Agreed. Im a Stiglitzian. Joseph Stiglitz made the Nobel winning proof that capitalism seeks to remove information symmetry and breaks down the market. Capitalism is ironically anti market and needs regulation to function.

In this case enshittification is due to giant studios self cannabilizing themselves as their profit growth didnt match their unsustainable greed.

Or many of the big AAA. Whats happening is a flattening of revenues as more indie devs break out, as fans grow tired of repeatedly releases titles with no innovation (cod, assassin’s creed etc). Big corporate studios are not seeing the growth their shareholders demand so they are starting to self cannibalize.

Canadians need to fight for these studios getting the support our oil or car companies get. We punch way above our weight in this industry. After ripping bioware away from ea of course.

Everything has vulnerabilities but a separate rest API lets you lock down far more access points especially if you further lock down the database itself. I like to fire up dockerized Django API frameworks when I need a secure, scalable rest in a hurry.

I have optimism most will find good work as video games make growing sales while corporate shells are convulsing and AI promises turn up empty.

More money in the video game industry than ever before but corporate predatory consolidation and enshittification still deeply mires the industry.

I hate to sound so elitist but the minute I could stop using php I moved on and never looked back. Sure, a separate backend language is more work but its so much more secure and scalable.

In my opinion, respectfully disagreed. So many professional engineers i work with or hire now forget how to code. We now allow LLMs but you must read every single line and be able to audit and explain your stack as if you read every line. And we don’t allow them for anything larger than simple functions. They are attrociously inefficient. Yet so many execs and devs think they are super intelligent. Hence why we need to call out vibe coding.

Not only that. LLMs have serious flaws like are much more costly than hand written code, are much more prone to errors, cant be reviewed or audited, and rarely employs the most efficient architectures. On top of that, execs think the memory is absolute and dont realize the more context you feed it, the more it has to guess.

LLM-only code is going to be terrible.

ccording to a new report by Bloomberg, developers on the game were told to implement an “AI-first” production model using Anthropic’s Claude AI models. The team is not to use any more “hand-written code,” and even artists are being pushed to use the technology that has become a punching bag among actual players. The director of the unannounced game reportedly told developers that all art should be “generated with full AI workflows.”

No handwritten code allowed is laughably stupid. This decision was made by someone who doesn’t understand code or llms.

Tbh not sure i agree. Started a lore-playing server with friends in 2012. It grew to over 200 unique players and rich DnD style growing history. Minecraft entered its dark period after the purchase but in the last few years has given players plenty of steady updates that are bringing us back and keeping our lore playing server thriving.

Ive seen more innovations in Minecraft in 5 years than I’ve seen in pokemon in 20, to put it into perspective. Love both series.

Great points. Fortunately unreal engine comes out of box with server prediction and validation of location. What is harder are edge case resource padding that are harder to detect. (Given our game is RTS people giving themselves a small, barely noticeable cheat is still a cheat). But yes there are lots of techniques to minimize most of it.

Indie game dev here with an upcoming arena /action rts. I fully agree with those companies employing toxic approaches, but cheating is legit. Even our very raw, very underdeveloped playtest had some players playing around with cheating, by adjusting client data. We had to reprioritize basic validation checks but they aren’t perfect. Im wondering if any devs has good tips/philosophies for balacinging discouraging cheating (as it ruins the experience for others) versus not pissing legitimate players off.

Not necessarily. Major triple A studios are seeing sales wane, regularly recycled slop like assassins creed and battlefield they were pumping out doesnt sell well. Video games are selling better than ever, but lots of indie titles or smaller studios taking the wins. Im not talking as much about say rockstar as I am say the ubisofts and EAs of the world.

Too sarcastic that they caused a PR mess, is definitely possible.

“In other words, we think AI should be voiced by AI - not to offend AI. This feels especially important nowadays, with AGI almost here. That’s all we can say, unpacking the whole AI cultural narrative isn’t really our place.”

Not only is their joke lame and distasteful the studio is also revealing they have no idea what they are talking about. No, AGI is not almost here. This is a bigger joke than their stupid post.

Its partly why for our indie title hermertia wars we are making playtests free and ubiquitous on our steam page instead of launching as early access ;)