I wouldn't worry about the AI takeover.  We will destroy the planet environmentally or via warfare long before AI takes over the world. 

I think you have that backwards. The planet is going to be fine, the planet has seen far worse temperature changes than what's happening now and been far hotter (and far colder) in the past. Even warfare, no one despite all their talk really has any incentive to want to get into a war that would in the process destroy their own country (which is what would happen in any kind of huge scale war). 

AI in our life times has the potential to cause economic and political strife unlike anything anyone has seen. 

People will eventually riot and burn things to the ground if enough of them have no jobs. 

An AI that eventually becomes self aware and can learn exponentially IMO is the biggest threat to humankind. That said, I think it will be banned at some point flat out. Even the upper class rich people will push for a ban, there's going to be no one to buy anything if the "poor peons" don't have any money to spend because they have no jobs. 

Lol, awesome.

People have been predicting automation doom since the 19th century and involving large language models specifically for decades. Yet we're seeing time and time again that 90% of people laid off from Midjourney or ChatGPT or whatever end up rehired because clueless CEOs had no idea what 'generative AI' actually is - neither intelligent nor artificial, for that matter.

(Not to mention the huge server/maintenance costs of these LLMs, most of which operate on a loss.)

Actually useful machine learning models might aid with development costs in the future but all that generative stuff... likely isn't it. Too much data entropy, possible legal challenges, and the limitations of human-reinforced learning are increasingly evident.

It's also taking it's baby steps now, AI is now where probably where the internet was maybe in 1993. 

I remember seeing my neighbor using it and scrolling through BBS forums and he was explaining the concept of "email" to me which I thought sounded like bonkers talk (electronic ... mail?). 

As things relate to the game industry though you're correct I don't think AI is sufficiently "intelligent" enough to handle huge tasks that would significantly reduce the budget explosion you see in the industry right now and won't be able to affect that time that's relevant to the immediate industry. 

But it could definitely be coming. I simply will not support that though. I have no interest in cheerleading destroying the lives of thousands of people who frankly are underpaid even today. For what? So I have prettier graphics? Gimme a fucking break. 

I don't even think the general gaming market is nearly as obsessed with graphics as a small minority of very loud people on the internet are. If they were the top 5 selling games every year, should be the ones with the best graphics, that's virtually never the case. GTAV is a PS3 game with lip gloss put on it, Minecraft looks like a PSOne era game on purpose, Mario Kart 8 is a Wii U game, those are the best selling games right now. 

Shawn Layden was head of Playstation until quite recently, he's even cited as one of the biggest architects of the whole concept of big budget "cinematic" games ... and even he is now saying this is not sustainable, lol. How much bigger of an authority than that can you get. You have internal memos from Insomniac's higher ups even questioning why they spent so much more money for an improvement they think many gamers won't really even appreciate. 

Here we go again from today.

Warner Bros. Discovery wants to move away from "one and done volatile" AAA console model and move more towards cheaper F2P titles that had longer revenue tails:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/warner-bros-discusses-volatile-aaa-console-games-will-lean-into-free-to-play-and-mobile/1100-6521597/?ftag=CAD-01-10abi2f&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

They literally had the no.1 selling game last year in Hogwarts Legacy, lol. The publisher of the no.1 selling game even wants out ... that's not a flattering picture of the AAA market. These games are way too expensive. 

And just as I've said now all the suits want GAAS titles where they can milk more money from these games.

The truth is all this is good for Nintendo in the console space, rising budgets means business-minded suits will be put in charge of all these 3rd parties, and even at the head of Playstation and XBox too ... and those new presidents/higher ups will all have a mandate to maximize profit margins and increase the potential buyer base of their top properties as their entire focus. That's good for Nintendo, they already know how to make games at a reasonable budget, so that's not going to really bother them. 

The dumb pettiness of the past where some of these companies had people in change still sour at Nintendo for some shit that happened back in 1992 or something is going to be flushed down the toilet where it belongs and you're to have these money-lapping suits desperate to put all their content everywhere they can, which means more 3rd party content is going to come to Nintendo, the Switch 2 probably will be the most strongly supported Nintendo platform by 3rd parties since the Super NES. 

Switch wins, PC wins, Playstation and XBox platforms though are going to be losers in all this. They will lose basically all their exclusives and 3rd party exclusives will also go the way of the dodo. The only platform that's going to have big exclusives left will be the Switch 2 and on top of that it will get a bunch of 3rd party franchises Nintendo has been locked out of. 

This sounds like WB is pulling the Western version of Konami bowing out of the market and focusing on mobile/pachinko machines. only for WB it's going to be tacky, cheaply designed live service crap with mobile games on the side, both of which will be designed to just siphon cash all year round, but I don't see either paying off, not in today's market.

It's just weird to me how many execs/CEO's you can see at the top of these companies calling the worst shots possible, and yet no one, not even the shareholders care to do anything, besides cutting those below them, who are not the ones at fault. This can only go on for so long before we eventually start seeing more CEO's/execs playing rapid musical chairs and swapping to other companies to wreck, right up until each of them magically decide to "retire" with their golden parachutes. 

It could be a sign of AAA problems...and it could be that Warner Bros is just filled with idiots on a lot of things. No reason to assume the worst when the simple answer could be 'one company are morons'.

WB is blaming the market for suicide squad instead of blaming their crappy game.

I think it's becoming more and more obvious that around $100-$150 million for a game budget is where things get dicey for these studios. That's *a lot* of money and even if you are profitable, the higher ups at a company who are responsible for delivering that money begin to get more involved with process. That's not play money anymore.

Once you are getting into $150 million budget range projects, you're into a different business altogether and business suits are going to run the show. This is not an after school hobby club when you're talking about that kind of money.

These companies will hire presidents who's no.1 focus is maximizing profit. Which fair enough, when you put $150+ million of your own money into a project, maybe you can let your developers do as they please, but in the real world there are consequences once you want to make games that big. The oversight will inevitably come from up top. No board of directors is going to let a dev studio goof around with $150 million+++++. They're going to want profit maximization. They're going to start asking why the game isn't on platform XYZ, they're going to start asking why they're spending 6-7 years waiting for a return on investment on a product that can be beaten in like a weekend and then there's no more money to collect. Any board of directors is going to want to find new revenue streams when production costs are 3-5x+++ higher.

This is just normal business stuff. This is how the business world works. This is not an afternoon hobby club for nerds to hang out and make their life's ambition in gaming form while burning 100-500 million dollars of money that isn't theirs. 

The telling thing about this though is here is a company with the best selling game of last year and they still want to move away from this business model.