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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

#251

Post by tarsinge »

munificent wrote: post #226
asdff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder. I also want to push back on the…

> I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day . >* NYT is now 10x as thick?* One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now. > Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of…

I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.

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

#252

Post by sgarland »

munificent wrote: post #226
asdff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder. I also want to push back on the…

> I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day . >* NYT is now 10x as thick?* One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now. > Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of…

> 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.

Tangentially, assuming a median length of 4:03 [0], and a bitrate of 8192 Kbps (8 Mbps for video, 192 Kbps for audio), that’s almost 5 PB per day. That is insane.

0: https://tubestats.io/statistics/video

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

#253

Post by threetonesun »

aldous wrote: post #250
threetonesun wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users wh…

Paul McCartney maybe? "We were writing songs that were memorable, not because we wanted them to be memorable but because we had to remember them"

Had to refresh my memory, but it was "If it ain't worth remembering, it ain't worth writing down.", from Ronnie Van Zant.

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

#254

Post by drugstorecowboy »

luke5441 wrote: post #174
drugstorecowboy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimatel…

There are enough people playing multiplayer games where this is not the case. Those are actually kind of annoying because ELO systems cause you to always loose about half the games (except if you are the top player of all the players) no matter how much better you get. You could tune this to handicap the LLM such that the player wins 80% of the time or so and it should be more fun (except for the competitive aspect).

Thats a good point about multiplayer, I was really thinking single player only. I guess the main thrust of my point is that the reason there isn't more ML in games isn't related to performance, its that the goal of game design(single player anyway) isn't to make enemies into unbeatable gods so the usefulness of ML is somewhat limited.

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

#255

Post by square_usual »

prophesi wrote: post #59
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: Ta…

You can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f...

Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division).

The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.

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

#256

Post by prophesi »

square_usual wrote: post #255
prophesi wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: Ta…

You can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f... Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division). The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because…

An article that references a tweet and some blog site called "beincrypto.com". That's not the first result for me, and I'm glad it isn't.

It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division.

edit:

> and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division

This is also false

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

#258

Post by square_usual »

prophesi wrote: post #256
square_usual wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f... Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division). The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because…

An article that references a tweet and some blog site called "beincrypto.com". That's not the first result for me, and I'm glad it isn't. It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division. edit: > and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division This is also false

The tweet is from Asha Sharma, the leader of Xbox!

> It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division.

No??? You can quibble about the article, but you must've failed to read:

> The fourth quarter alone showed a sharper split. Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, fell 10 percent in the quarter. Hardware revenue dropped 13 percent over the same three months

This is further bolstered by MS's own press release:

> XBOX content and services revenue decreased 10%

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2026-q4...

> and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division

You said "I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report"

When the report says:

> Xbox content and services revenue increased 13% (up 12% in constant currency)

In fact, there's no 11% figure anywhere in the report, so I have to assume this is what you're referring to since MS didn't break out Xbox hardware anywhere in it.

This is laughably shoddy work, please don't waste my time.

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

#259

Post by munificent »

tarsinge wrote: post #251
munificent wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day . >* NYT is now 10x as thick?* One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now. > Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of…

I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.

The thing is, though, people are still choosing to spend time on crap.

So as a producer of quality content, your audience has shrunk because a minute spend consuming crap is a minute not available for your thing. And as a consumer, the average total quality being consumed has likely gone down.

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

#260

Post by HDThoreaun »

bugbull wrote: post #145
zetanor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I…

What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.

Touchscreen is a terrible ux and battery life gets drained so fast you basically have to be at a charger
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