The layoffs are largely because of the class war going on, they are a part of essentially a broader collective threat to labor from the ruling class, but also I think the video game industry is blatantly trying to do what the movie industry tried to do with AI it is just there isn't an industry union to fight it. The execs are saying "we can train AI on all the past and present labor of our artists and then just fire the artists!". They aren't stupid enough to commit fully to this strategy so soon after the labor strikes in the movie industry, but mark my words this is just testing the waters.

I think they can particularly get away with this because gamers tend to be the kind of people who will scream "skill issue" or naively parrot a talking point at you if you bring up the political consequences of AI being used to consolidate power in the ruling class. As a result there is almost zero actual solidarity between fans and creators in this industry.

Either workers in the video game industry will lose a historic amount of power (and thus benefits, job security, pay etc...) in the next couple of years or there will be a historic amount of labor organizing. Those are the two possibilities. It doesn't really matter if the AI actually functions as a replacement for the artists for this happen, the narrative not the truth is the important part in undercutting the quality of life of video game industry workers. Once the damage is done companies will say that they maybe oversold the potential of AI to replace artists to their investors but even when they do they will never reverse the cuts they made to their workers. It will just become the new norm.

Even if in the best case for workers, using AI ends up being a frustrating waste of time for video game development, massive video game companies will force their workers to use shitty AI tools as part of their development process in order to jam reality into fitting the narrative they used to justify cutting investment into their workers. That is a small price to pay for the opportunity to fundamentally change the power dynamics between video game industry workers and the owners of the companies.

[–] smeg 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or the much simpler explanation that companies over-stretched in an economic boom and now need to cut costs

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Where are the huge losses being posted by gaming companies? This was a great year for games. It is nonsense.

[–] smeg 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The root cause of so many of these layoffs is overspending. It's also often, ironically, overspending linked to success. Gaming boomed during the pandemic when most of us were locked up at home with nothing to do, so companies saw currency signs in their eyes and jumped in on it.

Literally discussed in the article. The people's revolution is not upon us, comrade!

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ok, well retailers are also all saying shoplifting is destroying their profits and causing them to close stores and that is all nonsense. Why should I take these video game companies at their word?

[–] smeg 1 points 10 months ago

You don't need to take their word for anything, I'm sure they'll come up with whatever excuse so they don't have to admit that they made stupid mistakes and are terrible at business