I think there's a certain antipathy between "hustle culture" and gaming
https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/
that is is, people who are caught in AI FOMO are performatively trying to appear to be productive and that's the opposite of fun.
Anyone who has worked on a game knows it is a long, painful slog to the finish line. AI dev is promising the exact opposite: minimal prompts and the agent does all the slog.
Even if AI can whip up a quick demo or prototype for a game, it is the long-tail of tedious details that a passionate person has to hammer away on that separates what ships from what dies. I'm guessing most AI opportunists are looking for quick wins.
I still think it is only a matter of time before someone with the passion hammers an AI to get a game to market.
In the other corner we have the AAA publishers who are laying off devs and canceling games and talking as if AI is going to revolutionize their business… somehow.
Not to be argumentative since I broadly agree with your characterization (and the mass cancelling of games is concerning), but I think AI will revolutionize at least asset creation.
I worked on sports titles for a while and there was literally an army of contractors making uniforms, shoes, hairstyles, etc. I'm pretty convinced gen-AI will make that job obsolete.
I think the most interesting argument similar to yours centers around the problems of "social VR", that is, maybe people would like something like Horizon Worlds if the authoring tools weren't so bad. Part of the problem is that affordable XR headsets have a tiny amount of RAM and headsets with a moderate amount of RAM are crazy expensive and headsets with enough RAM just don't exist. Assuming you had something that could run generated worlds it would certainly be nice though if somebody could prompt them into existence.
I think you could make decent assets with AI but I don't know if the people who make video games today could. There's a certain kind of tastelesness which seems to infect people when they get infected with AI fever -- I think "gamers" are on edge for signs of this kind of thing because the AAA game makers give them off copiously no matter what they do.
That article is brilliant.
Wow thanks for posting this. Stole the show for me.