The title should be "ludus mortuus est", the game is dead. Ludus takes the nominative, since it's the subject of the sentence. And mortuus also takes the nominative, because it's a nominative complement. Google Translate will only take you so far.
Google translate gives "ludus mortuus est". 'Ludum' (vs 'ludus') possibly comes from the game jam 'ludum dare' (where 'ludum' is okay because it's meant to be in the accusative - the object of 'dare' - 'to give/make').
Indeed; I assumed that the goal was to reference the game jam.
But I ended up thinking that the title was a failure not because of grammar but because it makes my mind autocomplete the phrase in a way that the article does not intend. I see "Ludus mortuus est" and I immediately want to respond "Vivat ludus!"
> and mortuus also takes the nominative, because it's a nominative complement.
this is wrong. mortuus, dead, is the perfect active participle of morī, to die. its adjectival in nature, hence the attribution via esse. not too different from english. although in latin one is more likely to write ludus mortuus. the est naturally is implied.
No, it can't be both of those things. On one analysis, it is a complement to the verb est; on the other analysis, it is the verb.
Mortuus est is always going to be analyzed as the 3rd person singular perfect passive† indicative form of morior, "has died" or just "died", not "is dead". That's what combining the participle with esse means.
Now, mortuus could just be a non-participial adjective instead. You could form a sentence that way that looked identical, ludus mortuus est, and it would mean "the game is dead", which just happens to be semantically identical with "the game has died". You can't be dead in the present without having finished dying in the past, and you can't have finished dying in the past without being dead in the present.
So we make the assumption that mortuus est is a verb, and not a predicative verb phrase, just because morior is a very common verb and this is a normal way to use it. The assumption is analogous to the assumption in English that when somebody says "time flies like an arrow", they are talking about the rapidity of the passage of time, and not exhorting the listener to apply stopwatches to flies the same way they would to an arrow.
† To the extent that morior is a passive verb. It isn't -- we call it "deponent", an active verb that takes grammatically passive forms, like the English verb to be born -- and so mortuus est is just a perfect active form.
There's no existing market for Latin translator jobs, because everyone knows the best way to translate a Latin sentence is to translate it poorly and wait for someone to correct it in the comments.
I recommend never providing unsolicited Latin advice unless the phrase has been tattooed in flesh or used as the name of a legal entity (e.g. "Atlas Obscura").
While I empathize with the message about layoffs, the tone of this article is too hyperbolic for my tastes, “Game development is in an extinction level event crisis, and it is entirely self inflicted.”
The games industry makes more money than music and movies combined. It’s no where close to extinction. It does have all the problems of any entertainment industry though where the creators love the product and put up with unfair wages, hours, and personalities at the cost of their own well being.
The opening of the story really undercuts the hyperbole:
> There are approximately 330,000 people who work in the video game industry.
> 9,000 of them have been laid off in 2023.
> 3,000 more of them have been laid off this month. You know, the one that's only half over.
That's a four percent reduction. Meta cut thirteen percent in November 2022, and it still exists, as does Twitter/X, which has notoriously cut far more staff. A four percent reduction is probably just beginning to clear out some dead wood, not the sign of impending extinction.
Yeah all the layoffs all across tech are 100% a result of raising interest rates, but everyone wants to frame it with whatever their political ideology is (oh, it's DEI, oh, it's capitalist profiteering, whatever).
People didn't like inflation, but they loved inflated salaries. When people said "tackle inflation", they meant "lower prices", but didn't really consider that their salary increases were _also_ a result of inflation.
When you pull money out of the economy, companies cut spending and the single largest expense of tech companies is "salaries", so of course they're going to cut salaries.
The end result of this should all balance out, but in the mean time, everyone was mad about rising prices and didn't complain about rising salaries, and now they're mad about falling salaries and don't complain about falling prices.
In conclusion, (too much) inflation is bad and we should stop doing that.
Currently mostly energy and things whose prices depend mostly on energy like airline tickets, but inflation _generally_ doesn't end with prices falling over all, just not going up any more.
I hear this argument regularly, but I’ve never understood why. Hyperinflation is historically a bad thing, but whenever I ask about deflation, I just get hand-waving about the Great Depression. Is there any reading that lays out the dangers of deflation?
