New director starting with “building on the successful launch of starfield,…” doesn’t inspire confidence. Neither did kotick though so let’s just see what happens
The layoffs are largely because of the class war going on, they are a part of essentially a broader collective threat to labor from the ruling class, but also I think the video game industry is blatantly trying to do what the movie industry tried to do with AI it is just there isn’t an industry union to fight it. The execs are saying “we can train AI on all the past and present labor of our artists and then just fire the artists!”. They aren’t stupid enough to commit fully to this strategy so soon after the labor strikes in the movie industry, but mark my words this is just testing the waters.
I think they can particularly get away with this because gamers tend to be the kind of people who will scream “skill issue” or naively parrot a talking point at you if you bring up the political consequences of AI being used to consolidate power in the ruling class. As a result there is almost zero actual solidarity between fans and creators in this industry.
Either workers in the video game industry will lose a historic amount of power (and thus benefits, job security, pay etc…) in the next couple of years or there will be a historic amount of labor organizing. Those are the two possibilities. It doesn’t really matter if the AI actually functions as a replacement for the artists for this happen, the narrative not the truth is the important part in undercutting the quality of life of video game industry workers. Once the damage is done companies will say that they maybe oversold the potential of AI to replace artists to their investors but even when they do they will never reverse the cuts they made to their workers. It will just become the new norm.
Even if in the best case for workers, using AI ends up being a frustrating waste of time for video game development, massive video game companies will force their workers to use shitty AI tools as part of their development process in order to jam reality into fitting the narrative they used to justify cutting investment into their workers. That is a small price to pay for the opportunity to fundamentally change the power dynamics between video game industry workers and the owners of the companies.
The root cause of so many of these layoffs is overspending. It’s also often, ironically, overspending linked to success. Gaming boomed during the pandemic when most of us were locked up at home with nothing to do, so companies saw currency signs in their eyes and jumped in on it.
Literally discussed in the article. The people’s revolution is not upon us, comrade!
Ok, well retailers are also all saying shoplifting is destroying their profits and causing them to close stores and that is all nonsense. Why should I take these video game companies at their word?
I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m pretty sure during the Anthem fiasco it leaked that EA doesn’t prevent studios from using other engines, but strongly incentivizes teams to use Frostbite. For instance by taking the licensing fee out of the development budget meaning you either cut down the scope or use an engine that might not be suited for the project.
It’s very EA to say “you can use whatever you want” and then leave out the “but we’re not going to help you if you don’t do as we want”.
eurogamer.net
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