Ludum Mortuus Est
brokentoys.org
brokentoys.org
But I ended up thinking that the title was a failure not because of grammar but because it makes my mind autocomplete the phrase in a way that the article does not intend. I see "Ludus mortuus est" and I immediately want to respond "Vivat ludus!"
this is wrong. mortuus, dead, is the perfect active participle of morī, to die. its adjectival in nature, hence the attribution via esse. not too different from english. although in latin one is more likely to write ludus mortuus. the est naturally is implied.
Mortuus est is always going to be analyzed as the 3rd person singular perfect passive† indicative form of morior, "has died" or just "died", not "is dead". That's what combining the participle with esse means.
Now, mortuus could just be a non-participial adjective instead. You could form a sentence that way that looked identical, ludus mortuus est, and it would mean "the game is dead", which just happens to be semantically identical with "the game has died". You can't be dead in the present without having finished dying in the past, and you can't have finished dying in the past without being dead in the present.
So we make the assumption that mortuus est is a verb, and not a predicative verb phrase, just because morior is a very common verb and this is a normal way to use it. The assumption is analogous to the assumption in English that when somebody says "time flies like an arrow", they are talking about the rapidity of the passage of time, and not exhorting the listener to apply stopwatches to flies the same way they would to an arrow.
† To the extent that morior is a passive verb. It isn't -- we call it "deponent", an active verb that takes grammatically passive forms, like the English verb to be born -- and so mortuus est is just a perfect active form.
The games industry makes more money than music and movies combined. It’s no where close to extinction. It does have all the problems of any entertainment industry though where the creators love the product and put up with unfair wages, hours, and personalities at the cost of their own well being.
> There are approximately 330,000 people who work in the video game industry.
> 9,000 of them have been laid off in 2023.
> 3,000 more of them have been laid off this month. You know, the one that's only half over.
That's a four percent reduction. Meta cut thirteen percent in November 2022, and it still exists, as does Twitter/X, which has notoriously cut far more staff. A four percent reduction is probably just beginning to clear out some dead wood, not the sign of impending extinction.
People didn't like inflation, but they loved inflated salaries. When people said "tackle inflation", they meant "lower prices", but didn't really consider that their salary increases were _also_ a result of inflation.
When you pull money out of the economy, companies cut spending and the single largest expense of tech companies is "salaries", so of course they're going to cut salaries.
The end result of this should all balance out, but in the mean time, everyone was mad about rising prices and didn't complain about rising salaries, and now they're mad about falling salaries and don't complain about falling prices.
In conclusion, (too much) inflation is bad and we should stop doing that.
Where?
I hear this argument regularly, but I’ve never understood why. Hyperinflation is historically a bad thing, but whenever I ask about deflation, I just get hand-waving about the Great Depression. Is there any reading that lays out the dangers of deflation?
This would be great for the environment, but absolutely terrible for the economy
Sometimes I think about this as promoting investment in cash. Deflation over time means cash yields a profit.
But since cash doesn't actually do anything, investing in cash instead of something else is harmful.
One implication of both of our comments is that unanticipated deflation is good. What causes problems is the reaction people take to anticipating that deflation will occur -- they wait it out -- not the fact that things are cheaper.
The necessary refinement would be that unanticipated deflation that comes from an increase in the amount of stuff is good, and unanticipated deflation that comes from a reduction in the amount of money is [?].
Introducing that dimension asks us to fill out the grid:
- anticipated deflation from an increase in the amount of stuff: [?]
- anticipated deflation from a reduction in the amount of money: bad
In these discussions it's easy to forget that it's not only things that get cheaper or more expensive. Services and people's salaries also adjust the same way. With deflation your salary will also go down.
But in either case, the problems associated with deflation come from the actions people take to prepare for it, not from the consequences of it having already happened.
The world should get richer, and things should get cheaper. Creating wealth is good.
Holding your breath will leave more oxygen for whoever survives .... but there won't be as many who need it left alive.
Deflation is deadly unless you worship coins as the only valid measure of economics.
Or don't, I've heard it hundreds of times, and it's still nonsensical, and it's unbelievable that people are being constantly harmed by inflationary monetary policy on such a ridiculous justification.
Generally I see AAA studios churning out Boring Shooter: 2024 Q1 edition. Pay $70 for the same engine, some balance tweaks, and a new map. But their games are pretty because they are the only ones who can afford to buy millions to make assets.
Indie games are, of course, where all the interesting mechanics are invented.
If AI makes it easy to generate assets, why won’t the AAA studios feel the pain first? Of course, everyone would love a stable job, and it is really sad when they lose them. But the management just contributes coordination. Maybe we’re heading toward a world small teams can leverage AI to fill their skill gaps, they can make some actually interesting games, and the AAA studios can go extinct. The game shattering Steam records was made by like 10 people apparently, and I think they didn’t even use AI (as far as I know).
None of this puts food on the table now of course, but the future could be better.
