I'm not convinced the bad market is due to AI at all. That's just a convenient excuse to do layoffs without the bad PR normally involved in admitting you need to do layoffs.
Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.
I think it is both a partial contributor but also overstated for the reason you mentioned. The main culprits IMO are over hiring during the zero interest rate period as well as the never ending increases in the supply of CS graduates.
I believe it's not only the supply of CS graduates, it's their training as well. CS education seems to have changed little over the past 50 years. While the skills needed today are drastically different than those needed 10 years ago.
I have little doubt that if I had an opportunity to use Claude to do my CS homework, I would have used it. It seems that the curriculum should assume that college kids are going to use the latest agents and dramatically increase how hard the homework is.
This is like saying that people are going to the gym with power armor, so personal trainers should dramatically increase how heavy the weights are for their clients.
In a world where trainees are sent directly from the gym to the front lines to fight in power armor against power armor-equipped opponents, they probably should.
If that helps the clients learn to control the power armour, and if they can later get a job as a power armour operator, then I don't see what the problem with that is?
They won't be fit to work as body builders, sure, but presumably that's not what they were going for when they strapped on the power armour.
Same as CS graduates aren't going to enter a work force that writes code by hand, and shouldn't expect to. The job market requires power armour operators, not muscle heads.
Professional programming without AI assistance is a thing of the past. Much like stablehands or squires or farriers.
You can still do it as a hobby though. You know, for fun. If you want to. It's like knitting!
If you want to build strength, the gym is the right place to go. If you want to move large, heavy objects, you get a truck (or power armor, I guess).
Ideally, the people operating the large powerful vehicle are in fact trained in how to use it safely, because trucks (and power armor, and LLMs) can do a lot of damage if used incorrectly
I think the point is that the banner is more likely to extend your search by sending a negative signal than it is to speed up your search. Fair or not, potential employers often have a negative bias toward people who are unemployed, so indicating that you’re likely unemployed is unhelpful.
It would be far more effective to spin up a placeholder 1-person contracting firm as your current employment even if it's marginal work for pocket change (build websites for a friend or something).
For game dev, I believe that it is remiss to not include mention of the change in the gamer landscape. Ten years ago, it was console vs PC as the big game question... and various studios took bets on one or both sides of that.
Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.
Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).
As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.
Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.
I bought Rust, Conan Exiles, and similar AAA games. But I've been spending most of my gaming time on survival MMOs and idle games on Roblox anyway.
Partly it's because they're easier to get into. It works well on a Mac or even on a phone. Lie in bed, do your three missions, sleep.
Partly because I can play with the kids. No extra account purchases, no teabagging.
I think game devs assume that they're just different audiences, but not really. Just because I like 18+ rated games sometimes, it doesn't mean I wouldn't pay a 6+ rated game most of the time. Who knows, we might see a Civ equivalent on Roblox in time. Roblox is the metaverse that Meta saw a decade away but couldn't capture market share for.
So I'm not super well versed with Roblox, but I'd assumed it was aimed at a younger audience?
So wouldn't the above numbers indicate that you have a growing younger gamer population (e.g. in Roblox), and an older one in Steam? And that it would be reasonable to think that many of the current Roblox gamers would transition across to games in platforms like steam, but they cater to a different need or desire in the coming decades?
Or does Roblox have everything that games offer on Steam already? Can I get my Sekiro experience there, or Star Sector, or Civ, or Witcher?
There's no denying that Roblox is immensely popular, but maybe it's OK if Steam has more niche stuff in the long run? There's still big money to be made, especially for small developers.
And also aren't we comparing overall platforms to individual game performance? To compare _all_ of roblox against a single game (BF6) doesn't seem right, no? Shouldn't we be comparing the most popular Roblox experience instead (whatever that may be)?
Can you compare daily active users to peak simultaneous users? Seems like apples to oranges. 150 million DAU could easily be the same as 45 million peak online.
Also how believable are both Steam and Roblox's numbers with regard to bot accounts? I have no idea about this, I'm biased towards Steam but based on the HN comments every time Roblox comes up I get the vibes that they are a comparatively less ethical company that might be willing to push the boundaries of ignoring bots for the sake of better metrics to impress investors. Also this isn't data at all but the steam games I play wouldn't benefit from bots, but I could see players of some of the silly little games my kids play in Roblox benefit from having some bot accounts to help you.
To put some of those numbers into perspective:
Candy crush Saga has 273M MAU
and Minecraft has 204M MAU.
Those games are enormously popular and might need some context of their own let's continue:
Battlefield 6 has had at most 774k concurrent players, and peaked at 22.5M MAU
so Roblox is about 30% more popular than Minecraft and candy, or a good 19 times more popular than battlefield 6.
The Attention Economy(media and enertainment sector - gaming/movies/tv/streaming/sports/news/music and social media) needs a Central Bank. Peoples attention behaves similar to how currency works. And the system currently behaves as if Attention is not scarce and has no upper limits. So chaos is the natural state.
Very similar to how markets worked before central banks emerged. So someone, say a King, would over print cash for whatever random shit his self important 3 inch chimp brain came up with, like War. But at the market place there was nothing to signal random ppl now had more cash in their pocket. How much cash they had in their pocket got decoupled from any work they actually did. So strange things would start happening in the market - prices would jump, factories and farms couldnt produces at the same rate cash was printed, banks would lend too much, people would blame each other or outsiders because no one had info about how much cash was being printed and a mechanism to adjust its supply. Bankruns, asset bubbles, market crashes were the norm. Who looked rich had more to do with how close they were to the money printer.
Weird long explanation about currency, but no detail on what ‘attention economy needs a central bank’ even means in practice. Sounds like an empty LinkedIn slogan.
Wow. I'm not very clued in lately but I do own plenty of games in GOG, Humble Bundle and yes, Steam. I was just thrilled that Planet of Lana II got released recently.
This is the first time I heard of Roblox. And it's supposedly this huge phenomenon?
There are 151.5 million daily active users on Roblox. (70% growth YoY)
44% of Roblox users are over 17 years old. 56% are younger.
APAC has the most users (29.5%), followed closely by US & Canada (28%). Europe is the third largest market with 23%, while the rest of the world has 19.4%
As of February 2025, the platform has reported an average of 85.3 million daily active users. According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16.
I wonder how sticky Roblox is as the current cohort of kids get older. Of course more kids are being born, but last I checked that number is getting lower.
- a company that spent a decade throwing shit at the wall until something stuck, that seemingly has absolutely, utterly zero cultural impact, with a huge, inauditable non-US audience, where every game that any adult has tried is absolutely trash, that has tons of employees but seemingly not a single one has gone onto found a great game studio or do anything interesting in media unlike every other successful game studios, that Apple could ban for violating the mini-apps rule in an afternoon and hence ruin their entire business with a stroke of a pen... is overstating things.
Of interest to me regarding Roblox is that it's been around for a long time - public release in 2006, almost 20 years ago! It was around when I was a kid, and I vaguely remember being aware of it and thinking it was dumb (certainly, I didn't know anyone who played it).
I wonder what happened to make it so popular in the present day. Was it incremental improvement, or a better fit with modern devices/culture; maybe simply being free to play?
What made it so popular was a combination of it being cross platform as well as turning into a "game/experience platform" instead of just a game.
But it is legitimately incredible what some people created in it. I remember playing a very good/accurate counter strike source clone in roblox. Felt exactly like playing a source engine game. I doubt that it was made by a kid.
I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates than AI. This may change but I am deeply skeptical of massive RIFs being caused by AI at this point.
Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…
I feel like game dev is an entirely different market to the typical startups. Different investors, different talent, different marketing and market validation. Those who invest have already made their money in games (or "gaming"). The SDLC of an average Steam game is very waterfall.
Fair but almost everything in almost every industry is downstream of interest rates. Capital allocation gets much harder in a 7% market than a 2% market.
> almost everything in almost every industry is downstream of interest rates
This is a very "if you exclude the best and most robust parts of the economy, everything looks terrible!" sort of comment haha
services industries don't contract nearly as much as manufacturing during interest rate rises, see 1980-82 recessionary period
everyone in finance correctly regards entertainment industry as more robust during high interest rates (and the macro environment high rates respond to), that doesn't mean buying Disney is a good trade (it's not). two separate issues.
Yeah, I never really "learned" python. I don't think I've even done a tutorial before. But I've still written thousands of lines of python in my career.
> I've been playing with SEO for this website, and I learned that Google prefers human content because (they are not gonna say it) it needs to train, it cannot train on what it has already trained on. Google's crawler is hungry for human content
This is the reason why you can hardly trust AI companies to not train on your code. If you care about privacy, I think it's best to use Antrophic models via a third-party provider like GitHub Copilot (business) or Amazon Bedrock.
> He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on.
The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.
This post inspired me to donate to the only video game I've played in years, PokeMMO. Btw if anyone here plays my username is ieatpears, send a friend request or whatever, I'd love to play with someone else!
Idle thought. Not an economist.
What if the current tech scene is like how the u.s. capitalist class took power away from blue color workers in the 80s, 90s by leveraging cheaper labor in foreign countries? Now, programmers, sysadmins, system engineers no longer have leverage (real or imagined) because the owners just point to AI.
If they could do it, they would. White collar workers don't have any special status that protects them from getting the same treatment the blue collar workforce got. That said, I think it'll play out differently this time.Offshoring blue collar jobs eventually hurt the capitalist class; they lost whole industries to China. Offshoring white collar jobs is a different kind of risk: you end up with IOUs to countries that might not stay favorably disposed toward you when the power dynamics shift.
> Offshoring white collar jobs is a different kind of risk
Isn't this risk also present with offshorting blue collar jobs? I agree that both are bad ideas, but the capitalist class didn't care before and isn't exactly well known for it's long-term thinking.
>AI helps you with this, because it – increasingly instantly and well – turns English into running code. You can then react to it – "move the button there; make it bluer" – to get incrementally more precise about what you want.
