I'm not convinced the bad market is due to AI at all. That's just a convenient excuse to do layoffs without the bad PR normally involved in admitting you need to do layoffs.
Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.
> He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on.
The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.
No real idea why this bubbled to the front page, as it’s just another milquetoast subjective take from a single point of view recapping the same events from their context. Nothing added, no food for thought, just the same old, same old.
We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.
I have to wonder how GenAI would have fared if these LLMs had become available anytime before 2020, during the “normal” tech bubble. It feels like the faith in it is as much to slash costs while appearing to be cutting-edge (and thus, worthy of what little investment is still available), as it is because of its capabilities. Where would we be if the tech industry wasn’t in such a dire state due to the end of ZIRP?
Idle thought. Not an economist.
What if the current tech scene is like how the u.s. capitalist class took power away from blue color workers in the 80s, 90s by leveraging cheaper labor in foreign countries? Now, programmers, sysadmins, system engineers no longer have leverage (real or imagined) because the owners just point to AI.
For game dev, I believe that it is remiss to not include mention of the change in the gamer landscape. Ten years ago, it was console vs PC as the big game question... and various studios took bets on one or both sides of that.
Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.
Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).
As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.
Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.
So I'm not super well versed with Roblox, but I'd assumed it was aimed at a younger audience?
So wouldn't the above numbers indicate that you have a growing younger gamer population (e.g. in Roblox), and an older one in Steam? And that it would be reasonable to think that many of the current Roblox gamers would transition across to games in platforms like steam, but they cater to a different need or desire in the coming decades?
Or does Roblox have everything that games offer on Steam already? Can I get my Sekiro experience there, or Star Sector, or Civ, or Witcher?
There's no denying that Roblox is immensely popular, but maybe it's OK if Steam has more niche stuff in the long run? There's still big money to be made, especially for small developers.
And also aren't we comparing overall platforms to individual game performance? To compare _all_ of roblox against a single game (BF6) doesn't seem right, no? Shouldn't we be comparing the most popular Roblox experience instead (whatever that may be)?
I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates than AI. This may change but I am deeply skeptical of massive RIFs being caused by AI at this point.
Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…
This post inspired me to donate to the only video game I've played in years, PokeMMO. Btw if anyone here plays my username is ieatpears, send a friend request or whatever, I'd love to play with someone else!
There are many reasons, all layered, AI not being the decisive one.
1) Growth is gone and all expansion narratives have failed (VR/XR, NFT, etc) with no rescue in sight. That’s a death sentence in capitalism.
2) Demographic headwind - not only from age but also habits - short form video is attention intensive, highly addictive and doesn’t co-exist like a spotify or youtube clip in the background. And it’s wildly successful. New generations are not automatically gamers anymore, many just watch.
3) there’s plenty of cost competitive attention targets now all competing. A video subscription is easily competitive with most gaming options on price. It used to be games are THE cost effective way for people to be entertained.
4) The pacemaker is dead. Nvidia used to drive the industry forward with GPU expansion - new graphics capabilities offering better games and fantasies. By RDR2 this stalled, you can’t sell on “breathtaking graphics” driven by technicals anymore, all new experiences have to be gameplay based which is very very hard. 4k was already a bridge to far.
Worse, Nvidia abandoning the industry again (as with crypto) and the AI boom is massively increasing cost of entry for games as entertainment compared to other activities, cost of business (game studios do need a lot of GPU), kills attempts to shift the business model to streaming where you’d have expanded the audience by reducing hardware entry point (not a good use of GPU), murders new consoles whose marketing campaigns always provided strong market rejuvenation.
5) Competition with its own supply - especially because hardware stalled, 10-15 year old games look perfectly alright and run great. They cost 3.99$ in a sale and compete on time with new titles. Successful GaaS titles like PubG, Minecraft, Fortnite, Dota, Lol go strong and cannibalize a vast amount of attention.
Because Valve is privately owned and protective of their market, nobody can buy up the supply and remove it, which kills the proposition of game pass models.
6) There’s too much supply of games to allow all the companies in the space to make a living. It’s gonna get a lot worse with AI, which threatens to kill the artificially
high entry cost to AAA by scaling down both talent and technical moats is another reason for investors to run away.
7) When supply goes up, GTM costs become the primary business problem. We already saw this in mobile which has zero barrier of entry, chinese and vietnamese shops will budget build your game to specs.
But like sneakers, anyone able to make a game doesn’t sell them because supply side auction costs go up trying to reach eyeballs.
Facebook killed and ate mobile gaming because app install ads became the primary way of user acquisition - the infamous fake game video trend was the result: The video sells the game, not the game itself and an entire industry jumped up making attention optimized videos to sell to game developers. CAC is extracting all profit from the industry and VCs abandoned it because the extraction makes their financial goals impossible.
Failure to enforce truth in advertising regulation means competition happens more and more on fakes and grifts which favors the grifter.
With AI commoditisation is going to move up the stack into the rest of gaming.
And crucially, any narrative of more games or cheaper games runs into simple physics - we maxed the available attention which is colonized by companies who have genetically engineered themselves to maximum addiction. Without new time (4 day work week), it’s a brutal red ocean game companies cannot hope to win in, given that the platforms own the attention algorithms.
More supply in a red ocean means less money for creators and publishers and their shareholders and more for the platform”, even if you cut creatives with AI
8) There is no credible future vision or narrative for gaming.
Yes AI will allow new experiences but nobody knows how they will look, IP protection is dead so even if you create one, there’s no way to do it at c...
