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.
I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, algorithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder.
I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle.
I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists.
Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.
>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
I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle.
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.
Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away.
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.
If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.
Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back.
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.
Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.
It's almost impossible to predict how much demand there will be in that scenario because the world would be a very different place if that system was the default. And with things that are relatively cheap to make, such as professionally produced YouTube videos, people may only need to chip in a few cents to provide an equivalent return to ad revenue.
Given that people are already accustomed to paying for the promise of future things existing in the form of crowdfunding, Patreon or most subscription services in general, I don't think it would as drastic of a difference as you imagine, as long as the infrastructure is there to facilitate effortless 'investing' into many small things.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.
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.
Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.
Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.
in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something?
I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated?
I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table.
I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious
> 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 pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well.
> Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual.
Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works.
We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex).
The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “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.”
It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.
I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.
Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.
That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?
There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.
In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways.
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.
It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.
If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance. Since what you’re suggesting is a complete collapse of rule of law.
If IP law is the only thing preventing society from descending into anarchy, then maybe we deserve anarchy.
The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.
Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.
Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse?
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've worked for a few companies from 2000-2026 (2 startups, 2 medium companies), and overall, I would say they all had decent to great leadership. None of them were out to only maximize next quarter, all stressed being 100% honest with the customer, even if it meant disappointing them (i.e. we can't quite make that target, here's what we can do - this was for a consulting company), etc., and they were all trying to make the company grow AND be sustainable.
One startup didn't go too far (folded after 3 years), one grew to ~20 people, lasted for maybe 20 years total, I left after 2 years during the dot com crash.
Both of the medium companies are bigger now (I'm still working for one), and have generally positive outlook. I mean, you can't consistently be #1 in your industry when there are 2 companies with combined > 50 or 60% market share and roughly equal - some quarters, your competitor's 2-3 year plan will finish and deliver better for that quarter than your previous (now "old") product that is in the middle of a 2-3 plan, etc..
So they are out there, but it's RARELY in the "high profile" (FAANG/whatever) "move fast, break things" companies that you hear about a lot or that everyone wants to work for.
A friend said <ride sharing company> was like Game of Thrones come to life in a corporate setting, for example. Yet, some people got rich off it, I'm sure.
Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040
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.
Bungie, in its post-Halo standalone incarnation, was running a microtransactions empire from day one and funded itself on the debt owed by those; it was not ‘taken over’ by financial engineers, so to speak, because the call was coming from inside the house from day one. They executed on some very nice tricks to get funded but their business was operated consistently (impeccable scenic and gunplay, variable-quality story and voicing, catastrophically-bad management) throughout.
The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but I’m not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly they’re stellar examples of ‘greed minmaxers’ but not so much of ‘profitable incompetence through financial engineer takeover’ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?
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.
This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history.
I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franchise down.
It’s busy really interesting how fast that industry changed, and the massive scale involved compared to just 10-15 years prior, depending on where you measure from.
Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues.
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.
Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.
Companies are on purpose poorly run during the "gold rush" phase, which is where AI is right now. Everyone wants to not be left behind and velocity is placed ahead of profitability and especially ahead of quality.
What happens next (eventually...) is the bubble popping, which for AI will mostly look like established companies pulling back on AI hiring and especially cutting AI SaaS solutions unless they are clearly providing value and improving the bottom line.
What we think of as quality will come in the next phase, once the infrastructure woes get sorted out. Web 1.0 was pre-cloud and websites crashed all the time, no one could handle traffic spikes, etc. After a crash, stability becomes a market advantage, i.e. why Facebook won and Friendster died.
I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.
A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.
Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.
It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore.
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.
> Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies.
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.
> 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
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.
Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
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.
> Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance.
The overhire during ZIRP was insane though - in total it was a good nine years of zero interest rates, and between the first period (2008-2015) and the second period (2020-2022) interest rates weren't that high either. Companies battled each other hard even for people who just went through a few weeks worth of bootcamp, just to make sure the competition didn't have access to them, even if there was not much productive work that could be assigned.
And that group is where the layoffs really hit hard: people with basic training, relatively little investment both of the company into the workers and from the workers to the company and, most importantly, a skillset / allocation that just lends itself heavily to being replaced or at the very least heavily augmented by AI.
On top of that... "good financial performance" doesn't mean the balance sheets can't look even better. With C-level boni being tied to stock performance or "efficiency gains" KPIs, it's no surprise that many just look at their paycheck first, the long-term health of the company second.
