Yes, from my perspective you're very close. "It only takes a few (well-placed) people to move the direction of the project. The rest go with the flow, or are so micro-focused that they don't notice the tilt left." You're close, but the truth is that while you're correct that only a few people can steer a project, it is supremely rare for those people to actually care about the project and be actually competent, let alone to have the team of people who are comopetent to back up those ideas! A lot of the decay stems from society at large. We are so participation trophy obsessed any more, that the few talented, bright kids today that should be getting praise and being selected to be in this position, or start this studio are lost in the sea of other people with participation trophies, and they're all brainswashed into thinking they need to agree with everyone else, and support everyone else. That's not what produced a great industry or great civilizations. A great company needs a sane and tangible hierarchy based on ability and personality. People need to be in positions of agency not because they are amenable, not becaues they are kind and nice, but because they can get shit done! It HELPS if they can get shit done while being inspirational, the best leaders are both, but below great leadership, compentent leadership is not nice, it is demanding, and it will grind people down to get the results. That's the sad truth. But its' how we get great things in this world. You cna't make an omlette without cracking some eggs. That said! Gamedev is such a crazy awesome endeavor, and you don't have to grind people to pulp to get results, you just need to give them the opporutnity to do thier jobs and do it well and they will drive themsleves to crunch. It's a crime what became of gaming, because this industry used to be full of self disciplined, fantastic developers of all stripes and backgrounds, and we sold it all away so we could play patty cake and blow smoke up each other's bums.

Def some truth in there, but what a lot of people don't realize is these people aren't that different from you or me. Most of us will believe what we want to believe, and we are prone to misconceptoins. The biggest misconception of gamedev was that they were the majority. They believed that because they only hired people who thought like them, and that's all they see in their day to day in their bubbles they OBVIOUSLY they are a majority. They would go on reddit, get all their views parroted back, they would go on the news on get their opinoins affirmed, they were part of this well oiled machine designed to amplify thier confirmation bias. But it warped their perception of reality in ways that made them innefective as game designers, part of that was endless toxic positivity... "why try?", "why work hard?" Everyone is just going to say your work is amazing so long as you do the same in kind, it's how these work places work. But more than that, they started to drink their own kool aide, they started to think there were invisible modern audiences out there that thought exactly as they did, they thought there would be customers buying the game because they shared the same cause, had the same desires to see the games succeed as they did. This industry as a whole lost sight of the very difficult process of making games and experiences that are actually worth playing and experiencing. So while you had studio still doing some good work, making neat art, making fantastical worlds.... the hard earned skillsets that make the fundamental elements of the "secret sauce" got lost in the agenda, in the affirmations. Greatness and fun games, do not come easy, they require endless effort, toil, and failure, but most of all STANDARDS! And a meritocratic environment where these efforts hold value in the culture of the studio, not mindless pandering.

But it's taking a LONG time for these engines to take off. I think it's telling that the AI isn't quite as powerful as many people thought it was. What IS happening though, that I hope the engine makers are taking note of, is talented people are getting tech that they can use to show of unique competencies and talents. THAT will be the future of engines, not the AI tech itself, but those quality devs that emerge as capable of utilizing it. But I'm not sure it's going to be fully AI powered dev that makes this tech head and shoulders above the rest. That's the thing about engine tech, is it needs to be good, it needs ot be almost PERFECT. That's the point of the engine, is that people use it, which means it needs to be performant, ergonoic and work with the suit of other tools. And come to think of it, Unity is doing a really good job of managing all that of late, integrating with web, unifying in the URP and all that. Who knows what ends up being the future of gamedev, but for the forseable future, there doesn't seem to be anything pulling ahead of the big 3 of Unity, Unreal, and Godot ATM. Not even really inklings. I guess we could lump all those AI games making their custom engines could be lumped into one giant mass of games... but most of those don't really have any singular killer feature, nothing that couldnt' be ported to some engine. It's kinda funny, for all the hubbub about AI, the engine that would be pulling ahead right now would be the one that had banked most on just core functionality and neat new features. Because the AI doesn't really help with that stuff. The things that made any of the current engines great to work with still have value. The AI adds value in various other ways, but they don't totally eclipse what engines do or how those cohersive workflows make games better. Weird how 5 years into this AI revolution and no one has any idea what the future of game engines are, or gamedev is. We're all just chasing these wild ambitious certain everyone else is pulling ahead, but with no real evidence that that is actually happening.

