Great logical and concise summary of the problem and most likely outcome. Which of course means it will immediately be disregarded and you will be attacked as a patriarchal misogynistic neuro-normative capitalist tool by the millenials and Zers that dominate online culture.

They will figure it out eventually but unfortunately will wreak a lot of lives in unproductive attempts to stop progress as we have seen with every great technological leap.
 

Tobold: "Curiously people are unable to remember these basic economics when it comes to game development."

I'm not always sure if people know about that in the first place...

"The machines just replace the mediocre workers making the low quality stuff that doesn't need the highly skilled workers."

One angle here is that if you extrapolate from this and say ALL mediocre work is covered by machines, where do the mediocre workers go? Since they can't go up, their only way is down to the work that isn't covered by machines due to cost or effort.
So you have a large part of the population in those jobs, then a gap for the machines and then high skill jobs. There you have quite the potential for tensions and I don't think the jobs being more comfortable than 18th century weaving will make up for it.
 

I think many people are overestimating just how much AI tools can "automate" game creation. We've already had things like procedural generation for years and the lesson that has taught us is that skilled workers are still needed to make that content good. I believe the exact same thing will happen with Ai toolsets.

Ai tools are indeed the future but just like how machines created a slew of new jobs to service and operate them Ai tools will do the same.

I'm already using Ai tools to help me code at my current job and I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years all programmers are expected to be proficient at prompt writing and AI assist tools. Same with artists and other jobs. Ai tools will simply be another tool in the bucket.
 

Good article. It is indeed difficult for those who lose their jobs, I've experienced it first hand so my heart goes out to them. But ultimately it is like you say, economics. If your contributions are not valuable enough to your company, you find somewhere else to work, or something else to do where they are. Don't give up, and don't cast blame, it won't help. Take ownership of your life, and keep moving forward.
 

You make talk about the evil manager and the blameless employee in a way that makes it clear that you don't think this is a reasonable interpretation of what happens in these massive corporations, but then you talk about how no employee is especially meaningful to the whole because they're all cogs in a machine... A machine run and directed by management. Do you not see the dissonance there?

You're absolutely right that no particular employee or developer is "responsible" for a game bombing, but you're letting management off the hook, executive management in particular. The Chief Monetization Officer is absolutely a scourge on modern game design, as they direct dozens or even hundreds of developers' work to ensure it is more capable of extracting consumer surplus from you through lootboxes or gacha mechanics. The decision to reduce workforce may not have malice, but that's only in a vacuum. The executives who are responsible for the binary boom-or-bust outcomes, who prioritize design and fun-per-hour behind exploitative monetization, or otherwise make the decisions that constrain development into the gutter do so with, if not malice, something sufficiently close to it. And the resulting workforce reductions are collateral damage of those careless or malicious decisions.
 

There is a strong tendency with people to paint stories in black and white, to assign labels like “victims” and “oppressors” to the groups in any story. The reality is never that way. Reality is nearly always a story where the responsibility for anything is shared between many people.

I don’t let management off the hook. I am very well aware that they are responsible for bad working conditions in the industry and features like monetization. I just don’t let employees off the hook either. What generally happens, in all industries in which working conditions are suboptimal, is that employees either leave or “silent quit”: That is to say they stop believing in what they are doing, and just show up for the monthly paycheck. They lost their passion, and simply don’t care anymore. And in the case of programmers, working that way is likely to produce various bugs.

Have you read the story how Suicide Squad was giving players who bought the premium edition of the game a few days of early access, but then there was a bug that gave newly logged in players a 100% story completion and spoiled much of the story? They had to shut down the servers for 12 hours to fix that, which meant that people didn’t get as much advance start as they had paid for. You need to do some real strange mental gymnastics to claim that management was 100% responsible for that problem, and no employee is at fault in any way for this.