I wonder if author left this as some kind of Easter egg or it's just another life is a simulation moment. In this paragraph he used semicolon and parentheses multiple times. After that only once.
Anyway love the article. It's nice to hear from time to time that one is not becoming obsolete that quick.
No real idea why this bubbled to the front page, as it’s just another milquetoast subjective take from a single point of view recapping the same events from their context. Nothing added, no food for thought, just the same old, same old.
We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.
I don't think milquetoast is the right term (not less because it hasn't really left North America). People seem more angry than timid.
There are problems, some are very visible, some are present but not very visible, and some are imaginary.
There is a growing discontent like I have not seen in my lifetime, and I don't think much of it can be characterised as unjustified. The problem is the narratives that people are forming about those problems are mostly all wrong. This is easily provable by showing how mutually exclusive all of the narratives are, the correctness of any one of them would invalidate many more.
I don't don't have the expertise or data to conclusively show what the cause of any particular aspect. To make a guess, I would look to history and note that those who blame the new thing are usually wrong, and those who warn about actions being done without regard to the consequences are usually right.
People are angry and want to understand what is causing the problems, and it seems the unscrupulous have found that an answer to their questions is effective, even if it is a fiction.
> There is a growing discontent like I have not seen in my lifetime, and I don't think much of it can be characterised as unjustified.
> I don't don't have the expertise or data to conclusively show what the cause of any particular aspect.
For whatever it's worth, I think we're on the same page here. My personal observations shore up those same assertions, and they're very much systemic in nature rather than singular topic like prior grievances.
AI may just be the most recent inflection point bubbling more of this discontent to the surface, but said discontent has been gradually rising to a boil for decades.
I have to wonder how GenAI would have fared if these LLMs had become available anytime before 2020, during the “normal” tech bubble. It feels like the faith in it is as much to slash costs while appearing to be cutting-edge (and thus, worthy of what little investment is still available), as it is because of its capabilities. Where would we be if the tech industry wasn’t in such a dire state due to the end of ZIRP?
There are many reasons, all layered, AI not being the decisive one.
1) Growth is gone and all expansion narratives have failed (VR/XR, NFT, etc) with no rescue in sight. That’s a death sentence in capitalism.
2) Demographic headwind - not only from age but also habits - short form video is attention intensive, highly addictive and doesn’t co-exist like a spotify or youtube clip in the background. And it’s wildly successful. New generations are not automatically gamers anymore, many just watch.
3) there’s plenty of cost competitive attention targets now all competing. A video subscription is easily competitive with most gaming options on price. It used to be games are THE cost effective way for people to be entertained.
4) The pacemaker is dead. Nvidia used to drive the industry forward with GPU expansion - new graphics capabilities offering better games and fantasies. By RDR2 this stalled, you can’t sell on “breathtaking graphics” driven by technicals anymore, all new experiences have to be gameplay based which is very very hard. 4k was already a bridge to far.
Worse, Nvidia abandoning the industry again (as with crypto) and the AI boom is massively increasing cost of entry for games as entertainment compared to other activities, cost of business (game studios do need a lot of GPU), kills attempts to shift the business model to streaming where you’d have expanded the audience by reducing hardware entry point (not a good use of GPU), murders new consoles whose marketing campaigns always provided strong market rejuvenation.
5) Competition with its own supply - especially because hardware stalled, 10-15 year old games look perfectly alright and run great. They cost 3.99$ in a sale and compete on time with new titles. Successful GaaS titles like PubG, Minecraft, Fortnite, Dota, Lol go strong and cannibalize a vast amount of attention.
Because Valve is privately owned and protective of their market, nobody can buy up the supply and remove it, which kills the proposition of game pass models.
6) There’s too much supply of games to allow all the companies in the space to make a living. It’s gonna get a lot worse with AI, which threatens to kill the artificially
high entry cost to AAA by scaling down both talent and technical moats is another reason for investors to run away.
7) When supply goes up, GTM costs become the primary business problem. We already saw this in mobile which has zero barrier of entry, chinese and vietnamese shops will budget build your game to specs.
But like sneakers, anyone able to make a game doesn’t sell them because supply side auction costs go up trying to reach eyeballs.
Facebook killed and ate mobile gaming because app install ads became the primary way of user acquisition - the infamous fake game video trend was the result: The video sells the game, not the game itself and an entire industry jumped up making attention optimized videos to sell to game developers. CAC is extracting all profit from the industry and VCs abandoned it because the extraction makes their financial goals impossible.
Failure to enforce truth in advertising regulation means competition happens more and more on fakes and grifts which favors the grifter.
With AI commoditisation is going to move up the stack into the rest of gaming.
And crucially, any narrative of more games or cheaper games runs into simple physics - we maxed the available attention which is colonized by companies who have genetically engineered themselves to maximum addiction. Without new time (4 day work week), it’s a brutal red ocean game companies cannot hope to win in, given that the platforms own the attention algorithms.
More supply in a red ocean means less money for creators and publishers and their shareholders and more for the platform”, even if you cut creatives with AI
8) There is no credible future vision or narrative for gaming.
Yes AI will allow new experiences but nobody knows how they will look, IP protection is dead so even if you create one, there’s no way to do it at current economics.
Other uses like character.ai, again, A:B tested to maximum addictive/ sycophantic behavior seem like attention headwind.
All these PLUS AI investment having “better” bets (like betting on OpenAI to become a state sanctioned monopolist getting paid back by taxpayer money) means that there is no money, no lifeblood for the industry.
It’s going to burn down to a tiny shell before something can sprout from the ashes, in the tiny plot the attention platforms allow it to take.
AI adoption across the industry is anemic in effect. It’s impossible to build native AI studios because the ground and definition of native is shifting too fast. R&D risks and constantly shifting capabilities in the frontier are extreme, you can’t build a realistic financial projection. And even the cost savings that are there, theoretically, like voice over or asset generation are poison to an overwhelmingly negative to AI audience.
Overhiring is often cited as a reason and simultaneous cope to indicate temporary correction but games are multi year products and only a small segment of employers (platforms) engaged in it - there’s little evidence to support it.
ZIRP is also often paraded around, but ZIRP is short term and certainly a reason - but the tech industry, which had the same challenges, shows why that’s a cope and why the lack of narrative is terminal: There is no limit to the amount of investment you can collect on a good narrative. The industry has none.
Yes, AI narrative is killing the industry by choking and diverting oxygen, but technically AI has, for all intends and purposes, zero effect on gaming yet.
Personally, I believe that the supposed productivity gains of LLMs will turn out to be much like outsourcing to India around the turn of the century: managers think it's a great idea to cut costs, but it will also make quality plummet, and there will be a correction back towards sanity. That doesn't mean that everything is all roses - even if the market will get over the AI insanity someday, that's cold comfort if you're out of a job right now. But I do think that it's not going to be "if you aren't on board, then gg" in the long run.
I have already seen multiple CLs from people who are both senior and junior where I know they did not look at the code. I thought, at first, they worked and upon review it looked good but when I synced these changes I found either big bugs that a human would never make or a test would never catch or lots of code repetition.
One example was an engineer who was refactoring some code that ended up doing this:
def execute(jobs):
for job in jobs:
asyncio.create_task(compute(job))
yield await compute(job)
This is very simplified, it as actually broken up into two separate loops and hidden behind multiple nested calls but at some point there literally was a `asyncio.create_task` where the result was not being used.
I looked at this code because we were hitting some quota limits very early for some reason and it turned out we ran 2x the reads we needed to. I refactored this code, 1/2ed the execution time, fixed the quota issues, and took it from ~300 lines to 80 lines.
This was code from a *senior software engineer* with 15 years in the industry. What is very interesting is I see similar bugs from juniors who do or don't use AI.
I am not saying AI can't be useful. On weeks I have had clear tasks set out, while the rest of my team was OOO, I tackled probably 5x the work our team normally accomplishes (this was after all the work was identified, just working). My skip actually said "Wow, we had a very productive week!" so multiple layers noticed the productivity. I think what made this possible was:
1. I fully understood the **entire** task and the end-user needs.
2. The code base was structured "fine" with enough decoupling between components that I wasn't hitting merge conflicts with myself.
3. I self-reviewed all the work before sending anything to other people (opened all the changes in my IDE, read all the tests).
4. If something seemed too complicated I refactored it manually.
5. I left the AI chugging for long periods of time on objectively measurable tasks.
I don't think the practice of engineering software is dead. The architecture of your software now has measurable impact on productivity. I don't think thinking about performance is outdated. If you're running code no one has reviewed but is functional you wasting cycles / money. Having domain knowledge still improves your velocity.
Because of these reasons I think there is still marginal value to programmers. Companies which maintain internal talent pools and build tooling to scale the impact of people will probably beat out smaller companies that just vibe code.
What happens to a society where one class extracts payment from another class but the payment only flows in one direction and eventually the latter class doesn't have it, and outnumbers the former class?
What happens when a creative writer pens an influential treatise on economic and politics, but it turns out he was completely wrong on many key empirical aspects of human behaviour, leading to tens of millions of deaths, yet his followers will not see his failure and keep trying to turn over society to produce his false utopia?
I'm not convinced the bad market is due to AI at all. That's just a convenient excuse to do layoffs without the bad PR normally involved in admitting you need to do layoffs.
Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.
I think it is both a partial contributor but also overstated for the reason you mentioned. The main culprits IMO are over hiring during the zero interest rate period as well as the never ending increases in the supply of CS graduates.
I believe it's not only the supply of CS graduates, it's their training as well. CS education seems to have changed little over the past 50 years. While the skills needed today are drastically different than those needed 10 years ago.
I have little doubt that if I had an opportunity to use Claude to do my CS homework, I would have used it. It seems that the curriculum should assume that college kids are going to use the latest agents and dramatically increase how hard the homework is.
This is like saying that people are going to the gym with power armor, so personal trainers should dramatically increase how heavy the weights are for their clients.
In a world where trainees are sent directly from the gym to the front lines to fight in power armor against power armor-equipped opponents, they probably should.
If that was the world you lived in, would you go to the gym to learn it?
The question is, what are you trying to learn? There are still going to be problems "power armor" can't solve, like what to move where.
If that helps the clients learn to control the power armour, and if they can later get a job as a power armour operator, then I don't see what the problem with that is?
They won't be fit to work as body builders, sure, but presumably that's not what they were going for when they strapped on the power armour.
Same as CS graduates aren't going to enter a work force that writes code by hand, and shouldn't expect to. The job market requires power armour operators, not muscle heads.
Professional programming without AI assistance is a thing of the past. Much like stablehands or squires or farriers.
You can still do it as a hobby though. You know, for fun. If you want to. It's like knitting!
If you want to build strength, the gym is the right place to go. If you want to move large, heavy objects, you get a truck (or power armor, I guess).
Ideally, the people operating the large powerful vehicle are in fact trained in how to use it safely, because trucks (and power armor, and LLMs) can do a lot of damage if used incorrectly
Or that people are doing their driving tests using FSD
> Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation
It may as well say: "need work, bad"
The open to work banner is an extremely negative signal. Nobody should use it.
Unless you're desperate to feed and house your family and anything that shortens your search by a day might keep a roof over your head?
I think the point is that the banner is more likely to extend your search by sending a negative signal than it is to speed up your search. Fair or not, potential employers often have a negative bias toward people who are unemployed, so indicating that you’re likely unemployed is unhelpful.
It would be far more effective to spin up a placeholder 1-person contracting firm as your current employment even if it's marginal work for pocket change (build websites for a friend or something).
There's some data from Aline of interviewing.io who says it's a negative signal during a hot market but a neutral signal during a layoff market.
https://interviewing.io/blog/whos-open-to-work-a-tale-of-two...
Then the situation could be far worse depending on the percentage of people feel like you.
For game dev, I believe that it is remiss to not include mention of the change in the gamer landscape. Ten years ago, it was console vs PC as the big game question... and various studios took bets on one or both sides of that.
Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.
Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).
As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.
Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.
Gamers are dying out(*) - Belluar News https://youtu.be/_80DVbedWiI
I bought Rust, Conan Exiles, and similar AAA games. But I've been spending most of my gaming time on survival MMOs and idle games on Roblox anyway.
Partly it's because they're easier to get into. It works well on a Mac or even on a phone. Lie in bed, do your three missions, sleep.
Partly because I can play with the kids. No extra account purchases, no teabagging.
I think game devs assume that they're just different audiences, but not really. Just because I like 18+ rated games sometimes, it doesn't mean I wouldn't pay a 6+ rated game most of the time. Who knows, we might see a Civ equivalent on Roblox in time. Roblox is the metaverse that Meta saw a decade away but couldn't capture market share for.
So I'm not super well versed with Roblox, but I'd assumed it was aimed at a younger audience?
So wouldn't the above numbers indicate that you have a growing younger gamer population (e.g. in Roblox), and an older one in Steam? And that it would be reasonable to think that many of the current Roblox gamers would transition across to games in platforms like steam, but they cater to a different need or desire in the coming decades?
Or does Roblox have everything that games offer on Steam already? Can I get my Sekiro experience there, or Star Sector, or Civ, or Witcher?
There's no denying that Roblox is immensely popular, but maybe it's OK if Steam has more niche stuff in the long run? There's still big money to be made, especially for small developers.
And also aren't we comparing overall platforms to individual game performance? To compare _all_ of roblox against a single game (BF6) doesn't seem right, no? Shouldn't we be comparing the most popular Roblox experience instead (whatever that may be)?
Can you compare daily active users to peak simultaneous users? Seems like apples to oranges. 150 million DAU could easily be the same as 45 million peak online.
Also how believable are both Steam and Roblox's numbers with regard to bot accounts? I have no idea about this, I'm biased towards Steam but based on the HN comments every time Roblox comes up I get the vibes that they are a comparatively less ethical company that might be willing to push the boundaries of ignoring bots for the sake of better metrics to impress investors. Also this isn't data at all but the steam games I play wouldn't benefit from bots, but I could see players of some of the silly little games my kids play in Roblox benefit from having some bot accounts to help you.
To put some of those numbers into perspective: Candy crush Saga has 273M MAU and Minecraft has 204M MAU.
Those games are enormously popular and might need some context of their own let's continue: Battlefield 6 has had at most 774k concurrent players, and peaked at 22.5M MAU
so Roblox is about 30% more popular than Minecraft and candy, or a good 19 times more popular than battlefield 6.
Someone is getting a new yacht.
The Attention Economy(media and enertainment sector - gaming/movies/tv/streaming/sports/news/music and social media) needs a Central Bank. Peoples attention behaves similar to how currency works. And the system currently behaves as if Attention is not scarce and has no upper limits. So chaos is the natural state.
