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

qw_qrtx

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.

tiahura

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.

newtonianrules

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.

profstasiak

We need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihad

munificent

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.

hax0ron3

>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.

square_usual

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.

QuadrupleA

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."

tptacek

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

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

chias

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

daemin

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.

slowhadoken

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

Ancapistani

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

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.

madrox

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.

insane_dreamer

> 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

pandaman

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.