13 ms·

Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

241 points by Limb 26d ago

qw_qrtx 26d ago
I have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse. Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else. I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.
- ctoth 26d ago
  You may wish to check if the screen name JackWeinberg is available.
tiahura 26d ago
The argument that it is in shambles wasn’t particularly persuasive. “videogames are as profitable as ever” It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.
- qw_qrtx 26d ago
  "the industry" also includes "human resources", previously known as personnel or humans. Any why always call critics "frustrated" in order to depict them as weak and spiteful? Isn't the Dwarf Fortress guy independent anyway?
- mcphage 26d ago
  Video games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
- dexwiz 26d ago
  Profit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
  - bhewes 26d ago
    Worse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
    - spwa4 26d ago
      Yes, then this part was regulated. And so if you allow cash out, you're regulated. The result was not regulated gambling but extermination of cash out options (well, and sometimes very obvious illegal gambling houses).
- moshun 26d ago
  Part of the problem is that some investor somewhere making profits is considered the only real marker for success. It’s an insane perspective that devalues all other (arguably more important) aspects of a work’s success.
  - ctoth 26d ago
    It sounds like you're complaining about capitalism, not AI?
    - sm-silversight 26d ago
      Shareholder capitalism as milton friedman argued for it. Ford had a different vision but the Dodge brothers stamped it out.
      - tancop 26d ago
        Ford's vision wasn't that much better. Old school manager controlled companies only work if the people in charge are great like him with big plans and the skills to realize them. If the CEO is just average it will end badly, and if they good but retire or die in office their successor will probably be worse. And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
        badpun 26d ago
        > The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership. Is there any evidence of this claim being true?
        deleted 26d ago
        [deleted]
  - 26d ago
- makerofthings 26d ago
  Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not. An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
  - andrewmutz 26d ago
    Don’t you make more money if the game is fun to play? (People buy the game)
    - makerofthings 26d ago
      A huge marketing budget can push a mediocre game far further than a really good indie game that doesn't get lucky with youtube.
      - spwa4 26d ago
        ... which is why it was, and still is, common economic knowledge that the government must control marketplaces. Meaning the physical areas where trading is taking place. We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments. But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well. And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores. Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
    - jasonlotito 26d ago
      No. 100% not. To equate fun to play to people buying the game is 100% not how you should say making more money is more people buying the game. Money is money. If the game is mediocre but it is fun enough, it can get more money than a game that is more fun but doesn't have as many opportunities to spend. This is why things like dark patterns exist that try to get you to spend money through FOMO and other mechanisms like loot boxes. You can argue that all of these things are people having "fun," but I wouldn't define that as fun to play. Finally, none of these necessitate people buying the game, but rather spending money in the game. Usually, it's free games where people buy a secondary currency to spend on virtual items. Mobile apps, for example, are huge with this. So the real answer to your question on multiple grounds is no. Edit: Now, I will give you that people do have to make a choice, but that's like saying that gambling addiction is not real and it's a choice, or drug addiction is real and it's a choice. The reason for alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous is bogus because it's just a choice, but it would be dangerous to classify it as just a choice.
- megagpt4 26d ago
  The profitable videogames are mobileslop appstorespam games loaded to the brim with microtransactions, as well as the really good games that everyone wants to play, which are impossible to create more of on a whim.
- fzeroracer 26d ago
  Profitability can only matter as long as the ecosystem is sustainable; otherwise once the floor collapses there's no more money to be made. A game can be profitable, but when the entire team that made it is laid off or furloughed before launch there isn't a team anymore to follow up. Eventually those people leave the industry and there isn't enough capital made by your average worker to fund their own gaming studio, relying on investors or the rich to parasitize their work in order to create more games. This is part of the reason why we see endless games as a service despite 90% of them failing. Teams have to do the bidding of the rich, but the rich don't know what's 'fun'.
