You’re gonna be disappointed as fuck. Open world games are so formulaic and actually easier to shit out than a well-crafted linear experience. Especially when youre using generative tools. Huge maps are NOT hard to create or fill when you don’t give a fuck about quality.
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.
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.
There are, were, and always will be games made in shorter development cycles. It’s just that people are finally coming to the conclusion that longer cycles shouldn’t be the norm.
I would hope most of the industry learned a big lesson from Apex Legends. The day before its release, no one knew of its existence. The sole reason that it blew up was because it was fun.
Viral sharing of interactivity is likely the most cost effective way to run a marketing campaign for games - not bus ads, pre-order hype, etc. In other words, Make good games.
Good games fail to make their money back all the time. It’s not enough to just make a good game. In the case of Apex Legends, a game that needs to keep you playing long term at the expense of others, it needed to not only be good but also be earlier to market than its competitors, which is impossible to plan for. Its success involves a lot of luck, too, and using it as an example is survivorship bias.
Take off your rose-tinted glasses. We would be having this issue with physical goods as well because every game would still be competing for the attention of the customer with every other game ever released. The only thing physical goods would do is chop off the legs of the indie scene because it would simply be too costly to put their random ideas on a disc. Vampire survivors wouldn't exist without digital releases, Balatro also probably wouldn't exist. A lot of even weirder indie games wouldn't exist because the cost of physically releasing them would be too much to take these random chances of releasing something weird.
I will highlight the existence of shareware, freeware, and other indie physical distribution channels. Both IBM compatibles and other PCs had "homebrew" scenes, not dissimilar to the "indie" scene today. The Amiga is still noted for the PD offerings it boasted. Many of the big companies now started as Indies. So, no.
Maybe I'm not old enough but I don't remember a time where shareware and freeware were part of a physical distribution channels. Most of my shareware I found on the internet and my knowledge of the Amiga public domain comes from Aminet, which started as a FTP site. I still had to get physical discs for full games, but shareware and abandonware I could easily find on the web.
As for for many big companies starting as indies. I'm not arguing "indie" didn't exist back then, my point was that it was too expensive for most people to be indie. The fact that we had 10-20 "indie" studios (kinda hard to call them indie when most of the time they also ended up being publishers for other studios) back in the day and now we have thousands of indie studios supports my point that it is easier to be indie today than it was when physical media was dominant. Part of it is because of easier development tools, part of it is easier publishing.
The vibes on this game were on point. Great game and I really really really hope they’re making another one. Preferably with workshop and mod support! And DLCs! I wanna tear more ships apart! RIP AND TEAR UNTIL IT IS DONE
I've got 500hrs in that game! This is the best news I've heard all year 😆 Signed up for the Pioneer Program immediately, of course without reading the T&C's properly, just like any loyal LYNX employee should! Oh boy, can't wait to "disagree and commit" some more.
Era One (very recently into early acces) feels a LOT like homeworld 2 used to. But the “build your big ships from blocks” is definitely something you need to get used to, and need to like.
And it’s from the Homeworld Complex people, who do not exactly have the best trackrecord in developing.
Best gaming news I’ve heard in a while. This was a fantastic new IP and really shows a lot of promise for future games. Really excited to see where they take this world.
Worried Blackbird was a publisher for a moment. Shipbreaker is great. I beat it twice (normally and no clones) and still play for relaxation. Captain Shack mentioned it during a stream a few days back and I was just thinking how it’s probably the only game where i’d actually willingly buy a DLC for a new set of ships or a sequel with the ability to add ships as workshop mods.
This is one of the few games I keep installed and jump back to just as a chill game that requires no intense planning or strategy. The mechanics are simple, well executed, and easy to pick back up after not playing for a while. So many games have tons of complex mechanics that are fine when you’re playing it, but hard to remember if you haven’t touched it in a while.
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