> You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
I don't have much hope left for anything in the field of "knowledge work" and for most of "creative work" either. Let's be real, the wide masses don't care they're being force fed with AI slop, as long as they have some brainrot to doomscroll in the evening. The only jobs relatively secure for now IMHO are the trades and wiping the arses of dying boomers in care homes. For the former, robots lack the required dexterity and force feedback, and for the latter, maybe the Japanese are willing to accept arse-wiping robots, but I heavily doubt this will be the case in Western countries any time soon.
> Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon.
There are companies left that are actively growing and not making shovels for the AI gold diggers? Huh?
> 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.
A rare few, yes. But most have given up and went for appeasement instead after the first ones got mergers disrupted or otherwise punished.
I'm not disagreeing with you exactly - there are obviously reasons for doing all those things and on the surface they may seem sensible as well. But there are also good reasons why you'd do the exact opposite and my point is that in a group of independent thinkers you'd see greater diversity of opinions and outcomes. I was a middle manager involved in some of those layoffs (on both sides!) and saw the sausage made up close. Thing is, yes it's a shitty thing to do to someone personally, but nothing of what I saw could be justified in objective terms.
In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid.
So, the game development industry really hasn’t 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 weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ 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 didn’t 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 didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s 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.
Companies under a capitalist mode of production are funddamentally incompatible with creative output because companies want a reproducible formula that they can scale. This is why we get endless sequels, annual FIFA, CoD, etc releases, adaptations of successful IP and so on. Creative output, be it music, movies, TV, games or books, doesn't scale.
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.
I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech).
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.
I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better!
So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
Yes, absolutely. US games developers are paid a lot more than elsewhere.
There has been a growing trend over the past couple of decades to outsource more and more game development to cheaper parts of the world, trending towards keeping only a small core team in the home country, supported by for-hire remote developers in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The other big advantage to work for hire is not needing to keep a large team of specialists employed throughout development, when they may not be required for all of that time. Keeping everyone fully utilised has always been one of the big challenges for game studios.
Ironically, AI may actually reduce the amount of outsourcing that a core team needs to do (though a lot of it is content and AI is still pretty bad at generating content).
The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.
I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs.
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.
Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."
Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales.
I’m in the front of the line for the Tarn Adams fan club, but I don’t think he’d be my first pick for advice on the state of software engineering. DF is exceptional in many ways, not all of them uniformly positive.
The number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up.
I have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse.
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.
Part of the problem is that some investor somewhere making profits is considered the only real marker for success. It’s an insane perspective that devalues all other (arguably more important) aspects of a work’s success.
Ford's vision wasn't that much better. Old school manager controlled companies only work if the people in charge are great like him with big plans and the skills to realize them. If the CEO is just average it will end badly, and if they good but retire or die in office their successor will probably be worse.
And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
Profit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
Worse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
The profitable videogames are mobileslop appstorespam games loaded to the brim with microtransactions, as well as the really good games that everyone wants to play, which are impossible to create more of on a whim.
Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not.
An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
... which is why it was, and still is, common economic knowledge that the government must control marketplaces. Meaning the physical areas where trading is taking place.
We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments.
But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well.
And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores.
Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
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.
Money has to do with whether you can make the game. Games are regularly funded by many non-profit options such as co-ops or grants, etc. Developers are free to make games however they want.
Video games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
Profitability can only matter as long as the ecosystem is sustainable; otherwise once the floor collapses there's no more money to be made. A game can be profitable, but when the entire team that made it is laid off or furloughed before launch there isn't a team anymore to follow up. Eventually those people leave the industry and there isn't enough capital made by your average worker to fund their own gaming studio, relying on investors or the rich to parasitize their work in order to create more games.
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'.
>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job.
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.
A sizable portion of the blue collar economy collapses too if the white collar portion stops having money to spend or suddenly has an influx of time to do some of the stuff the blue collar workers were doing for them like lawns, home repair, painting etc.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
"Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI"
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.
Blue collar workers such as plumbers are in danger of being replaced by robots, but not any time soon. But by the time this happens, enough people from more vulnerable fields will have been forced out that a "solution" will have been found. The "solution" is much more likely to be dystopic than utopic though.
I'll believe that when I can get a robot plumber or electrician to come to my house for less than what a senior SWE makes per hour. Until then, it's just an empty promise.
> 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.
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 issue isn’t every other CEO having access to the “make game” button, but who will buy that game when the customers have access to their own “make game” button?
Well, people often play games not because they are the best game, but because their friends are playing it and they want to join in the experience. This seems to have more to do with marketing than game or code quality, and marketing is not exactly cheap.