Deflation has a natural tendency to spiral; things will be cheaper in the future, so people put off spending, which brings prices down further and so on. You create an incentive to hoard cash rather than consuming or investing, and that is also self-reinforcing, so money stops functioning as money with all the trouble that implies.
This is obviously not how things generally work in the real world. Prices for personal computers have been deflating for years. The computing power in a $1000 laptop today would have probably cost at least $3000 a decade ago. And yet customers keep buying them instead of putting off spending because they want to have stuff today.
People buy computers when they want or need them, yes. But they absolutely do put off buying them because a better model is coming. Whereas people rush to buy e.g. a house as quickly as they can, because the price of houses keeps going up.
Deflation throws on the breaks in the economy, because X is cheaper if you postpone it. With X representing essentially all economic activities like buying a new phone / hiring a programmer / going on vacation / etc
This would be great for the environment, but absolutely terrible for the economy
> Deflation throws on the breaks in the economy, because X is cheaper if you postpone it. With X representing essentially all economic activities
Sometimes I think about this as promoting investment in cash. Deflation over time means cash yields a profit.
But since cash doesn't actually do anything, investing in cash instead of something else is harmful.
One implication of both of our comments is that unanticipated deflation is good. What causes problems is the reaction people take to anticipating that deflation will occur -- they wait it out -- not the fact that things are cheaper.
The necessary refinement would be that unanticipated deflation that comes from an increase in the amount of stuff is good, and unanticipated deflation that comes from a reduction in the amount of money is [?].
Introducing that dimension asks us to fill out the grid:
- anticipated deflation from an increase in the amount of stuff: [?]
- anticipated deflation from a reduction in the amount of money: bad
In these discussions it's easy to forget that it's not only things that get cheaper or more expensive. Services and people's salaries also adjust the same way. With deflation your salary will also go down.
That's the point of what I called "the necessary refinement". If there is more stuff, stuff gets cheaper without a matching decrease in your salary. If there is less money, stuff gets cheaper and there is also a matching decrease in your salary.
But in either case, the problems associated with deflation come from the actions people take to prepare for it, not from the consequences of it having already happened.
To add to this, it's also very hard to get out of as we've seen for decades in Japan. Some countries get stuck in recurring waves of inflation as well, as we set with Argentina, but that's arguably more sure to avoidable policy choices.
Making those with money able to buy more tomorrow than today will make all sales plummet... all real needs go unmet and all efficient loaning of money cease.
Holding your breath will leave more oxygen for whoever survives .... but there won't be as many who need it left alive.
Deflation is deadly unless you worship coins as the only valid measure of economics.
Tell me more about the spectre of the nonsense world where everyone sits around starving to death because they're too wealthy and food is too cheap.
Or don't, I've heard it hundreds of times, and it's still nonsensical, and it's unbelievable that people are being constantly harmed by inflationary monetary policy on such a ridiculous justification.
Generally I see AAA studios churning out Boring Shooter: 2024 Q1 edition. Pay $70 for the same engine, some balance tweaks, and a new map. But their games are pretty because they are the only ones who can afford to buy millions to make assets.
Indie games are, of course, where all the interesting mechanics are invented.
If AI makes it easy to generate assets, why won’t the AAA studios feel the pain first? Of course, everyone would love a stable job, and it is really sad when they lose them. But the management just contributes coordination. Maybe we’re heading toward a world small teams can leverage AI to fill their skill gaps, they can make some actually interesting games, and the AAA studios can go extinct. The game shattering Steam records was made by like 10 people apparently, and I think they didn’t even use AI (as far as I know).
None of this puts food on the table now of course, but the future could be better.
> If AI makes it easy to generate assets, why won’t the AAA studios feel the pain first?
Because, as you said in your first paragraph, the AAA studios' USP is that their games look better. They have skilled artists, and for the moment generative assets aren't going to be able to match that - and they don't have to, for most purposes. Indie games using procedural generation is already a tradition, it's just going to kick up a notch, and then the low end of AA will start using it, and so on; I'm not saying this stuff won't eventually make it into the AAA games, but it's going to get there from the bottom up, and the low/middle-end - those studios that just barely kept a few artists on the payroll at the moment - will be the first jobs hit.