newtonianrules 26d ago
Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
- dfxm12 26d ago
  I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech). Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
- pavel_lishin 26d ago
  Were they ever well run?
- anonreeeeplor 26d ago
  [dead]
- martythemaniak 26d ago
  I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t... The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform. You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives. In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
profstasiak 26d ago
We need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihad
- tedd4u 26d ago
  Instead, we got Universal Paperclips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - slazaro 26d ago
    Which ironically is the name of a pretty amazing game: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
    - Sohcahtoa82 26d ago
      Ah shit, here I go again. The last two hours of productivity today are toast.
anonreeeeplor 26d ago
[dead]
munificent 26d ago
1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually. Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone. Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
- lackoftactics 26d ago
  This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle. How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
  - ryandvm 26d ago
    Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
    - archagon 26d ago
      It's pretty clear to me that the primary value-add of AI is as an enshittification accelerator. (At least in the commercial sector.)
      - 26d ago
hax0ron3 26d ago
>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor? The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs. >Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand. I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.
- dibujaron 26d ago
  "Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI" I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.
  - ThrowawayR2 26d ago
    I'll believe that when I can get a robot plumber or electrician to come to my house for less than what a senior SWE makes per hour. Until then, it's just an empty promise.
  - bryanlarsen 26d ago
    Blue collar workers such as plumbers are in danger of being replaced by robots, but not any time soon. But by the time this happens, enough people from more vulnerable fields will have been forced out that a "solution" will have been found. The "solution" is much more likely to be dystopic than utopic though.
square_usual 26d ago
In the first paragraph: > While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says: > It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY. Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as bad as they've ever been.
- deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
- prophesi 26d ago
  Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4... edit: Tarn Adams is also an indie game developer, not a game journalist. Dwarf Fortress is highly influential in the indie game scene.
  - square_usual 25d ago
    You can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-falls-7-fy26-121105743.html https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f... Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division). The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.
    - prophesi 25d ago
QuadrupleA 26d ago
Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."
- madrox 26d ago
  If you take away the cynical edge, though, if this actually happens we're talking about an age of mom-and-pop businesses in industries that have not traditionally had them. It can't/won't be all software, but mom and pop stores were only about serving their neighborhood to begin with.
  - sleight42 25d ago
    LOL no it won't because mom and pop won't be able to afford to run a business and no one would be able to afford to buy from them either.
tptacek 26d ago
I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.
- shevy-java 26d ago
  This seems to be miss the topic. Isn't the topic about AI and how damaging it can be? I am not sure why you want to discredit the messenger; the message appears to be correct. That should be a better focus. > Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation. Well, that is an assumption. You have to demonstrate this claim. Right now I do not believe that claim.
  - Supermancho 26d ago
    > the message appears to be correct. "in shambles because of AI" no. It's the same as it always was.
- stryan 26d ago
  I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article. Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
  - lobf 26d ago
    Why do you think this?
