See, this is the thing people don’t realize when they think generative AI is going to reduce headcounts overall.
Corporations suck. The entire reason they exist is because of the high transactional costs surrounding labor (there’s a Nobel winning economics essay on this from the turn of the 20th century called “the nature of the firm”).
They will reduce value and increase price as much as possible because they only exist to be a middleman between the consumer and the producer.
But right now there’s no alternative. It’s crazy expensive to make AA and up games so you need to target mass market appeal to get the money for it and usually need to crawl up finance bros’ asses who don’t even play games and look down on those who do.
That’s all about to change dramatically.
Co-op studio structures where employees are owners, smaller teams with large aspirations, franchises with small but dedicated fan bases - these largely died out in the 90s besides remnant very indie groups as transactional costs to produce a game went through the roof and those costs are about to turn around.
Yes, gen AI means less people are needed to make a game. But it doesn’t mean less people will be making games. It means there will be more games, and games coming from people with vision rather than coming from people with a quarterly statement they are trying to maximize.
Hello Games was a team of around a dozen people, and while it was a bumpy road, using procgen allowed them to build an entire universe. Well procgen and a whole host of other tools are about to suck a lot less and be much more accessible to even small studios to make ambitious games.
My hope is that we see things happen rapidly enough that many of the thousands of devs who have lost their jobs at mega-corps will be able to reorganize to take on the Goliaths and win rather than be forced to move on to other industries.
A shakeup is about to happen that’s going to destroy the season pass, micro transaction, soulless meat grinder that’s most large studio/publishers today - it’s just maybe ~3 years out from the inflection point of no return.
But one thing is for certain - most of the largest games companies are woefully unprepared for what’s coming and are about to be stepped all over like Blockbuster or Circuit City.