Very similar to how markets worked before central banks emerged. So someone, say a King, would over print cash for whatever random shit his self important 3 inch chimp brain came up with, like War. But at the market place there was nothing to signal random ppl now had more cash in their pocket. How much cash they had in their pocket got decoupled from any work they actually did. So strange things would start happening in the market - prices would jump, factories and farms couldnt produces at the same rate cash was printed, banks would lend too much, people would blame each other or outsiders because no one had info about how much cash was being printed and a mechanism to adjust its supply. Bankruns, asset bubbles, market crashes were the norm. Who looked rich had more to do with how close they were to the money printer.
Weird long explanation about currency, but no detail on what ‘attention economy needs a central bank’ even means in practice. Sounds like an empty LinkedIn slogan.
Wow. I'm not very clued in lately but I do own plenty of games in GOG, Humble Bundle and yes, Steam. I was just thrilled that Planet of Lana II got released recently.
This is the first time I heard of Roblox. And it's supposedly this huge phenomenon?
I guess this is what getting old feels like.
A key part of that is a that its dominated by kids. The video I linked is one to start with...
https://www.takeaway-reality.com/post/roblox-demographics-st...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobloxI wonder how sticky Roblox is as the current cohort of kids get older. Of course more kids are being born, but last I checked that number is getting lower.
what is more likely:
- everything Roblox says is true
- a company that spent a decade throwing shit at the wall until something stuck, that seemingly has absolutely, utterly zero cultural impact, with a huge, inauditable non-US audience, where every game that any adult has tried is absolutely trash, that has tons of employees but seemingly not a single one has gone onto found a great game studio or do anything interesting in media unlike every other successful game studios, that Apple could ban for violating the mini-apps rule in an afternoon and hence ruin their entire business with a stroke of a pen... is overstating things.
Of interest to me regarding Roblox is that it's been around for a long time - public release in 2006, almost 20 years ago! It was around when I was a kid, and I vaguely remember being aware of it and thinking it was dumb (certainly, I didn't know anyone who played it).
I wonder what happened to make it so popular in the present day. Was it incremental improvement, or a better fit with modern devices/culture; maybe simply being free to play?
What made it so popular was a combination of it being cross platform as well as turning into a "game/experience platform" instead of just a game.
But it is legitimately incredible what some people created in it. I remember playing a very good/accurate counter strike source clone in roblox. Felt exactly like playing a source engine game. I doubt that it was made by a kid.
I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates than AI. This may change but I am deeply skeptical of massive RIFs being caused by AI at this point.
Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…
I feel like game dev is an entirely different market to the typical startups. Different investors, different talent, different marketing and market validation. Those who invest have already made their money in games (or "gaming"). The SDLC of an average Steam game is very waterfall.
Fair but almost everything in almost every industry is downstream of interest rates. Capital allocation gets much harder in a 7% market than a 2% market.
> almost everything in almost every industry is downstream of interest rates
This is a very "if you exclude the best and most robust parts of the economy, everything looks terrible!" sort of comment haha
services industries don't contract nearly as much as manufacturing during interest rate rises, see 1980-82 recessionary period
everyone in finance correctly regards entertainment industry as more robust during high interest rates (and the macro environment high rates respond to), that doesn't mean buying Disney is a good trade (it's not). two separate issues.
> I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates
Really, interest rates? Not the change in the law that made it illegal to treat software developer salaries as a business expense?
Games imploded long before AI was in wide use. There were back to back worst years ever for layoffs in 2023,2024.
> I have never written a single line in Python. My only experience with it is Neetcodes tutorials. Before AI, you had to hire a Python programmer
I know that learning averse programmers exist, but even pre AI, many people in this position would just learn some python
Yeah, I never really "learned" python. I don't think I've even done a tutorial before. But I've still written thousands of lines of python in my career.
That doesn't mean those lines were of any quality though.
They're still being used by those orgs to this day, so they're doing the job at least.
> I've been playing with SEO for this website, and I learned that Google prefers human content because (they are not gonna say it) it needs to train, it cannot train on what it has already trained on. Google's crawler is hungry for human content
This is the reason why you can hardly trust AI companies to not train on your code. If you care about privacy, I think it's best to use Antrophic models via a third-party provider like GitHub Copilot (business) or Amazon Bedrock.
The topic has been done to death by now but this
> He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on.
The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.
I would expect the majority of developers on their twenties
Did i age my self with that comment?
Yes, but also it’s also crazy where people under 25 get their “facts.”
For one thing I am under 25 and I get my views from here the orange site.
Well, my non-tech execs get development world view from YouTubers among other influencers.
This post inspired me to donate to the only video game I've played in years, PokeMMO. Btw if anyone here plays my username is ieatpears, send a friend request or whatever, I'd love to play with someone else!
> PokeMMO
I play pokemonshowdown.com sometimes. You can message me there or mail me your username and we can decide a time to play :-)
My username on pokemonshowdown.com is smilenowpleas
It’s a little hard to believe when I remember game dev jobs already being a mess in 2019.
Idle thought. Not an economist. What if the current tech scene is like how the u.s. capitalist class took power away from blue color workers in the 80s, 90s by leveraging cheaper labor in foreign countries? Now, programmers, sysadmins, system engineers no longer have leverage (real or imagined) because the owners just point to AI.