> I've been playing with SEO for this website, and I learned that Google prefers human content because (they are not gonna say it) it needs to train, it cannot train on what it has already trained on. Google's crawler is hungry for human content
This is the reason why you can hardly trust AI companies to not train on your code. If you care about privacy, I think it's best to use Antrophic models via a third-party provider like GitHub Copilot (business) or Amazon Bedrock.
>AI helps you with this, because it – increasingly instantly and well – turns English into running code. You can then react to it – "move the button there; make it bluer" – to get incrementally more precise about what you want.
I wonder if author left this as some kind of Easter egg or it's just another life is a simulation moment. In this paragraph he used semicolon and parentheses multiple times. After that only once.
Anyway love the article. It's nice to hear from time to time that one is not becoming obsolete that quick.
21 comments
[ 0.76 ms ] story [ 35.0 ms ] threadAlso, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.
> He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on.
The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.
We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.
Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.
Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).
As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.
Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.
Gamers are dying out(*) - Belluar News https://youtu.be/_80DVbedWiI
So wouldn't the above numbers indicate that you have a growing younger gamer population (e.g. in Roblox), and an older one in Steam? And that it would be reasonable to think that many of the current Roblox gamers would transition across to games in platforms like steam, but they cater to a different need or desire in the coming decades?
Or does Roblox have everything that games offer on Steam already? Can I get my Sekiro experience there, or Star Sector, or Civ, or Witcher?
There's no denying that Roblox is immensely popular, but maybe it's OK if Steam has more niche stuff in the long run? There's still big money to be made, especially for small developers.
And also aren't we comparing overall platforms to individual game performance? To compare _all_ of roblox against a single game (BF6) doesn't seem right, no? Shouldn't we be comparing the most popular Roblox experience instead (whatever that may be)?
Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…
I know that learning averse programmers exist, but even pre AI, many people in this position would just learn some python
1) Growth is gone and all expansion narratives have failed (VR/XR, NFT, etc) with no rescue in sight. That’s a death sentence in capitalism.
2) Demographic headwind - not only from age but also habits - short form video is attention intensive, highly addictive and doesn’t co-exist like a spotify or youtube clip in the background. And it’s wildly successful. New generations are not automatically gamers anymore, many just watch.
3) there’s plenty of cost competitive attention targets now all competing. A video subscription is easily competitive with most gaming options on price. It used to be games are THE cost effective way for people to be entertained.
4) The pacemaker is dead. Nvidia used to drive the industry forward with GPU expansion - new graphics capabilities offering better games and fantasies. By RDR2 this stalled, you can’t sell on “breathtaking graphics” driven by technicals anymore, all new experiences have to be gameplay based which is very very hard. 4k was already a bridge to far.
Worse, Nvidia abandoning the industry again (as with crypto) and the AI boom is massively increasing cost of entry for games as entertainment compared to other activities, cost of business (game studios do need a lot of GPU), kills attempts to shift the business model to streaming where you’d have expanded the audience by reducing hardware entry point (not a good use of GPU), murders new consoles whose marketing campaigns always provided strong market rejuvenation.
5) Competition with its own supply - especially because hardware stalled, 10-15 year old games look perfectly alright and run great. They cost 3.99$ in a sale and compete on time with new titles. Successful GaaS titles like PubG, Minecraft, Fortnite, Dota, Lol go strong and cannibalize a vast amount of attention.
Because Valve is privately owned and protective of their market, nobody can buy up the supply and remove it, which kills the proposition of game pass models.
6) There’s too much supply of games to allow all the companies in the space to make a living. It’s gonna get a lot worse with AI, which threatens to kill the artificially high entry cost to AAA by scaling down both talent and technical moats is another reason for investors to run away.
7) When supply goes up, GTM costs become the primary business problem. We already saw this in mobile which has zero barrier of entry, chinese and vietnamese shops will budget build your game to specs.
But like sneakers, anyone able to make a game doesn’t sell them because supply side auction costs go up trying to reach eyeballs.
Facebook killed and ate mobile gaming because app install ads became the primary way of user acquisition - the infamous fake game video trend was the result: The video sells the game, not the game itself and an entire industry jumped up making attention optimized videos to sell to game developers. CAC is extracting all profit from the industry and VCs abandoned it because the extraction makes their financial goals impossible.
Failure to enforce truth in advertising regulation means competition happens more and more on fakes and grifts which favors the grifter.
With AI commoditisation is going to move up the stack into the rest of gaming.
And crucially, any narrative of more games or cheaper games runs into simple physics - we maxed the available attention which is colonized by companies who have genetically engineered themselves to maximum addiction. Without new time (4 day work week), it’s a brutal red ocean game companies cannot hope to win in, given that the platforms own the attention algorithms.
More supply in a red ocean means less money for creators and publishers and their shareholders and more for the platform”, even if you cut creatives with AI
8) There is no credible future vision or narrative for gaming.
Yes AI will allow new experiences but nobody knows how they will look, IP protection is dead so even if you create one, there’s no way to do it at c...
This is the reason why you can hardly trust AI companies to not train on your code. If you care about privacy, I think it's best to use Antrophic models via a third-party provider like GitHub Copilot (business) or Amazon Bedrock.
I wonder if author left this as some kind of Easter egg or it's just another life is a simulation moment. In this paragraph he used semicolon and parentheses multiple times. After that only once.
Anyway love the article. It's nice to hear from time to time that one is not becoming obsolete that quick.