I kinda feel like blueprints were one of the greatest features of the Unreal Engine. It's entirely possible Unreal is able to leverage AI to do amazing things, but I hate to say it, it also feels like a bit of a hail mary because their projects weren't going especially well. There doesn't seem to be any AI powered engine that's standing out and taking up all the spotlight, as much as everyone predicted that. If AI were truly the future, then AI generated engines built from the ground up would be emerging by now with a huge leg up over the comopetition. I'm actually really happy Unity didn't take huge gambles on AI. Unity is a fantastic engine, and it's dominance is no accident, it's because it's usable, effective software that does amazing things. Yes, AI cand o some various aspects of software well, or really fast... but it doesn't do new things particularly well, and it doesn't reach the level of polish that engine tools require on its own. But maybe i'm not understanding the sorts of features you had in mind for Unity 7. The thing about tech, is its easy to think of all the amazing things that could be, how this thing or this team could make this new amazing thing. But actually reaching that tool, that innovatoin, that is another thing ENTIRELY. How much of this industry has fallen on its face chasing AI features or some flashy new thing? And how many companies have actually PROVIDED that new thing? I honestly can't think of a single revolutionary feature outside of art generatoin that's come out of this AI era due to the new AI tools and such. It's a shortcut to repurposing and porting some feature from this project to that project... but that doesn't put u in the lead, it just puts you near the other existing product.

Honestly? Most of them are actually passionate and care. They love their art, they love working in the industry. But it was a death by a thousand cuts. And the toxic positivity did take its tole. It snowballed over time. Basically it went like this... The code was the first to decay, because code takes cold, calculated logic. You can staff a building with a bunch of progressive back scratchers and get amazing art, but you're not going to get amazing code. And over time, that art is going to drift towards content no one's going to want, and over even more time, they extend their ranks and the art becomes uneven. It's why games have INCREDIBLE art here, and then you see this character over there that just isn't up to quality. They've been indulging themselves is what they've been doing. Blowing smoke up each other's bums, filling their ranks. Oh, and they've been canceling a lot of people. And signalling to each other that they'er the good ones, and celebrating every act of violence that happens to their "enemies". They also go out of their way to sniff you out. I remember when I first got a new job somewhere, people would go out of their way to ask me about political opinoins, "That new staffing choice by X, sure is alarming don't you think?". I had a coworker out of nowhere scream nearly at the top of his lungs, "WHY IS HE SO EVILLLLLLLLLLLL!?" (I'm sure you can guess who i'm reffering to) in the middle of the office. I worked in Austin and then Portland, so I got a front row seat to this well ahead of everyone else, likely a couple years before anyone else in the industry, and about 6 years before the gamres themselves started to see the ramifications of this becauese games just take so damn long to develop. The sad truth... is that gamedev was taken over by a bunch of smarmy, self serving goofballs. And no one stopped them, because the money people are back scratching, smarmy, goofballs. That's what gets me the most, is how easily they did this. It wasn't a grand plan, it didn't happen over night. But just a group of back scratching subversives over time pushing their luck, and pushing things just a LITTLE bit further because they couldnt' help themselves. Had they stopped a few years in, and didn't force their politics into the content, they could have totally captured gaming for all eternity, but they just couldn't help it. They're fanatic, and what's really sad, is they don't even think they did anything wrong. They genuinly think they were cutting down and destroying the careers of bigots and Nazis. That they are the superior game creators, that they were doing this world a servicve as they indulged themselves, and played patty cake at the office as meritocracy and gamedev died...

AI is a weapon. It can be used to defend gamedev from the decay of burnout and corporatization, to democratize gamedev, but it can also be used to shoot it in the face. There are many ways that AI can bolster and weaken gamedev, systematically, and culturally. And we are experiencing all of the positives and the negatives simultaneously at breakneck speed. Best thing to do is take a deep breath, and get back to making the beset games we can in the best means we can. And that relationship between AI and the game is going to be different for everyone based on what they believe to be logistically right, and morally right.

This is where the real debate is. I think most everyone agrees that for character controllers and animation states the AI isn't quite there yet, and these systems interconnect in so many complex ways that simply brute forcing it until it works doesn't cut it. The AI can iterate and force the emulations and the graphics settings and the UI's and such, but in the realm of play is a totally different beast. Once you distill all these systems of movement and animation down to their essenses, it doesn't really matter if it's AI generated tools or tuning values in a bit of scripting. The process inevitably becomes the same. This is where the fun is made, this is where the game goes from good to great. And you can't prompt the AI to make the punches feel punchier or the jumps feel jumpier without endless excess code and noise that starts to muddy the process of finding the fun. This is where the human element will remain for at least some bit of time while the elements of content genertaion, world building, post processing, etc, all of that gets sucked up by the AI prompt based methods.