  - tptacek 26d ago
    Why not? The code is famously convoluted and slow (see: dfhack). It's still an amazing accomplishment, but that doesn't make the code itself a challenge frontier models today aren't up to.
shevy-java 26d ago
AI is very disruptive. I'd wish people would stop boosting Skynet.
- bigstrat2003 26d ago
  More accurately stated, people's reactions are disruptive. The tech itself sucks and doesn't do any of the things boosters claim it does.
chias 26d ago
The number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up. [1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
daemin 26d ago
The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.
- ThrowawayTestr 26d ago
  Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.
  - daemin 26d ago
    I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs. Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer. There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.
    - drugstorecowboy 26d ago
      In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimately have a very limited number of attacks and very basic AI that consists of "Wait until player is in range, Run in a straight line toward the player until in attack range, attack". Even with that simplistic AI its pretty difficult and enjoyable.The player is meant to triumph over hundreds of enemies, its the player that learns and adapts to a static set of obstacles. If enemies in Dark Souls learned and adapted to the player, it would go from difficult to impossible very quickly and would not be enjoyable. The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.
slowhadoken 26d ago
It’s been in bad shape for the last 11 years.
Ancapistani 26d ago
I’m in the front of the line for the Tarn Adams fan club, but I don’t think he’d be my first pick for advice on the state of software engineering. DF is exceptional in many ways, not all of them uniformly positive.
bob1029 26d ago
Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.
- vuurmot 25d ago
  there already tons of interesting games generated over at www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev I think it is over
  - bob1029 25d ago
    What would you say is the best example of an AI created game?
madrox 26d ago
When we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind. I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side. As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.
- invalidptr 26d ago
  Netflix disruption might be an apt metaphor, since it did severely damage the industry and reduce the quality of its output. Those Hollywood execs were right, even if they were ultimately doomed. It's another step in the Sheinification of everything. If it happens to software too, it won't be a victory for anyone except the owners of software companies.
  - boinkboink78912 26d ago
    [flagged]
  - vablings 26d ago
    I honestly couldn't disagree more. With the advent of online services, the quality of both tv series and movies have massively increased. Budgets are larger the appetite is larger and grass roots non-Hollywood creators have a serious shot at disrupting the market. I am personally no longer interested in the same shitty nostalgia rehash of previously garbage marvelslop and the same 15-20 actors on my screen and that has started to change because I have way more choice.
goawaydang 26d ago
[flagged]
- radnor 26d ago
  are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein
insane_dreamer 26d ago
> now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don't understand—and are able to self-delude themselves into thinking it's replicable at scale, or that it's even producing the same quality as the product they've actually been selling. this is happening across all industries
- mock-possum 26d ago
  But will people buy it? (Spoiler: more than you’re comfortable with, yes they will)
pandaman 25d ago
The article makes note about profits as high as ever, which is true for the revenues. Revenue of the industry used to grow every year until 2020, when it stalled and had been the same for the past 5 years. While revenue remains the same, the cost raises - people want more money due to inflation, benefits cost more, capital costs more etc. etc. So no, profits are not as high as ever, they had been falling steadily over the past 6 years and as the result we see all the layoffs and studio closures. Is AI the reason? I somehow doubt that AI caused the revenue to stall in 2021. In 2021 AI could not even draw hands, least write decent code. What we had around that period was a lot of M&A in the industry. Insane capital went into buying up game studios and even publishers like Zenimax and Activision. Embracer alone acquired ~200 studios in 2019-2022. If I wanted to know why the industry is fucked up now I'd be looking there, not at the AI.
andrevallee 25d ago
[flagged]
gilbetron 25d ago
AI lets people cosplay as whatever field they are interested in. You can feel like a game developer, or doctor, or writer, or artist, and it's fun!

