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Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

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Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#51

Post by hluska »

newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid.

So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed.

Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation.

Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives.

There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#52

Post by reactordev »

altairprime wrote: post #29
newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040 I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial en…

Ubisoft, Bungie, id software…

Blizzard

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#53

Post by BiscuitBadger »

newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#54

Post by astrange »

martythemaniak wrote: post #24
newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t... The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alte…

> Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies.

This doesn't happen anymore, it's actually relatively good at sorting bad comments to the bottom now. The current problem is it's full of wannabe LinkedIn influencers with "Building for AI agents in business in public" in their profile using LLMs to reply to everything.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#55

Post by [deleted] »

square_usual wrote: post #48

In the first paragraph: > While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says: > It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY. Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as ba…

[deleted]

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#56

Post by watwut »

munificent wrote: post #20

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…

The article starts by video companies being as profitable as ever. Issue is not with economics not being there.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#57

Post by mschuster91 »

martythemaniak wrote: post #41
mschuster91 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase. As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.

Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actual…

> Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance.

The overhire during ZIRP was insane though - in total it was a good nine years of zero interest rates, and between the first period (2008-2015) and the second period (2020-2022) interest rates weren't that high either. Companies battled each other hard even for people who just went through a few weeks worth of bootcamp, just to make sure the competition didn't have access to them, even if there was not much productive work that could be assigned.

And that group is where the layoffs really hit hard: people with basic training, relatively little investment both of the company into the workers and from the workers to the company and, most importantly, a skillset / allocation that just lends itself heavily to being replaced or at the very least heavily augmented by AI.

On top of that... "good financial performance" doesn't mean the balance sheets can't look even better. With C-level boni being tied to stock performance or "efficiency gains" KPIs, it's no surprise that many just look at their paycheck first, the long-term health of the company second.

> You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".

I don't have much hope left for anything in the field of "knowledge work" and for most of "creative work" either. Let's be real, the wide masses don't care they're being force fed with AI slop, as long as they have some brainrot to doomscroll in the evening. The only jobs relatively secure for now IMHO are the trades and wiping the arses of dying boomers in care homes. For the former, robots lack the required dexterity and force feedback, and for the latter, maybe the Japanese are willing to accept arse-wiping robots, but I heavily doubt this will be the case in Western countries any time soon.

> Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon.

There are companies left that are actively growing and not making shovels for the AI gold diggers? Huh?

> Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.

A rare few, yes. But most have given up and went for appeasement instead after the first ones got mergers disrupted or otherwise punished.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#58

Post by noduerme »

newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#59

Post by prophesi »

square_usual wrote: post #48

In the first paragraph: > While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says: > It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY. Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as ba…

Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4...

edit: Tarn Adams is also an indie game developer, not a game journalist. Dwarf Fortress is highly influential in the indie game scene.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#60

Post by altairprime »

reactordev wrote: post #52
altairprime wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040 I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial en…

Ubisoft, Bungie, id software… Blizzard

Bungie, in its post-Halo standalone incarnation, was running a microtransactions empire from day one and funded itself on the debt owed by those; it was not ‘taken over’ by financial engineers, so to speak, because the call was coming from inside the house from day one. They executed on some very nice tricks to get funded but their business was operated consistently (impeccable scenic and gunplay, variable-quality story and voicing, catastrophically-bad management) throughout.

The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but I’m not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly they’re stellar examples of ‘greed minmaxers’ but not so much of ‘profitable incompetence through financial engineer takeover’ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?

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