From our other sites
The story
A game designer’s remark that “AI is wiping out jobs — the game industry is already finished” was picked up on 5ch’s Game Hardware & Industry board (known as “Geha”), sparking a heated debate. The discussion was fueled by growing anxiety that AI is taking over work once done by illustrators and programmers, with AI services costing just a few thousand yen a month now handling everything from coding to debugging. Posters split between “AI can only do Work, not Create” and “even that distinction will vanish within a few years,” with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto cited along the way, as opinions diverged over whether the industry will shrink — or whether this instead ushers in a golden age for individual creators.
What people said
I've got no complaints about using it where it's invisible to players, if it cuts costs.
Watching those dreamy AI-generated landscapes floating around YouTube, I'm starting to think AI's fine for everything except the characters.
AI art looks nice, but it has no sense of pacing, no storyboarding ("neme," the rough panel-layout stage in manga), no flow.
Things like making you wait for the payoff, or the classic setup-then-punchline rhythm — AI's still got a long way to go on that kind of craft.
All AI can do is Work.
Humans just do the initial concept, and AI fleshes it out from there.
Even just that alone is a huge blow — it cuts the workload dramatically.
Look at salaries and it's obvious most humans can only do Work too.
AI's the real Creator here, honestly.
It's always humans who create the quirks.
That's just the imitation stage we're at now — give it a few years and I bet it'll easily reproduce even those human quirks.
With ChatGPT's paid plan, 3000 yen a month basically gets you your own personal programmer.
Ask it for some software and it'll whip it up right away.
The cost of programmers in game development is about to get slashed hard.
If current AI handled the debugging, would it have turned out better than it did for Wilds (Monster Hunter Wilds)?
No telling how long this window lasts, which is exactly why it'd be a waste not to jump on it now.
There's even a Blender interface, so you're not just coding — you can become a modeler or an illustrator too.
All depends on how you prompt it though.
If anything, programmers who have no hang-ups about it and just treat AI as a tool are going to power up.
Meanwhile they'll walk away from companies that ban it.
Whether you like AI generation or not, now really is a chance to learn.
Outside of anything criminal, it'll function as an instructor for pretty much everything.
Not me personally, but
I think the people who hate it most should be the ones using it, if only to learn what it can do and where its weak points are.
Flailing around like a kid without even knowing the reality of the thing gets you nowhere.
We're already at the point where multiple AIs fixing and tuning each other's output can get things most of the way there, so all you need is staff for the final check — nothing more.
There's no longer any need to put people on review duty.
AI's gotten that good at proofreading other AI's generated code.
Even the evaluating is being done by AI now.
Like, pair 1000 coding AIs with about 20 evaluator AIs,
then have a handful of humans do the final check on whatever the 20 flag.
Anyone who's not a supervisor — hundreds of code monkeys ("ma," slang for programmer) — gets shown the door.
The technical skills and knowledge that used to be a barrier won't be needed anymore, since AI can be left to handle things up to a working prototype.
The birth of a great indie era, then.
Even idea-first games can reach a shippable product if you let AI handle the balance tuning —
as long as you can juggle multiple AI agents well, that is.
No question those people need to rethink things.
Sucks for them, but when you factor in efficiency, it just becomes 'can't afford to let them do it anymore.'
Feels like we're close to an era where manual programming becomes a purely hobbyist thing.
That said, you still need to understand the fundamentals, so drills and competitions for building logic and algorithms by hand will probably stick around.
If AAA titles — which used to require a labor-intensive approach, gathering tons of highly paid, highly skilled people — can now be mass-produced with AI,
doesn't that mean a bright future for the game industry?
Also, if similar new titles keep dropping all the time, players will stop getting excited,
and loyalty/insider buying will drop too — I bet the industry shrinks.
Correction:
if similar AAA titles keep dropping all the time, players will stop getting excited,
plus loyalty/insider buying will drop too, so I bet the industry shrinks.
Also, given someone like Miyamoto's emphasis on the formative experiences behind creativity,
it seems unavoidable that creators' talent and ideas will get worn thin over time.
If AI-driven mass production leads to oversupply, won't prices have to come down?
Same as always — expectations will just go up instead, lol.
Way too many people are covering for their own lack of effort here.
Speed and accuracy are exactly the areas humans can't win.
That's the whole point — it's exactly why the creative part becomes what matters.
So? Can you do that? Go on, show us how it's done.
"What AI's rise is ending isn't 'game development' itself, but the labor-intensive, assembly-line style of 'mechanical development.' Going forward, we should shift to an era where humans are freed from manual grunt work and focus on 'ideas for fun and direction.' Individuals should hand mass production of code and art off to AI and specialize in presenting a sharp, distinctive worldview and the 'discerning eye' to judge AI output. Companies should use small elite teams plus AI to rapidly speed up prototyping and focus on validating what's actually fun. And the industry as a whole will need to differentiate itself, amid a flood of AI-generated content, through uniquely human intent and experiential value — i.e., 'who made this, and why.'"
So it says.
'Ideas for fun' — that's exactly the field Nintendo, the company you all love to hate, happens to be great at.
So that means designers' jobs really are finished, huh.
I've had AI play games, and even with Pokémon it struggled just choosing what action to take.
Isn't it, at best, a stand-in for a debugger that just reruns a fixed set of test commands?
AI evolves on its own, you know.
Even that 'kinda nice remaster' of Torneko —
once they left debugging to AI, the controls felt absolutely terrible.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
A post claiming “a game designer said AI is wiping out jobs” was picked up on 5ch’s Game Hardware & Industry board (“Geha”), sparking a wide-ranging debate. The backdrop: paid AI services like ChatGPT, for just a few thousand yen a month, can now handle everything from code generation to debugging to image generation, and have started replacing work once done by programmers and illustrators. The thread split between the optimistic view that “AI can do Work but not Create” and the pessimistic view that “even that line will blur within a few years.” The piece also cites a quote attributed to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto about technical skills losing importance while creative vision grows more important, feeding into the debate over whether mass-producing AAA titles will shrink the industry or grow it. One thing readers might misread: much of the thread isn’t making the simple claim that “everyone loses their job” — it draws a line between “mechanical mass-production work” and “ideas and direction,” with some also pointing out that greater efficiency doesn’t necessarily mean game prices will fall.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry, “Geha”) thread “[Sad News] Game Designer: “AI Is Wiping Out Jobs. The Game Industry Is Already Finished”.”
Leave a Reply