People are free to preach the gospel of AI referencing that post. But the point was to show that the vast majority of people don't' understand AI or it's limits or how it adds values to games, and where games still benefit from human made systems and tunings. I've spent many years on my current project developing many features, if I threw away every feature that wasn't fun, I would have no features in my game! Something we are losing in this AI era, is the will to push through mediocrity and make things GREAT! So much of what makes a game fun is in the nuance and the skills and perspectives that comes through endless tuning and failure. Games are very simple, and people keep speaking to these large, complex porotype features that the AI can try. We used to call that scope creep, and we understood it was largely bad. Good games are a methodically considered "chord" of features that you have faith will be fun, and making those as fun as possible often takes ingenuity and endless tweaking. THAT SAID! AI will be creating debug features and tuning mechanisms and setups that I could see amplifying this process. But what worries me, is that people will simply relenquish all of gamedev to the AI, believing AI to be faster, and better in all aspects, that if you're doing anything slowly and methodically you're falling behind. But GREAT games are made slowly and methodically. Some elements of those great games will be sped up, but we seem to be hypnotized into thinking that we are at an inflection point where any area of your game you're not supercharging with AI will be lesser than, and that's kinda tragic. It's as if all the world decided only AI can survive, only AI can recieve investment and attention, whether that AI is productive in the short term or not. It's this reckless gamble that OTHERS have made, that is having a MASSIVELY negative impact on the lives of all developers. AI gamedevs jump from project to project, they try this thing and that thing in the matter of a week or so, and they are becoming so short of attention, and losing the qualities of commitment and ability to spend long periods of time to make systems truly great any more.

It's also a cultural problem. Games were once made by gamers for gamers, when you have a culture that respects work ethic, and WANTS to make good games, you get teams that genuinly focus on their crafts and put out good games. There is a ubiquitous drive and need to do good work to promote the efforts of those doing that work because the system is an extension of the players. Somewhere along the line gaming became a money printing machine, attracting the wrong people, happened in the 80's too. To say nothing of the social engineering that happened on top. There were too many distractions, to many forces looking to diminish the efforts of making great games for ulterior motives and self preservation among the coattail riders. It's been so long since we had this culture we don't know how to bring it back. We're all scratching our heads wondering how gaming becomes strong and sustainable again.

I agree with your assessment. But where they are supremely incompenent, and what did in the entire industry, was thinking empire building led to better game sin the first place. Indie devs are already churning out better games with single dev teams, or teams in the single digits. Even with the obvious truth staring them in the face that smaller, harder working, and more talented team leads to superior products they can't change their ways. Because the very existence of AAA requires a large staff and large teams to justify their entire existence. The entire fuckign industry was a house of cards, a throng of people faking it till they made it, blowing smoke up each other's behinds to justify exessive paychecks and inane monetizations. All the marketing, the beuaracracy, the massive team management, the big buildings, it was all an illusion built around that small core of quality gaming that the very core teams built up over time. Blech. Like I don't know wtf anything even is any more. It's all nonsense, nothing is in service to anything, everytihng is a con, in serviec to this giant machine that just produces ungrateful people gassing each other up a everyting goes to shit. And I realize it makes me an asshole for poiting out. But I'm just so very tired of watching everything in this world go to absolute shit.

Ha sorry you caught me worked up responding to AI glazers who think AAA is going to leverage AI to make the next great game. I don't think people should feel ANY shame using AI. it's an INCREDIBLE learning tool, use it to learn the dark arts of gamedev that this shitty industry kept chained in a cave in a basement. There's lots of things AI does very well, and MOST OF ALL it does a great job of helping people learn gamedev!

AI is VERY overhyped. It can do some cool tech stuff for feature sets like graphics elements, it can handle various controllers for stale things like sounds, music, UI, or it can do some generic procedural generation for things like worlds or cities that don't have demanding play requirments. But people seem to be really taken hold by this mass spell that AI is going to do everything and do it better than people in regards to gamedev and if you're not getting those gains, then you're not using AI right. This is INSANITY, AI can't do the gameplay systems, it can polish a jump, it can't make a punch feel punchy, it can't create levels with a darn, and honestly even with art unless it's 2D pixar style stuff you want, it's just not going to be doing much work in the competitive space. The AI fears that it's replacing everyone is really unfounded, but lots of people are buying into it because so many people are speaking the notion into existence. Simple question... Can anyone show a single rigged character, or some gameplay feature? Or some procedurally generated area of game made by AI that is even passably made let alone exceptoinal? We need to start requiring tangible examples of this AI takeover, because the global conversation is dominated by people asserting these things are happening, or hoping they will. But the evidence says otherwise, and people shouldn't abandon their dreams of making kick ass games just because there are waves of people declairing the era of hand made games are over, and that AI is already victories. That's absolutely silly talk, AI generated systems aren't even in the same ballpark of quality as other games, not yet anyway. I don't want to talk too much crap about AI, it will enable people to get their hands dirty and start somewhere with gamedev, but it's not the high end benchmark, it's an entry point.