Luckily for us China based companies are pushing the price down and bringing it to those who can afford a decent hardware. Which might not be everyone, but enough people to make it matter.
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.
I think that even back in early farming days, there were usually some guys who were good at using spears and didn't know much about farming who would go around taking part of the farmers' output. If the farmers were relatively lucky, the guys with the spears would stick around and defend the farmers from other guys with spears in a long-term arrangement of trading protection for material goods instead of just roaming around robbing farmers without giving anything back.
I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. 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.
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article.
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.
This seems to be miss the topic. Isn't the topic about AI and how damaging it can be? I am not sure why you want to discredit the messenger; the message appears to be correct. That should be a better focus.
> 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.
1. Human attention is a finite resource.
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.
I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, algorithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder.
I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle.
I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists.
Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.
>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
I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle.
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.
Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away.
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.
If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.
Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back.
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.
Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.
It's almost impossible to predict how much demand there will be in that scenario because the world would be a very different place if that system was the default. And with things that are relatively cheap to make, such as professionally produced YouTube videos, people may only need to chip in a few cents to provide an equivalent return to ad revenue.
Given that people are already accustomed to paying for the promise of future things existing in the form of crowdfunding, Patreon or most subscription services in general, I don't think it would as drastic of a difference as you imagine, as long as the infrastructure is there to facilitate effortless 'investing' into many small things.
Sounds fine to me! Less inane, pointless, content? Only left with what people chose to exist? Sign me up!
Good.
And this is precisely the business model that platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter facilitate.
If you want to get rid of patents and copyright then entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc).
Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.
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 is some New Zealand-level of alternative facts.
"Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights"
Adequately? name one lol
"many musicians make their pay by performing live" ticketmaster
"innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available" that's not what innovation is.
"China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious" you need to go outside
Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.
Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.
in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something?
I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated?
I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table.
I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious
> 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 pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well.
> Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual.
Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works.
We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex).
The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “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.”
It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.
I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.
Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.
That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?
There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.
>For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available
Which is why there is famously no market or money to be made on generic medicine.
In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways.
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.
That's just absolute nonsense, where do you get these kind of ideas?
Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.
It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.
If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance. Since what you’re suggesting is a complete collapse of rule of law.
If IP law is the only thing preventing society from descending into anarchy, then maybe we deserve anarchy.
The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.
The article starts by video companies being as profitable as ever. Issue is not with economics not being there.
Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.
Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse?
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've worked for a few companies from 2000-2026 (2 startups, 2 medium companies), and overall, I would say they all had decent to great leadership. None of them were out to only maximize next quarter, all stressed being 100% honest with the customer, even if it meant disappointing them (i.e. we can't quite make that target, here's what we can do - this was for a consulting company), etc., and they were all trying to make the company grow AND be sustainable.
One startup didn't go too far (folded after 3 years), one grew to ~20 people, lasted for maybe 20 years total, I left after 2 years during the dot com crash.
Both of the medium companies are bigger now (I'm still working for one), and have generally positive outlook. I mean, you can't consistently be #1 in your industry when there are 2 companies with combined > 50 or 60% market share and roughly equal - some quarters, your competitor's 2-3 year plan will finish and deliver better for that quarter than your previous (now "old") product that is in the middle of a 2-3 plan, etc..
So they are out there, but it's RARELY in the "high profile" (FAANG/whatever) "move fast, break things" companies that you hear about a lot or that everyone wants to work for.
A friend said <ride sharing company> was like Game of Thrones come to life in a corporate setting, for example. Yet, some people got rich off it, I'm sure.
Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040
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.
Ubisoft, Bungie, id software…
Blizzard
Bungie, in its post-Halo standalone incarnation, was running a microtransactions empire from day one and funded itself on the debt owed by those; it was not ‘taken over’ by financial engineers, so to speak, because the call was coming from inside the house from day one. They executed on some very nice tricks to get funded but their business was operated consistently (impeccable scenic and gunplay, variable-quality story and voicing, catastrophically-bad management) throughout.
The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but I’m not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly they’re stellar examples of ‘greed minmaxers’ but not so much of ‘profitable incompetence through financial engineer takeover’ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?
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
This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history.
I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franchise down.
It’s busy really interesting how fast that industry changed, and the massive scale involved compared to just 10-15 years prior, depending on where you measure from.
Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues.
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.
Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.
Toyota is (was?), all by their lonesome selves, almost 100% bet-the-farm on hydrogen vehicles instead of electric.
Toyota made un-Toyota like mistakes on the new v6 twin turbo. They are not immune anymore.
