I hate to say it, but I think in the long run Nintendo will cave. 

At their heart, Nintendo loves being a company with smaller teams being able to make games quickly and affordably (this is the heart of the Famicom and Super Famicom days). I think they long for those days, I don't think they like what game development is today, they just tolerate it because they have to. 

Generative AI also kind of solves the "graphics problem" for them, it will inevitably allow you to take a lower end base image and let the AI make a higher end visual result and in a way it kind of makes the graphics side of the game less important. Anyone/everyone will just have graphics that punch way above their weight class. 

Unfortunately characters artists and modelers will be pared down, but the ugly truth to that is that saves Nintendo money. 

I do think they will feel bad about certain elements of AI, but ultimately cave. It's not like Nintendo is a GPU supplier anyway, the writing is on the wall here, likely future "Nvidia GPUs" will become more like NPU/CUDA core driven devices anyway. Nintendo can't be some lone bastion of keeping traditional rendering going forever when none of the other major players in the industry are. 

I do think they will put up a token fight at first and resist for a while, but ultimately they will cave as other big companies standardize this kind of workflow. 

Then AI really is destroying the economy like I said it would. People will be too poor to afford new products from pretty much any company. Thanks for nothing, AI bros., you're sending us towards another Great Depression.

Such concerns are completely valid, I'm not advocating for this direction just stating that's where I see things shaking out. 

Isn't there a way to avert this or at least survive it?

Take me for instance. I studied to be an artist and animator, and thanks to AI my livelihood has been reduced to collecting disability benefits. There's no way I can afford a house on disability benefits alone, and I don't have the experience to find a different job.

AI ruined my life, which further makes it personal when I see idiots advocate for AI.

You're completely right to feel how you feel. I do think there will be a coming backlash to this from a sizable portion of people (well I mean you can already see it now) though who will value human made art. 

RTGI and hybrid-RT solutions like Lumen already automate a lot of intensive lighting work. That's why so many publishers push to use UE5 even when their developers have proprietary engines. 

I don't think this will erase artists from the process entirely, just like these technologies didn't, but like with every industry it will likely mean less hiring of entry-level people. 

I suspect unemployment will be around 20% by 2030, but much, much higher for those early in their career. And it will affect pretty much every industry. That's a recipe for a social revolution and will be THE political problem to solve. It's probably a good thing it would be so widespread though because that means the problem can't be thrown under the rug. 

The big wildcard is embodied intelligence/robotics. I hope it isn't solved before then. 

This is why I keep saying AI will lead to humanity going extinct. I'm tired of being brushed off as someone who's "overreacting", just like people who were warning everyone else about Hitler.

RTGI and hybrid-RT solutions like Lumen already automate a lot of intensive lighting work. That's why so many publishers push to use UE5 even when their developers have proprietary engines. 

I don't think this will erase artists from the process entirely, just like these technologies didn't, but like with every industry it will likely mean less hiring of entry-level people. 

I suspect unemployment will be around 20% by 2030, but much, much higher for those early in their career. And it will affect pretty much every industry. That's a recipe for a social revolution and will be THE political problem to solve. It's probably a good thing it would be so widespread though because that means the problem can't be thrown under the rug. 

The big wildcard is embodied intelligence/robotics. I hope robotics isn't solved before then. 

To be honest, I kind of am wondering why even bother with ray/path tracing/Lumen at all. Those things still take a ton of compute. 

The one example in the DF video that stood out was Starfield which doesn't support raytracing/path tracing/Lumen at all and is by DF's own labelling a "flat looking game" lighting wise. To their trained eyes they admitted the generative AI lighting added to the scenes made the game look like a path traced game. 

I mean if that's their initial reaction, that's likely easily good enough for "regular or even hardcore gamer Joe", DF was "fooled" and it's their job to pixel count things. 

That's another take away I kind of see here, why bother with extremely compute expensive technologies like path tracing and Lumen at all if you can get an image to "pop" lighting wise like that. Now I know there is a group of people who rightfully so hate that overlit look, but if you eventually get games where you don't even have reference to what the "normal lighting" is supposed to look like and you just have a game with a Neural rendering light engine (generative AI) ... you won't even know what the original looks/looked like and will just take at face value that is the lighting of the scene. 

The problem with this stance is that it implies nothing can be done other than somehow reverse technology in a Dune-esque fashion. I can't think of an example of this happening historically. 

But we can do something else. We can change the social system and move beyond capitalism. Capitalism is what is creating these x-risks.