

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