Uhm, seems to me the companies that are spearheading the rollout of electric vehicles will be still existing in the future.
BYD will dominate, not GM.
Companies are on purpose poorly run during the "gold rush" phase, which is where AI is right now. Everyone wants to not be left behind and velocity is placed ahead of profitability and especially ahead of quality.
What happens next (eventually...) is the bubble popping, which for AI will mostly look like established companies pulling back on AI hiring and especially cutting AI SaaS solutions unless they are clearly providing value and improving the bottom line.
What we think of as quality will come in the next phase, once the infrastructure woes get sorted out. Web 1.0 was pre-cloud and websites crashed all the time, no one could handle traffic spikes, etc. After a crash, stability becomes a market advantage, i.e. why Facebook won and Friendster died.
I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.
A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.
Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.
Were they ever well run?
It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore.
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.
I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...
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.
> Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies.
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.
> 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
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.
Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
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.
> Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance.
The overhire during ZIRP was insane though - in total it was a good nine years of zero interest rates, and between the first period (2008-2015) and the second period (2020-2022) interest rates weren't that high either. Companies battled each other hard even for people who just went through a few weeks worth of bootcamp, just to make sure the competition didn't have access to them, even if there was not much productive work that could be assigned.
And that group is where the layoffs really hit hard: people with basic training, relatively little investment both of the company into the workers and from the workers to the company and, most importantly, a skillset / allocation that just lends itself heavily to being replaced or at the very least heavily augmented by AI.
On top of that... "good financial performance" doesn't mean the balance sheets can't look even better. With C-level boni being tied to stock performance or "efficiency gains" KPIs, it's no surprise that many just look at their paycheck first, the long-term health of the company second.
> You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
I don't have much hope left for anything in the field of "knowledge work" and for most of "creative work" either. Let's be real, the wide masses don't care they're being force fed with AI slop, as long as they have some brainrot to doomscroll in the evening. The only jobs relatively secure for now IMHO are the trades and wiping the arses of dying boomers in care homes. For the former, robots lack the required dexterity and force feedback, and for the latter, maybe the Japanese are willing to accept arse-wiping robots, but I heavily doubt this will be the case in Western countries any time soon.
> Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon.
There are companies left that are actively growing and not making shovels for the AI gold diggers? Huh?
> 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.
A rare few, yes. But most have given up and went for appeasement instead after the first ones got mergers disrupted or otherwise punished.
I'm not disagreeing with you exactly - there are obviously reasons for doing all those things and on the surface they may seem sensible as well. But there are also good reasons why you'd do the exact opposite and my point is that in a group of independent thinkers you'd see greater diversity of opinions and outcomes. I was a middle manager involved in some of those layoffs (on both sides!) and saw the sausage made up close. Thing is, yes it's a shitty thing to do to someone personally, but nothing of what I saw could be justified in objective terms.
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?
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.
In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid.
So, the game development industry really hasn’t 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 weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ 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 didn’t 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 didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s 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.
Companies under a capitalist mode of production are funddamentally incompatible with creative output because companies want a reproducible formula that they can scale. This is why we get endless sequels, annual FIFA, CoD, etc releases, adaptations of successful IP and so on. Creative output, be it music, movies, TV, games or books, doesn't scale.
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.
I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech).
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.
I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better!
So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
Yes, absolutely. US games developers are paid a lot more than elsewhere.
There has been a growing trend over the past couple of decades to outsource more and more game development to cheaper parts of the world, trending towards keeping only a small core team in the home country, supported by for-hire remote developers in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The other big advantage to work for hire is not needing to keep a large team of specialists employed throughout development, when they may not be required for all of that time. Keeping everyone fully utilised has always been one of the big challenges for game studios.
Ironically, AI may actually reduce the amount of outsourcing that a core team needs to do (though a lot of it is content and AI is still pretty bad at generating content).
The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.
Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.
I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs.
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.
Right until you release it and a minor gets the NPC to talk about rape or something.
Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."
In the first paragraph:
> 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.
Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales.
[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.
Revenues overall are rising, but the only real growth right now is in China + East Asia, and in Roblox.
https://www.matthewball.co/all/presentation-the-state-of-vid...
I’m in the front of the line for the Tarn Adams fan club, but I don’t think he’d be my first pick for advice on the state of software engineering. DF is exceptional in many ways, not all of them uniformly positive.
We need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihad
Instead, we got Universal Paperclips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
It’s been in bad shape for the last 11 years.
AI is very disruptive. I'd wish people would stop boosting Skynet.
