“THE games industry as we know it is dead.”
That was the verdict of videogame journalist, Chris Tapsell, deputy editor of Eurogamer, earlier this month. And to be fair, he’s not wide of the mark. The old ways of working just aren’t — well — working. The paradigm of the big budget, triple-A studio is failing. Spectacularly.
The scale of this disaster, spurred by overproduction, worker exploitation, dependencies on monopoly capital, cuts to arts council funding, Trump’s tariffs on China, and, of course, AI technologies, has reached apocalyptic proportions. The C-suite fantasy, whereby miracle machines will quickly and efficiently produce art in lieu of actual artists, with all their ideals and meaningful social discourse, is becoming more and more ridiculous. To be sure, what we’re seeing isn’t the beginning of art as procedurally generated play but a grotesque imitation of it — a kind of counter art, or, to borrow a phrase from those campaigning against killer robots in the military, a “death by algorithm.”