Brevity is the soul of wit:
You’re pretty much spot on.
If they could do it, they would. White collar workers don't have any special status that protects them from getting the same treatment the blue collar workforce got. That said, I think it'll play out differently this time.Offshoring blue collar jobs eventually hurt the capitalist class; they lost whole industries to China. Offshoring white collar jobs is a different kind of risk: you end up with IOUs to countries that might not stay favorably disposed toward you when the power dynamics shift.
> Offshoring white collar jobs is a different kind of risk
Isn't this risk also present with offshorting blue collar jobs? I agree that both are bad ideas, but the capitalist class didn't care before and isn't exactly well known for it's long-term thinking.
It's a different kind of risk as blue collar has already been exported. Especially if you have neither a strong military nor natural resources.
>AI helps you with this, because it – increasingly instantly and well – turns English into running code. You can then react to it – "move the button there; make it bluer" – to get incrementally more precise about what you want.
I wonder if author left this as some kind of Easter egg or it's just another life is a simulation moment. In this paragraph he used semicolon and parentheses multiple times. After that only once.
Anyway love the article. It's nice to hear from time to time that one is not becoming obsolete that quick.
No real idea why this bubbled to the front page, as it’s just another milquetoast subjective take from a single point of view recapping the same events from their context. Nothing added, no food for thought, just the same old, same old.
We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.
I don't think milquetoast is the right term (not less because it hasn't really left North America). People seem more angry than timid.
There are problems, some are very visible, some are present but not very visible, and some are imaginary.
There is a growing discontent like I have not seen in my lifetime, and I don't think much of it can be characterised as unjustified. The problem is the narratives that people are forming about those problems are mostly all wrong. This is easily provable by showing how mutually exclusive all of the narratives are, the correctness of any one of them would invalidate many more.
I don't don't have the expertise or data to conclusively show what the cause of any particular aspect. To make a guess, I would look to history and note that those who blame the new thing are usually wrong, and those who warn about actions being done without regard to the consequences are usually right.
People are angry and want to understand what is causing the problems, and it seems the unscrupulous have found that an answer to their questions is effective, even if it is a fiction.
> There is a growing discontent like I have not seen in my lifetime, and I don't think much of it can be characterised as unjustified.
> I don't don't have the expertise or data to conclusively show what the cause of any particular aspect.
For whatever it's worth, I think we're on the same page here. My personal observations shore up those same assertions, and they're very much systemic in nature rather than singular topic like prior grievances.
AI may just be the most recent inflection point bubbling more of this discontent to the surface, but said discontent has been gradually rising to a boil for decades.
;fly and hack
;flying
I have to wonder how GenAI would have fared if these LLMs had become available anytime before 2020, during the “normal” tech bubble. It feels like the faith in it is as much to slash costs while appearing to be cutting-edge (and thus, worthy of what little investment is still available), as it is because of its capabilities. Where would we be if the tech industry wasn’t in such a dire state due to the end of ZIRP?
There are many reasons, all layered, AI not being the decisive one.
1) Growth is gone and all expansion narratives have failed (VR/XR, NFT, etc) with no rescue in sight. That’s a death sentence in capitalism.
2) Demographic headwind - not only from age but also habits - short form video is attention intensive, highly addictive and doesn’t co-exist like a spotify or youtube clip in the background. And it’s wildly successful. New generations are not automatically gamers anymore, many just watch.
3) there’s plenty of cost competitive attention targets now all competing. A video subscription is easily competitive with most gaming options on price. It used to be games are THE cost effective way for people to be entertained.
4) The pacemaker is dead. Nvidia used to drive the industry forward with GPU expansion - new graphics capabilities offering better games and fantasies. By RDR2 this stalled, you can’t sell on “breathtaking graphics” driven by technicals anymore, all new experiences have to be gameplay based which is very very hard. 4k was already a bridge to far.
Worse, Nvidia abandoning the industry again (as with crypto) and the AI boom is massively increasing cost of entry for games as entertainment compared to other activities, cost of business (game studios do need a lot of GPU), kills attempts to shift the business model to streaming where you’d have expanded the audience by reducing hardware entry point (not a good use of GPU), murders new consoles whose marketing campaigns always provided strong market rejuvenation.
5) Competition with its own supply - especially because hardware stalled, 10-15 year old games look perfectly alright and run great. They cost 3.99$ in a sale and compete on time with new titles. Successful GaaS titles like PubG, Minecraft, Fortnite, Dota, Lol go strong and cannibalize a vast amount of attention.
Because Valve is privately owned and protective of their market, nobody can buy up the supply and remove it, which kills the proposition of game pass models.
6) There’s too much supply of games to allow all the companies in the space to make a living. It’s gonna get a lot worse with AI, which threatens to kill the artificially high entry cost to AAA by scaling down both talent and technical moats is another reason for investors to run away.
7) When supply goes up, GTM costs become the primary business problem. We already saw this in mobile which has zero barrier of entry, chinese and vietnamese shops will budget build your game to specs.