More accurately stated, people's reactions are disruptive. The tech itself sucks and doesn't do any of the things boosters claim it does.
I have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse.
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.
You may wish to check if the screen name JackWeinberg is available.
The argument that it is in shambles wasn’t particularly persuasive. “videogames are as profitable as ever”
It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.
Part of the problem is that some investor somewhere making profits is considered the only real marker for success. It’s an insane perspective that devalues all other (arguably more important) aspects of a work’s success.
How is that any different than the market for toilet paper or ovens?
It's not, and it's the reason why nearly everything is low quality or ultra expensive.
It sounds like you're complaining about capitalism, not AI?
Shareholder capitalism as milton friedman argued for it. Ford had a different vision but the Dodge brothers stamped it out.
Ford's vision wasn't that much better. Old school manager controlled companies only work if the people in charge are great like him with big plans and the skills to realize them. If the CEO is just average it will end badly, and if they good but retire or die in office their successor will probably be worse.
And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
> The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
Is there any evidence of this claim being true?
Welcome to growthism.
Profit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
Worse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
Yes, then this part was regulated. And so if you allow cash out, you're regulated.
The result was not regulated gambling but extermination of cash out options (well, and sometimes very obvious illegal gambling houses).
The profitable videogames are mobileslop appstorespam games loaded to the brim with microtransactions, as well as the really good games that everyone wants to play, which are impossible to create more of on a whim.
"the industry" also includes "human resources", previously known as personnel or humans.
Any why always call critics "frustrated" in order to depict them as weak and spiteful? Isn't the Dwarf Fortress guy independent anyway?
Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not.
An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
Don’t you make more money if the game is fun to play? (People buy the game)
A huge marketing budget can push a mediocre game far further than a really good indie game that doesn't get lucky with youtube.
... which is why it was, and still is, common economic knowledge that the government must control marketplaces. Meaning the physical areas where trading is taking place.
We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments.
But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well.
And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores.
Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
No.
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.
Money has to do with whether you can make the game. Games are regularly funded by many non-profit options such as co-ops or grants, etc. Developers are free to make games however they want.
Video games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
Profitability can only matter as long as the ecosystem is sustainable; otherwise once the floor collapses there's no more money to be made. A game can be profitable, but when the entire team that made it is laid off or furloughed before launch there isn't a team anymore to follow up. Eventually those people leave the industry and there isn't enough capital made by your average worker to fund their own gaming studio, relying on investors or the rich to parasitize their work in order to create more games.
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'.
>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job.
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.
A sizable portion of the blue collar economy collapses too if the white collar portion stops having money to spend or suddenly has an influx of time to do some of the stuff the blue collar workers were doing for them like lawns, home repair, painting etc.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
"Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI"
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.
Blue collar workers such as plumbers are in danger of being replaced by robots, but not any time soon. But by the time this happens, enough people from more vulnerable fields will have been forced out that a "solution" will have been found. The "solution" is much more likely to be dystopic than utopic though.
I'll believe that when I can get a robot plumber or electrician to come to my house for less than what a senior SWE makes per hour. Until then, it's just an empty promise.
> 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.
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 issue isn’t every other CEO having access to the “make game” button, but who will buy that game when the customers have access to their own “make game” button?
Well, people often play games not because they are the best game, but because their friends are playing it and they want to join in the experience. This seems to have more to do with marketing than game or code quality, and marketing is not exactly cheap.
Good point. Except, the problem is that at AI prices similar to current ones, it would cost someone thousands of dollars to make the game for himself.
Luckily for us China based companies are pushing the price down and bringing it to those who can afford a decent hardware. Which might not be everyone, but enough people to make it matter.
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.
Not to mention “labor they don’t understand” is only possible with specialization and modernity.
Back when everyone was a farmer, yeah sure everyone understood the job
I think that even back in early farming days, there were usually some guys who were good at using spears and didn't know much about farming who would go around taking part of the farmers' output. If the farmers were relatively lucky, the guys with the spears would stick around and defend the farmers from other guys with spears in a long-term arrangement of trading protection for material goods instead of just roaming around robbing farmers without giving anything back.
Yep.
We call the former “states” and the latter “gangs”. The difference is subtle.
It's possible to be very talented and a crank.
I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. 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.
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article.
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.
Why do you think this?
This seems to be miss the topic. Isn't the topic about AI and how damaging it can be? I am not sure why you want to discredit the messenger; the message appears to be correct. That should be a better focus.
> 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.
> the message appears to be correct.
"in shambles because of AI" no. It's the same as it always was.