Comment on At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion

Resplendent606@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Which part?

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  • Resplendent606@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It is shitty in many ways. First, I view videogames as art (because they are art) and taking out the human element just makes them a product created by a machine. Coding is a form of human expression. I understand the capitalist urge not to pay people, but replacing people with AI is a moral wrong. Microsoft, for example, after purchasing many studios over the past few years, has fired over 15,000 people in 2025 alone, despite making record profits and charging us more for new games.

    I would be terrified if I were a full-time coder. Like many other occupations, programming jobs are in jeopardy. I would be considering other fields or specializations because these corporations plan to replace them all. Google already is saying that more 25% of their code is written by ai. That will only increase and bleed over to game development.

    Second, by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary, you are creating an inferior product. Just throwing a game in early access because it isn't complete isn't a good solution and there are hundreds of games currently in that status. Personally, I avoid anything that is early access, with a few exceptions. I get the point in the article about making games with lesser graphics, which I am fine with if the project warrants it, but it feels like these companies don't care what the product is as long as it sells. They are going to create ai-slop and charge us more for it. This is how the AAA industry dies.

    Sources:

    <https://www.geekwire.com/2025/in-new-memo-microsoft-ceo-addresses-enigma-of-layoffs-amid-record-profits-and-ai-investments/&gt;

    <https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/29/24282757/google-new-code-generated-ai-q3-2024&gt;

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m a coder, and I’m not in fear of losing my job. Definitely not long term. They can chase this trend all they like, but they’ll soon realize what they need people for. Or, something I find less likely, they don’t need those people, and you can’t un-ring a bell. Sometimes new technologies shrink the need for a certain kind of job, like farming, or they erase the need for it altogether, like telephone switchboard operators. I don’t see AI shrinking this profession all that much, and if it does, there’s nothing anyone can do that will undo it. Even Comcast can’t make people stick with cable using all the nastiest tricks in the book; sometimes things just become obsolete.

      by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary

      “By any means necessary” are your words, not mine, nor the article’s. I too took issue with the article saying that early access can just be a fallback; that’s not actually solving the problem and just kicking the can down the road. But we got tons of great games made in under 3 years, even with high production value.

      This is how the AAA industry dies.

      As we know it. But it might be how it finds a path to sustainability rather than the feast or famine of betting your career on a project that took 7 years to make. Rather than perpetually updated live service games, AAA used to make sequels on a rapid cadence. Rather than games that take dozens of hours to finish, often filled with a bunch of busy work, we used to get games that took a fraction of that, often with far better pacing.

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