There is a fundamental business challenge at work -- games these days are "worth less".

Not having no value, but being of less worth to investors and companies to invest in. This is simple fundamental economics, since game prices are not growing as fast as their input costs. For example, I spent $30 for Atari video games in the 1980s and it was a lot less expensive to produce. That game would cost $90 today with inflation.

For a comprehensive breakdown, see https://www.gamesindustry.biz/are-video-games-really-more-ex...

If your costs are increasing and you can't raise your price then your industry is being commoditized, or at least in a real quandary about how to move forward. AI could be a way to slow the huge, up-front costs that go into AAA games and help limit the risk to making new ones.

If this subject interests you, there is a great long-form interview with Matthew Ball on Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-matthew-ball-...

Anyway, Carmack is right on the money on this one.

> For example, I spent $30 for Atari video games in the 1980s and it was a lot less expensive to produce. That game would cost $90 today with inflation.

And the Nintendo Switch has sold 5x as many consoles as did Atari. Likely a similar scale for games sold. Nintendo very likely makes more in total than Atari did, even with lower prices.

> That game would cost $90 today with inflation.

Speaking of $90 - Nintendo recently announced the Switch 2 and physical copies of the games will be just that, $90.

John, this isn't a power tool. This is a copy machine.

And while I don't have anything against copy machines per se, that's not how it's being sold to the public. The public is being told this copy machine is a really good power tool that can do lots of things. So what creatives are hearing is "your work is interchangeable with a slightly smarter copy machine, so stop paying creatives and just rip them off".

I think you're wrong.

Anyone who argues that LLMs are "just stochastic parrots" fundamentally doesn't understand what neural networks do. The power does not come from sampling from a distributions over words but from the multi-dimensional representation. And it is that that enables LLMs to be more than just mechanisms that produce copies of material previously seen in training.

Using AI tools in a professional code base, currently, seems a bit dangerous to me. However I have changed my mind on using it for vibe coding.

I used to type in program source code from magazines and had no idea what I was doing until something broke then I had to fix it. If I am honest, that was how I learned how to code.

AI will either teach that kind of thing to the new generation, or coding will become irrelevant. Either way, I think that’s good.

But I still don’t want my bank or airplane guidance software using it.

> It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone

Except that the quality of mass-farmed, labor-saving tech produced 'stuff' is approaching a level of literal shit and the methods have poisoned air, water and soil to a horribly dumb degree.

Will the same happen to the analog/digital soil, water, air in SWE, game dev and content creation? Likely. It started a while ago, before the big AI boom and that's what young creators and devs see in their youth and get inspired, stimulated and motivated by: toxic, low quality shit that they have to shove down their throats and into their minds. "I can do better" is not something we see a lot anywhere; not in cinemas, not on the news, not in SaaS and sure as hell not in VC culture or portfolio capitalism.

Next generations brains are wired and minds nourished by the current environment. And we've been fucking up for a while, even if we leave out politics, news, culture and how we systemically perceive, portrait, never defuse and always escalate conflicts in a slow burn fashion.

All that wires brains, reinforces behaviors and thought patterns and perception and nourishes minds.

I like the comparison to farming. The end game is displayed in movies and games alike and it's always dire, dry and satisfies no one.

There's no case against AI, though, but a momentous one against experienced, educated people who have witnessed the shit show long enough and don't need predictive algorithms to know what's coming.

How silly it is to 'let it happen', to 'let it be'.

I think people are arguing about two different topics on the same item:

- Technological advance

- Political and economical fallout once AI starts replacing a meaningful amount of jobs, and quickly

Me? I'm scared. That's it.

It's only a problem if we live in a society where people's perceived value, and thus capability of living a healthy, full life, is tied to their productivity to produce profit for an increasingly shrinking pool of people and organizations.

Which is what we have, hence the problem.

Yes, AI has the potential to screw things up royally. But do not mistake its' exacerbation of symptoms as the true illness.

It really is a pretty measured and reasonable take.

I’m trying not to sound elitist but maybe this is just plain elitist. But it seems like lowering the barrier to entry to some skills too much just gets us too much crap, _and_ worst of all changes the economics so you can’t get anything good anymore. See: the movie industry.

And actually, the problem is not that my neighbor who’s passionate about video game design but makes bad games. I’m glad social media is full of that. It’s the highly capitalized content farms that flood the zone.

What’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale?

There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented.

Or maybe the music industry? I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact. It doesn't seem like it's gotten better with easier accessibility to tools, just there's a lot more options for you if you are a fan of a certain genre.

I can see games being similar, maybe a few creative people invent new genres never seen before, or mix elements in creative ways with AI tools, but I'm guessing it will more likely mean a lot of slight variations of games that bring in money churned out quickly.

I think when it comes to music, it's really disheartening to hear people say it hasn't gotten better. There is a lot of good music coming out in so many genres, but it really requires actively seeking it out.

The issue is that as music progresses and changes so too does distribution networks. Traditional, or even nontraditional to those from the pre spotify internet days, pipelines of music discovery have been largely co-opted by industry. Outlets of organic discovery are different now - and people typically don't continually keep changing their habits enough to keep up with it.