241 points by Limb 26d ago

I have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse. Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else. I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.

ctoth 26d ago
You may wish to check if the screen name JackWeinberg is available.

tiahura 26d ago

The argument that it is in shambles wasn’t particularly persuasive. “videogames are as profitable as ever” It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.

qw_qrtx 26d ago
"the industry" also includes "human resources", previously known as personnel or humans. Any why always call critics "frustrated" in order to depict them as weak and spiteful? Isn't the Dwarf Fortress guy independent anyway?
mcphage 26d ago
Video games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
dexwiz 26d ago
Profit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
- bhewes 26d ago
  Worse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
  - spwa4 26d ago
    Yes, then this part was regulated. And so if you allow cash out, you're regulated. The result was not regulated gambling but extermination of cash out options (well, and sometimes very obvious illegal gambling houses).
moshun 26d ago
Part of the problem is that some investor somewhere making profits is considered the only real marker for success. It’s an insane perspective that devalues all other (arguably more important) aspects of a work’s success.
- ctoth 26d ago
  It sounds like you're complaining about capitalism, not AI?
  - sm-silversight 26d ago
    Shareholder capitalism as milton friedman argued for it. Ford had a different vision but the Dodge brothers stamped it out.
    - tancop 26d ago
      Ford's vision wasn't that much better. Old school manager controlled companies only work if the people in charge are great like him with big plans and the skills to realize them. If the CEO is just average it will end badly, and if they good but retire or die in office their successor will probably be worse. And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
      - badpun 26d ago
        > The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership. Is there any evidence of this claim being true?
        deleted 26d ago
        [deleted]
- 26d ago
makerofthings 26d ago
Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not. An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
- andrewmutz 26d ago
  Don’t you make more money if the game is fun to play? (People buy the game)
  - makerofthings 26d ago
    A huge marketing budget can push a mediocre game far further than a really good indie game that doesn't get lucky with youtube.
    - spwa4 26d ago
      ... which is why it was, and still is, common economic knowledge that the government must control marketplaces. Meaning the physical areas where trading is taking place. We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments. But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well. And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores. Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
  - jasonlotito 26d ago
    No. 100% not. To equate fun to play to people buying the game is 100% not how you should say making more money is more people buying the game. Money is money. If the game is mediocre but it is fun enough, it can get more money than a game that is more fun but doesn't have as many opportunities to spend. This is why things like dark patterns exist that try to get you to spend money through FOMO and other mechanisms like loot boxes. You can argue that all of these things are people having "fun," but I wouldn't define that as fun to play. Finally, none of these necessitate people buying the game, but rather spending money in the game. Usually, it's free games where people buy a secondary currency to spend on virtual items. Mobile apps, for example, are huge with this. So the real answer to your question on multiple grounds is no. Edit: Now, I will give you that people do have to make a choice, but that's like saying that gambling addiction is not real and it's a choice, or drug addiction is real and it's a choice. The reason for alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous is bogus because it's just a choice, but it would be dangerous to classify it as just a choice.
megagpt4 26d ago
The profitable videogames are mobileslop appstorespam games loaded to the brim with microtransactions, as well as the really good games that everyone wants to play, which are impossible to create more of on a whim.
fzeroracer 26d ago
Profitability can only matter as long as the ecosystem is sustainable; otherwise once the floor collapses there's no more money to be made. A game can be profitable, but when the entire team that made it is laid off or furloughed before launch there isn't a team anymore to follow up. Eventually those people leave the industry and there isn't enough capital made by your average worker to fund their own gaming studio, relying on investors or the rich to parasitize their work in order to create more games. This is part of the reason why we see endless games as a service despite 90% of them failing. Teams have to do the bidding of the rich, but the rich don't know what's 'fun'.

newtonianrules 26d ago

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

dfxm12 26d ago
I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech). Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
pavel_lishin 26d ago
Were they ever well run?
anonreeeeplor 26d ago
[dead]
martythemaniak 26d ago
I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t... The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform. You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives. In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.

profstasiak 26d ago

We need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihad

tedd4u 26d ago
Instead, we got Universal Paperclips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- slazaro 26d ago
  Which ironically is the name of a pretty amazing game: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
  - Sohcahtoa82 26d ago
    Ah shit, here I go again. The last two hours of productivity today are toast.

anonreeeeplor 26d ago

[dead]

munificent 26d ago

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually. Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone. Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.

lackoftactics 26d ago
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle. How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
- ryandvm 26d ago
  Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
  - archagon 26d ago
    It's pretty clear to me that the primary value-add of AI is as an enshittification accelerator. (At least in the commercial sector.)
    - 26d ago

hax0ron3 26d ago

>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor? The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs. >Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand. I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.

dibujaron 26d ago
"Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI" I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.
- ThrowawayR2 26d ago
  I'll believe that when I can get a robot plumber or electrician to come to my house for less than what a senior SWE makes per hour. Until then, it's just an empty promise.
- bryanlarsen 26d ago
  Blue collar workers such as plumbers are in danger of being replaced by robots, but not any time soon. But by the time this happens, enough people from more vulnerable fields will have been forced out that a "solution" will have been found. The "solution" is much more likely to be dystopic than utopic though.

square_usual 26d ago

In the first paragraph: > While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says: > It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY. Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as bad as they've ever been.

deleted 26d ago
[deleted]
prophesi 26d ago
Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4... edit: Tarn Adams is also an indie game developer, not a game journalist. Dwarf Fortress is highly influential in the indie game scene.
- square_usual 25d ago
  You can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-falls-7-fy26-121105743.html https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f... Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division). The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.
  - prophesi 25d ago

QuadrupleA 26d ago

Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."

madrox 26d ago
If you take away the cynical edge, though, if this actually happens we're talking about an age of mom-and-pop businesses in industries that have not traditionally had them. It can't/won't be all software, but mom and pop stores were only about serving their neighborhood to begin with.
- sleight42 25d ago
  LOL no it won't because mom and pop won't be able to afford to run a business and no one would be able to afford to buy from them either.

tptacek 26d ago

I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.

shevy-java 26d ago
This seems to be miss the topic. Isn't the topic about AI and how damaging it can be? I am not sure why you want to discredit the messenger; the message appears to be correct. That should be a better focus. > Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation. Well, that is an assumption. You have to demonstrate this claim. Right now I do not believe that claim.
- Supermancho 26d ago
  > the message appears to be correct. "in shambles because of AI" no. It's the same as it always was.
stryan 26d ago
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article. Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
- lobf 26d ago
  Why do you think this?
- tptacek 26d ago
  Why not? The code is famously convoluted and slow (see: dfhack). It's still an amazing accomplishment, but that doesn't make the code itself a challenge frontier models today aren't up to.

shevy-java 26d ago

AI is very disruptive. I'd wish people would stop boosting Skynet.

bigstrat2003 26d ago
More accurately stated, people's reactions are disruptive. The tech itself sucks and doesn't do any of the things boosters claim it does.

chias 26d ago

The number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up. [1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

daemin 26d ago

The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.

ThrowawayTestr 26d ago
Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.
- daemin 26d ago
  I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs. Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer. There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.
  - drugstorecowboy 26d ago
    In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimately have a very limited number of attacks and very basic AI that consists of "Wait until player is in range, Run in a straight line toward the player until in attack range, attack". Even with that simplistic AI its pretty difficult and enjoyable.The player is meant to triumph over hundreds of enemies, its the player that learns and adapts to a static set of obstacles. If enemies in Dark Souls learned and adapted to the player, it would go from difficult to impossible very quickly and would not be enjoyable. The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.

slowhadoken 26d ago

It’s been in bad shape for the last 11 years.

Ancapistani 26d ago

I’m in the front of the line for the Tarn Adams fan club, but I don’t think he’d be my first pick for advice on the state of software engineering. DF is exceptional in many ways, not all of them uniformly positive.

bob1029 26d ago

Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.

vuurmot 25d ago
there already tons of interesting games generated over at www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev I think it is over
- bob1029 25d ago
  What would you say is the best example of an AI created game?

madrox 26d ago

When we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind. I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side. As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.

invalidptr 26d ago
Netflix disruption might be an apt metaphor, since it did severely damage the industry and reduce the quality of its output. Those Hollywood execs were right, even if they were ultimately doomed. It's another step in the Sheinification of everything. If it happens to software too, it won't be a victory for anyone except the owners of software companies.
- boinkboink78912 26d ago
  [flagged]
- vablings 26d ago
  I honestly couldn't disagree more. With the advent of online services, the quality of both tv series and movies have massively increased. Budgets are larger the appetite is larger and grass roots non-Hollywood creators have a serious shot at disrupting the market. I am personally no longer interested in the same shitty nostalgia rehash of previously garbage marvelslop and the same 15-20 actors on my screen and that has started to change because I have way more choice.

goawaydang 26d ago

[flagged]

radnor 26d ago
are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein

insane_dreamer 26d ago

> now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don't understand—and are able to self-delude themselves into thinking it's replicable at scale, or that it's even producing the same quality as the product they've actually been selling. this is happening across all industries

mock-possum 26d ago
But will people buy it? (Spoiler: more than you’re comfortable with, yes they will)

pandaman 25d ago

The article makes note about profits as high as ever, which is true for the revenues. Revenue of the industry used to grow every year until 2020, when it stalled and had been the same for the past 5 years. While revenue remains the same, the cost raises - people want more money due to inflation, benefits cost more, capital costs more etc. etc. So no, profits are not as high as ever, they had been falling steadily over the past 6 years and as the result we see all the layoffs and studio closures. Is AI the reason? I somehow doubt that AI caused the revenue to stall in 2021. In 2021 AI could not even draw hands, least write decent code. What we had around that period was a lot of M&A in the industry. Insane capital went into buying up game studios and even publishers like Zenimax and Activision. Embracer alone acquired ~200 studios in 2019-2022. If I wanted to know why the industry is fucked up now I'd be looking there, not at the AI.

andrevallee 25d ago

[flagged]

gilbetron 25d ago

AI lets people cosplay as whatever field they are interested in. You can feel like a game developer, or doctor, or writer, or artist, and it's fun!