Because, as you said in your first paragraph, the AAA studios' USP is that their games look better. They have skilled artists, and for the moment generative assets aren't going to be able to match that - and they don't have to, for most purposes. Indie games using procedural generation is already a tradition, it's just going to kick up a notch, and then the low end of AA will start using it, and so on; I'm not saying this stuff won't eventually make it into the AAA games, but it's going to get there from the bottom up, and the low/middle-end - those studios that just barely kept a few artists on the payroll at the moment - will be the first jobs hit.
> None of this puts food on the table now of course, but the future could be better.
It'll be better for creative and original people. But those who were just getting by churning out good enough are in for a rough time.
Lovely description of current AAA drivel. Permission to reuse? :)
I used to call those "Battlefield of Honor of Duty", but I think that name combination isn't current any more.
This seems very selective. Shooters seem to take up a fairly small portion of released AAA games these days and it's easy to find AAA games that don't fit this at all. We all know about Zelda ToTK, Baldur's Gate III, Alan Wake II, Mario Bros. Wonder, Hi-fi Rush. All games that came out last year, are AAA games and take risks and don't fit what you criticize at all. We even had debates about Dave the Diver which is a game from a major studio, but kept getting falsely celebrated as a indy hit.
If anything the "boring shooters" like Cod and Medal of Honor are taking up less space these days. Fortnite might have started out as a shooter and is massive, but at this point it's hard to tell what it even is.
And I would not be surprised if this formula comes crashing down hard and people simply stop paying $70 for the same crap.
It's happened before to too-comfortable corporate gaming companies and I won't be sad this time either.
Okay, we'll wait and see whether games are really dead this time next year. That's an easy one to confirm, since he gave a prediction and a timeline. We can just wait a year and see if he's right, or if he's being hyperbolic to the point of inanity. Being really generous, I'll interpret his prediction as weaker than stated and say that the prediction is confirmed if there are 25% fewer games released this year than last.
For example, the author opines that
> Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love, from indie developers or the few good AAA development houses still running, and piles upon piles upon piles of AI-generated vomit that will make people nostalgic for the days when most of Steam's catalog was Unity Store asset flips.
> And gamers won't buy them.
The only games I cared about in 2023 were from indie developers or labors of love. But... "gamers" bought them. At least I did. Am I a "gamer"? Are the titles I care about going to suddenly fail in 2024? I don't see any evidence for that in the article. Will sales of titles I don't care about fall in 2024? I don't see any evidence for that in the article either.
I didn't buy any Unity Store asset flips or AI generated nonsense or NFT-powered whatever or gacha b.s. or Call of Duty 20XX: Shootie-Person Redux, and I wasn't planning on doing so in 2024. Should I be concerned about that industry?
I don't put much value in the EA/Activision/Blizzard/Tencent/etc. gaming shops. I haven't for a long time, though. If the market somehow killed those studios, I'd struggle to call that a bad thing? Should I think differently?
There is an even darker possible future: gamers WILL buy this AI generated crap. And the executives know it, since gamers have been buying their low effort budget cut pre-order alpha crap for years.
If people are willing to pay $70 for what is essentially just a database update...
Sure, to me personally it really doesn't matter how the assets are generated, gameplay is what matters. However, I will buy AI generated crap with good gameplay / design for 20€ with no DRM and no grinding, no microtransaction bullshit and no always-online.
So far, the doom and gloom prediction that games are almost dead doesn't seem to be true. At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters about your game is whether it's fun or not, and almost no one would care if a game used AI if people found it fun to play.
Looking at modern gaming and the modern games industry, I'm finding it pretty hard to be sad about it though.
The best games were finished before they were put onto physical media, to be owned and played forever.
I'm entirely okay if the rest of the future was only peoples passion projects.
Working in game dev and then complaining about the conditions looks like running out in the rain and complaining it’s wet. I have next to no sympathy for the unionization activism. A huge part of how marketable your skillset is comes down to the nicheness of the domain, or at least how applicable your skills are to various niche domains. Game dev is not niche, and you’ve all made your bed chasing this dream.
The game industry is monolithic, it has recently undergone a sweeping change, but no further change is possible, therefore it is safe to make a linear projection based on what's happened over the last six months out to infinity. And I'm skeptical that those are good assumptions to make.
> Epic Games in September laid off over 800 people, almost 15% of the entire company. Epic is one of the most successful and profitable game companies that exist. [...] For years, every other game company has tried to copy Fortnite, and mostly failed at the attempt. This is not enough to ensure job security
Okay, yeah, that's interesting, and no doubt traumatic for the people who were fired, their colleagues we have so far avoided it, and for devs working in the broader industry, and I am sympathetic. But: Sometimes companies overhire, sometimes corporate priorities shift, sometimes a company decides to reorient towards a leaning production model. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. There isn't any industry where overall profitability is, alone, enough to ensure job security. (And I'd also suggest that putting these layoffs in the context of the broader tech industry and the end of zero interest rates might also yield some useful insights...)
In any case, if Epic fires a bunch of devs, and profitability drops, then that was a mistake and they will try to staff back up. And if it doesn't (or rises) then that suggests that game development is actually more profitable than previously expected and individual game devs are more productive than previous realised, which will of course be cold comfort for the devs laid off, but suggests that overall employment and compensation across the broader industry will be tracking upwards not downwards, which is good news for game devs as a whole in the medium to long term.