But like sneakers, anyone able to make a game doesn’t sell them because supply side auction costs go up trying to reach eyeballs.
Facebook killed and ate mobile gaming because app install ads became the primary way of user acquisition - the infamous fake game video trend was the result: The video sells the game, not the game itself and an entire industry jumped up making attention optimized videos to sell to game developers. CAC is extracting all profit from the industry and VCs abandoned it because the extraction makes their financial goals impossible.
Failure to enforce truth in advertising regulation means competition happens more and more on fakes and grifts which favors the grifter.
With AI commoditisation is going to move up the stack into the rest of gaming.
And crucially, any narrative of more games or cheaper games runs into simple physics - we maxed the available attention which is colonized by companies who have genetically engineered themselves to maximum addiction. Without new time (4 day work week), it’s a brutal red ocean game companies cannot hope to win in, given that the platforms own the attention algorithms.
More supply in a red ocean means less money for creators and publishers and their shareholders and more for the platform”, even if you cut creatives with AI
8) There is no credible future vision or narrative for gaming.
Yes AI will allow new experiences but nobody knows how they will look, IP protection is dead so even if you create one, there’s no way to do it at current economics.
Other uses like character.ai, again, A:B tested to maximum addictive/ sycophantic behavior seem like attention headwind.
All these PLUS AI investment having “better” bets (like betting on OpenAI to become a state sanctioned monopolist getting paid back by taxpayer money) means that there is no money, no lifeblood for the industry.
It’s going to burn down to a tiny shell before something can sprout from the ashes, in the tiny plot the attention platforms allow it to take.
AI adoption across the industry is anemic in effect. It’s impossible to build native AI studios because the ground and definition of native is shifting too fast. R&D risks and constantly shifting capabilities in the frontier are extreme, you can’t build a realistic financial projection. And even the cost savings that are there, theoretically, like voice over or asset generation are poison to an overwhelmingly negative to AI audience.
Overhiring is often cited as a reason and simultaneous cope to indicate temporary correction but games are multi year products and only a small segment of employers (platforms) engaged in it - there’s little evidence to support it.
ZIRP is also often paraded around, but ZIRP is short term and certainly a reason - but the tech industry, which had the same challenges, shows why that’s a cope and why the lack of narrative is terminal: There is no limit to the amount of investment you can collect on a good narrative. The industry has none.
Yes, AI narrative is killing the industry by choking and diverting oxygen, but technically AI has, for all intends and purposes, zero effect on gaming yet.
Source: Industry veteran in AAA and Big Tech.
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Maybe folks with the opposite opinion can add some context. My manager told our team the same thing using more words, as far as expectations go.
Personally, I believe that the supposed productivity gains of LLMs will turn out to be much like outsourcing to India around the turn of the century: managers think it's a great idea to cut costs, but it will also make quality plummet, and there will be a correction back towards sanity. That doesn't mean that everything is all roses - even if the market will get over the AI insanity someday, that's cold comfort if you're out of a job right now. But I do think that it's not going to be "if you aren't on board, then gg" in the long run.
I have already seen multiple CLs from people who are both senior and junior where I know they did not look at the code. I thought, at first, they worked and upon review it looked good but when I synced these changes I found either big bugs that a human would never make or a test would never catch or lots of code repetition.
One example was an engineer who was refactoring some code that ended up doing this:
This is very simplified, it as actually broken up into two separate loops and hidden behind multiple nested calls but at some point there literally was a `asyncio.create_task` where the result was not being used.I looked at this code because we were hitting some quota limits very early for some reason and it turned out we ran 2x the reads we needed to. I refactored this code, 1/2ed the execution time, fixed the quota issues, and took it from ~300 lines to 80 lines.
This was code from a *senior software engineer* with 15 years in the industry. What is very interesting is I see similar bugs from juniors who do or don't use AI.
I am not saying AI can't be useful. On weeks I have had clear tasks set out, while the rest of my team was OOO, I tackled probably 5x the work our team normally accomplishes (this was after all the work was identified, just working). My skip actually said "Wow, we had a very productive week!" so multiple layers noticed the productivity. I think what made this possible was:
I don't think the practice of engineering software is dead. The architecture of your software now has measurable impact on productivity. I don't think thinking about performance is outdated. If you're running code no one has reviewed but is functional you wasting cycles / money. Having domain knowledge still improves your velocity.Because of these reasons I think there is still marginal value to programmers. Companies which maintain internal talent pools and build tooling to scale the impact of people will probably beat out smaller companies that just vibe code.
What happens to a society where one class extracts payment from another class but the payment only flows in one direction and eventually the latter class doesn't have it, and outnumbers the former class?
What happens when a creative writer pens an influential treatise on economic and politics, but it turns out he was completely wrong on many key empirical aspects of human behaviour, leading to tens of millions of deaths, yet his followers will not see his failure and keep trying to turn over society to produce his false utopia?
I'm not sure what you're referring to. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations?
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They are implying the higher classes will cull the rest.