> None of this puts food on the table now of course, but the future could be better.
It'll be better for creative and original people. But those who were just getting by churning out good enough are in for a rough time.
> Generally I see AAA studios churning out Boring Shooter: 2024 Q1 edition
This seems very selective. Shooters seem to take up a fairly small portion of released AAA games these days and it's easy to find AAA games that don't fit this at all. We all know about Zelda ToTK, Baldur's Gate III, Alan Wake II, Mario Bros. Wonder, Hi-fi Rush. All games that came out last year, are AAA games and take risks and don't fit what you criticize at all. We even had debates about Dave the Diver which is a game from a major studio, but kept getting falsely celebrated as a indy hit.
If anything the "boring shooters" like Cod and Medal of Honor are taking up less space these days. Fortnite might have started out as a shooter and is massive, but at this point it's hard to tell what it even is.
> hope you liked the games of 2023 because that's all folks [...] Game development is in an extinction level event crisis
Okay, we'll wait and see whether games are really dead this time next year. That's an easy one to confirm, since he gave a prediction and a timeline. We can just wait a year and see if he's right, or if he's being hyperbolic to the point of inanity. Being really generous, I'll interpret his prediction as weaker than stated and say that the prediction is confirmed if there are 25% fewer games released this year than last.
I didn't read the prediction as saying the number of releases would go down. Just that we were sliding into an area where the majority would be shitty AI-generated games.
I struggled to find anything of substance in this article. How did 2023 differ from 2022? Why does laying off 5% of the AAA workforce (which part?) correspond to an AI apocalypse in 2024? What is this article actually arguing, and why should I care?
For example, the author opines that
> Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love, from indie developers or the few good AAA development houses still running, and piles upon piles upon piles of AI-generated vomit that will make people nostalgic for the days when most of Steam's catalog was Unity Store asset flips.
> And gamers won't buy them.
The only games I cared about in 2023 were from indie developers or labors of love. But... "gamers" bought them. At least I did. Am I a "gamer"? Are the titles I care about going to suddenly fail in 2024? I don't see any evidence for that in the article. Will sales of titles I don't care about fall in 2024? I don't see any evidence for that in the article either.
I didn't buy any Unity Store asset flips or AI generated nonsense or NFT-powered whatever or gacha b.s. or Call of Duty 20XX: Shootie-Person Redux, and I wasn't planning on doing so in 2024. Should I be concerned about that industry?
I don't put much value in the EA/Activision/Blizzard/Tencent/etc. gaming shops. I haven't for a long time, though. If the market somehow killed those studios, I'd struggle to call that a bad thing? Should I think differently?
There is an even darker possible future: gamers WILL buy this AI generated crap. And the executives know it, since gamers have been buying their low effort budget cut pre-order alpha crap for years.
Sure, to me personally it really doesn't matter how the assets are generated, gameplay is what matters. However, I will buy AI generated crap with good gameplay / design for 20€ with no DRM and no grinding, no microtransaction bullshit and no always-online.
Then the repugnant conclusion is not that gaming is dead, but that games are made primarily for teenaged boys and most of us have aged out of the target audience, so games simply aren't made for us anymore.
Not at $70. If it's that easy to sell AI-generated druck to the masses then hundreds of shops will open and the prices will fall to free (with in-game subscriptions).
People buy new FIFA games at prices like that every year, and usually the only thing that's changed since the last game is updated player stats and some cookie cutter "new features". Unless there's a new console out, in which case there may be a jump in engine quality.
If people are willing to pay $70 for what is essentially just a database update...
The situation in game dev not so different from Hollywood before unionization, where the workers who produced the content could be barely scraping by while the films they worked on created tremendous profits for studio heads and investors. As in the old days of Hollywood, workers' passion for their work was weaponized against the,
The fact that this article was written the day before the release of Palworld makes it a bit funny, we're not even a month into 2024 and there's already a game that's the third all-time peak game on Steam for concurrent players, the highest if you don't count free-to-play games like CS and PUBG, and it's also the most played game at the moment.