Pair this with the fact that most people settle their musical tastes to be in line with when they are experiencing the most emotionally significant time in their early lives (high school for some, college for others, etc) and the result is an assumption that

A) What they encounter forms an overall opinion of "all" new music despite being the tip of the iceberg and

B) It's not as good as what they grew up on

I've dug pretty deep in the genres I like...it's just all slight variations imo of the work the trendsetting artists did establishing the genre in the first place as far as I can tell.

> Or maybe the music industry? I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact. It doesn't seem like it's gotten better with easier accessibility to tools, just there's a lot more options for you if you are a fan of a certain genre.

You both listen to so much music and have a palette that is so wide-ranging that you can somewhat objectively judge it as not having gotten better?

How do you objectively judge that? It's just my opinion, value that for what its worth to you (sounds like not much).

> I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact.

I'm sorry, but this seems exactly like what every single generation says. I'm pretty sure that I read some similar quotes aimed at the Beatles back in the 60s.

I've thought of that, but there is a trend of a retreat from newer music, this isn't just a generation gap speaking.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...

A lot of what's happening is imo is just there's so much more competition for attention, and music has lost value as a cultural force beyond the music itself for younger people than it used to have, when young people would develop parasocial relationships or "crushes" or build their self-identity on pop stars and their fandom. A lot of this power culturally has been balkanized.

Speaking of the music itself, once the economic incentive is removed to create great songs (we are there already) we will get fewer great songs. That force is countering the fact that we have more tools and distribution channels than ever to create great songs, and those two forces are in opposition and to me, it seems like the fewer great songs force is winning (subjective).

Good points, but it is worth considering that in both of those scenarios you listed the content within the end product is fully created by a human and not generated by a machine.

That’s severely discounting the machines used to generate the video content.

Yeah this is where my own internal conflict is too. May be this cheap flooding is required to bring down the cost of creation so the truly high quality games/content creates by the top 1% will be valued more (though finding would be much harder?)?

We moved from a content generation problem to a search problem.

It was always a search problem.

Yeah this was where I was getting to. Are the content enablers enabling flooding of content so now they can start selling the search tools/tactics. Wonder if this another way of creating a pandemic so you can sell a cure haha

I think we're saying different things. In 1977 finding a good video game amongst the drek was difficult. It was a search problem in 1977, it's a search problem in 2025.

Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is, and always will be, drek.

There's a valid argument to be made there though. We possibly were better off when tastemakers managed to filter out the lowest common denominator.

When you think of Youtube, you might think of pretty decent stuff but you have to remember the absolute slop like Spiderman/Elsa videos, crude ripoffs and near porn gets many, many more views than the good stuff.

I'm not saying strict gatekeeping is necessary, but open systems are an absolute minefield for humanity. That's clear to me after the last 10 years or so.

This comparison suffers from what I call “the scale phallacy”. You can’t compare disrupting technologies like this as if the scale of their impact plays no role at all. How many people’s livelihood depended on monks writing books by hand?

Arguably all the tens of millions of those whose lives depended on the hegemony of the Catholic church and the status quo it maintained. The disruption was relatively slow, but massive.

> What’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale?

Yes, I think I would make that argument.

But also I think I’m making a different argument. The game market already seems to be pretty flooded. I think many people see it as “we get more great indie games”, but I wonder if we don’t get less. That it creates more of a bipolar distribution. Triple-A relatively unaffected, and more vaporware games but it hollows out the middle.

I also think that “we objected to earlier progress and it turned out ok, therefor all objections to progress are bad” is a logical fallacy.

How is the movie industry an example of this? There are great movies still coming out every year, and the main commercial trends have been around IP exploitation that may or may not be reducing movie quality but certainly not due to lower barriers to entry.

What's the correlation between programming skill and video game design skill? It's probably not 0 but certainly well under 1. We want good video game designers making games, not just good programmers.

I get the feeling that Balatro is not a well coded game. It was coded by one person. Yet it's a great game. The world will be better with more Balatro's.

I assert we get less Balatro’s this way(I don’t know Balatro specifically, but I imagine it’s a stand-in for indie-game by one developer), perhaps counter intuitively.

This is a question I’ve been pondering post-2000, where are all the new Kevin Smiths?

Where are all the great counter-culture indie movies?

That Market has certainly not exploded post YouTube the way you might think.

We've been lowering the barrier to entry for decades now. Where is the line? Some would say digital. Some have pointed to electric. Some have pointed to cars. And on and on and on.

But older entertainment doesn't instantly make it better. Will there be more crap? Sure, but that's always been the case. But that also means more stuff of quality.

That could mean it's hard to find the quality stuff, but that's a different issue entirely, and one mostly solved with old school stuff (reviewers, just find reviewers you mostly agree with).

But in the end, good games are still released every year. And many/most of these good games wouldn't exist if the barrier to entry wasn't lowered.

I mean won’t the leave the door open for people to bring value to the market by helping curate? Sifting there the turds to find diamonds?

This could be the golden age of the reviewer. Yahtzee could make millions!

A world of slop increases the demand for products that help you discern.

Relevant, I guess: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat