Controversial opinion but I think the AI game studio idea is a very good one. Not because I think they will make any money off the games, but dogfooding will lead to so much more improvement than relying on feedback from external customers.
Seeing awesome feedback from players on our demos (and seeing an insane amount of stickiness from players playing even small demos built around generative AI mechanics). Raising now. Hiring soon to move faster. Feel free to reach out - dru@chromagolem.com
If you don't get feedback from the people actually playing your game (or using your product), you will never get the improvement you need to help them.
You can have the most talented passionate people there are developing a product, but if it's not working for the people you want to sell it to, it's the wrong product.
Most tech products are terrible because those paying for them are not those that have to use them every day, or because they solve a corporate problem (compliance) and not a usability problem which is the actual need from the people on the shop floor.
Many big games/products are already built mostly on metrics, and that has proven to be a terrible way to work out what people 'want'. It's a great way to justify money decisions though, so it keeps happening (and games/products from big companies keep getting worse).
The implicit assumption with dogfooding is that more feedback is better, even if that feedback is artificially constructed.
I think the idea here is that foisting one's product onto one's own workers is likely to incur a bunch of additional biases and preferences in feedback. Paying customers presumably use the product because they need it. Dogfooding workers use the product because they are told to do so.