To be clear: I do not want for one moment to defend the big studios (who appear, by and large, to have C-suites full of pod people who delight in human misery), or to minimise the very real pain suffered by gave devs, but the idea that an entire industry can somehow run off a cliff in a way which is permenantly non-recoverable is...well, let's say it's a bold claim that needs extraordinary support.
> Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love...
Yeah, plausible. But what do you think is going to happen in 2026 and 2027?
Why linear? Why not logarithmic?
All societies in the world should have mechanisms to protect vulnerable people in moments like these.
At the same time it’s impossible to reflect on the fact that maybe the videogame industry is extremely crowded and a lot of tasks will require less employees as the AI advances. As humans, do we really need to have this many people employed in videogame development?
The problem is that with capitalism, the only way to find out is by iterating economic cycles in which a lot of vulnerable people get abused. (Not claiming that any other economical system known to man would solve this issue in a better way)
E.g. the upcoming releases for steam[0] show eleven popular games coming out in the next three days, and it's a single platform.
Still sucks for those working in the industry and losing their employment tho.
Well, now they need to wipe Guild Wars 2 off the face of the earth and do a proper sequel to Guild Wars 1. Then I'll love them :)
- AI is 'good enough' for a lot of industries, and will be continued to go to market when it's 'good enough' for a given industry.
- That said, AI in games as it stands is really buggy. A "Good Enough" relationship, dialogue tree, Social Graph LLM for a game might take so much time finetuning that it may always be better to just start with Twine or an excel sheet.
- Gamers (with a capital G) are different from gamers. Gamers are the gaming equivalent of armchair food critics. They hate AI, and will brigade anything with a whiff of it, and will demonize anyone or anything that pushes back on them, even if the Gamers are wrong (see the 'Baldurs Gate Xalavier' drama).
- The issue is that Gamers are the influencers that determine whether the long tail of games (games that aren't AAA mainstays, yearly sports games, or the top multiplayer games) get enough momentum and traction to pop up for less serious gamers.
- Gamers hate AI, and will do everything in their power to make every content creator 'acknowledge the controversy' (these 'cancel culture'-adjacent dynamics are all downstream from Gamergate). Comnsidering Gamers are often the enthusiasts most game studios need to swing digital game store algos in their favor, you don't want to build a game that becomes a 'stand-in for a controversial topic.'
- If the game is polished enough and is a AAA game that has a dedicated audience, it'll get bought in spite of that.
- If the game was AA or indie, the influencers who'd amplify the game in other instances will talk about it like the end of True Artistic Gaming.
- This leads to less MTX-like games getting funded, because the long tail of gamers are mobile, and most mobile games are miniaturized one-way casinos with WoW guild warfare grafted onto it.
- If there are more layoffs as the gaming industry's financiers go risk off for lower ROI games, then only the AAA, P2W, gacha, battle pass games get funded, which creates a feedback loop.
So yes, games as an industry will continue to rake in money because gacha games, battle passes, and MTX business models make the overwhelming majority of the industry's revenue. What's being missed is that what saved gaming from the ET gaming market crash and took it to $1 billion in sales for Counter Strike lootboxes was the passion and specialized labor of a lot of people. A lot of issues with game development preservation have accumulated (losing source code, laying off people who knew how to build critically acclaimed games before doing knowledge transfer, etc), and will compound as thousands of people get laid off, and people either dial in core parts of games, or outsource logic to an LLM.
The article acts as a lamentation, because the games that most people above the age of 20 grew up with are not going to be made as often anymore, unless there's some way to introduce a whale/guppy power dynamic with online play, or a battle pass, or gacha "Pay-to-Win" mechanic that pays for itself within a few weeks of launch.
Unfortunately it misses the point - a huge number of these layoffs were companies purchased by Embracer Group, so a big part of it is overleveraged attempt at consolidation failing spectacularly. Secondly is just game industry cycle at big companies of overhiring and cutting fat. Thirdly is overall layoffs in tech industry in 2022-2023.
AI maybe had a small role in the unusually high number of layoffs in 2023 but it's far from the biggest factor, but the more banal truth is it was a combination of different events.
> Gamers watch this video and think "Wow, that is some really trite and boring dialogue. Could we not?" > CEOs watch this video and think "I can fire so many people next week." > Designers? Just get the AI to shit out some dialogue, no one cares about it anyway. Artists? AI already pillaged all their work, no need for them to come in any more. Programmers? Feh, just slap some API framework together and call it a day, get an intern to do it. > Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love, from indie developers or the few good AAA development houses still running, and piles upon piles upon piles of AI-generated vomit that will make people nostalgic for the days when most of Steam's catalog was Unity Store asset flips. > And gamers won't buy them. > And game development studio heads will ask what happened. > And no one will answer, because everyone is gone. > Ludum mortuus est.
So I guess the article is about the layoffs, and then switches to being about AI at the end and names the article after their point about AI? It's a very confusing article, not sure what it's trying to say other than everything sucks, this isn't normal (without explaining that), and AI is a thing.