The nuance that's lost in the article:
- Game Devs are similar and different to SWEs. The differences are that most game devs are contractors, work long hours, usually get underpaid given the work they're doing(they're working with low level languages to make droplets on Spiderman's suit look realistic enough for Youtube commenters).

- AI is 'good enough' for a lot of industries, and will be continued to go to market when it's 'good enough' for a given industry.

- That said, AI in games as it stands is really buggy. A "Good Enough" relationship, dialogue tree, Social Graph LLM for a game might take so much time finetuning that it may always be better to just start with Twine or an excel sheet.

- Gamers (with a capital G) are different from gamers. Gamers are the gaming equivalent of armchair food critics. They hate AI, and will brigade anything with a whiff of it, and will demonize anyone or anything that pushes back on them, even if the Gamers are wrong (see the 'Baldurs Gate Xalavier' drama).

- The issue is that Gamers are the influencers that determine whether the long tail of games (games that aren't AAA mainstays, yearly sports games, or the top multiplayer games) get enough momentum and traction to pop up for less serious gamers.

- Gamers hate AI, and will do everything in their power to make every content creator 'acknowledge the controversy' (these 'cancel culture'-adjacent dynamics are all downstream from Gamergate). Comnsidering Gamers are often the enthusiasts most game studios need to swing digital game store algos in their favor, you don't want to build a game that becomes a 'stand-in for a controversial topic.'

- If the game is polished enough and is a AAA game that has a dedicated audience, it'll get bought in spite of that.

- If the game was AA or indie, the influencers who'd amplify the game in other instances will talk about it like the end of True Artistic Gaming.

- This leads to less MTX-like games getting funded, because the long tail of gamers are mobile, and most mobile games are miniaturized one-way casinos with WoW guild warfare grafted onto it.

- If there are more layoffs as the gaming industry's financiers go risk off for lower ROI games, then only the AAA, P2W, gacha, battle pass games get funded, which creates a feedback loop.

So yes, games as an industry will continue to rake in money because gacha games, battle passes, and MTX business models make the overwhelming majority of the industry's revenue. What's being missed is that what saved gaming from the ET gaming market crash and took it to $1 billion in sales for Counter Strike lootboxes was the passion and specialized labor of a lot of people. A lot of issues with game development preservation have accumulated (losing source code, laying off people who knew how to build critically acclaimed games before doing knowledge transfer, etc), and will compound as thousands of people get laid off, and people either dial in core parts of games, or outsource logic to an LLM.

The article acts as a lamentation, because the games that most people above the age of 20 grew up with are not going to be made as often anymore, unless there's some way to introduce a whale/guppy power dynamic with online play, or a battle pass, or gacha "Pay-to-Win" mechanic that pays for itself within a few weeks of launch.