The Impact of AI on Game Dev Jobs. Open to Work Crisis

0x3f

I'm not convinced the bad market is due to AI at all. That's just a convenient excuse to do layoffs without the bad PR normally involved in admitting you need to do layoffs. Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.

tayo42

The topic has been done to death by now but this > He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on. The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.

stego-tech

No real idea why this bubbled to the front page, as it’s just another milquetoast subjective take from a single point of view recapping the same events from their context. Nothing added, no food for thought, just the same old, same old. We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.

Apocryphon

I have to wonder how GenAI would have fared if these LLMs had become available anytime before 2020, during the “normal” tech bubble. It feels like the faith in it is as much to slash costs while appearing to be cutting-edge (and thus, worthy of what little investment is still available), as it is because of its capabilities. Where would we be if the tech industry wasn’t in such a dire state due to the end of ZIRP?

hackthemack

Idle thought. Not an economist. What if the current tech scene is like how the u.s. capitalist class took power away from blue color workers in the 80s, 90s by leveraging cheaper labor in foreign countries? Now, programmers, sysadmins, system engineers no longer have leverage (real or imagined) because the owners just point to AI.

Tiktaalik

Games imploded long before AI was in wide use. There were back to back worst years ever for layoffs in 2023,2024.

shagie

For game dev, I believe that it is remiss to not include mention of the change in the gamer landscape. Ten years ago, it was console vs PC as the big game question... and various studios took bets on one or both sides of that. Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once. Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights . Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M). As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms. Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story. Gamers are dying out(*) - Belluar News https://youtu.be/_80DVbedWiI

pclowes

I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates than AI. This may change but I am deeply skeptical of massive RIFs being caused by AI at this point. Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…

sdsd

This post inspired me to donate to the only video game I've played in years, PokeMMO. Btw if anyone here plays my username is ieatpears, send a friend request or whatever, I'd love to play with someone else!