So far, the doom and gloom prediction that games are almost dead doesn't seem to be true. At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters about your game is whether it's fun or not, and almost no one would care if a game used AI if people found it fun to play.
Any predicted death would be years out anyway, Palworld got started in production years ago after all and AI isn’t about to take over major elements of game production anytime soon.
From the perspective of gamers, it's actually better than ever. UE5 means a single dude can make his roguelite with no compromises, AI means he can also make passable assets. It's just Ubisoft and EA and the other shitty conglomerates that are going to have to downsize and I for one am looking forward to it.
If compensation is all about performance bonuses, and then only when projects are successful, projects should just become collectives. There's no justification for having an 'owner' in that case.
I’m unimpressed with AAA game studios and the game dev employment pipeline. People KNOW that there’s a perpetual supply glut of devs lied up around the corner, but still peddle their labor in a buyer’s market. They KNOW they’ll work on giant over-produced design-by-committee games that are awards-bait or gambling platforms and little more. They KNOW these companies are publicly traded and that accountants at public companies value creative vision and institutional knowledge at absolute zero. They KNOW indie is a saturated market with very few inspired designs that can be profitable even if the conditions are right.
Working in game dev and then complaining about the conditions looks like running out in the rain and complaining it’s wet. I have next to no sympathy for the unionization activism. A huge part of how marketable your skillset is comes down to the nicheness of the domain, or at least how applicable your skills are to various niche domains. Game dev is not niche, and you’ve all made your bed chasing this dream.
I sympathise with the author and agree that there are some pretty terrible stories and numbers floating around, but the unstated premise of the article seems to be:
The game industry is monolithic, it has recently undergone a sweeping change, but no further change is possible, therefore it is safe to make a linear projection based on what's happened over the last six months out to infinity. And I'm skeptical that those are good assumptions to make.
> Epic Games in September laid off over 800 people, almost 15% of the entire company. Epic is one of the most successful and profitable game companies that exist. [...] For years, every other game company has tried to copy Fortnite, and mostly failed at the attempt. This is not enough to ensure job security
Okay, yeah, that's interesting, and no doubt traumatic for the people who were fired, their colleagues we have so far avoided it, and for devs working in the broader industry, and I am sympathetic. But: Sometimes companies overhire, sometimes corporate priorities shift, sometimes a company decides to reorient towards a leaning production model. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. There isn't any industry where overall profitability is, alone, enough to ensure job security. (And I'd also suggest that putting these layoffs in the context of the broader tech industry and the end of zero interest rates might also yield some useful insights...)
In any case, if Epic fires a bunch of devs, and profitability drops, then that was a mistake and they will try to staff back up. And if it doesn't (or rises) then that suggests that game development is actually more profitable than previously expected and individual game devs are more productive than previous realised, which will of course be cold comfort for the devs laid off, but suggests that overall employment and compensation across the broader industry will be tracking upwards not downwards, which is good news for game devs as a whole in the medium to long term.
To be clear: I do not want for one moment to defend the big studios (who appear, by and large, to have C-suites full of pod people who delight in human misery), or to minimise the very real pain suffered by gave devs, but the idea that an entire industry can somehow run off a cliff in a way which is permenantly non-recoverable is...well, let's say it's a bold claim that needs extraordinary support.
> Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love...
Yeah, plausible. But what do you think is going to happen in 2026 and 2027?
We're talking about a hundred billion dollar entertainment industry. Video games have come a long, long way from the odd circumstances in 1983 which notably only affected the nascent industry in America, not Japan or Europe.
I feel close to everyone who lost his/her job, especially in this moment of crisis in which it seems harder and harder to find one.
All societies in the world should have mechanisms to protect vulnerable people in moments like these.
At the same time it’s impossible to reflect on the fact that maybe the videogame industry is extremely crowded and a lot of tasks will require less employees as the AI advances. As humans, do we really need to have this many people employed in videogame development?
The problem is that with capitalism, the only way to find out is by iterating economic cycles in which a lot of vulnerable people get abused. (Not claiming that any other economical system known to man would solve this issue in a better way)
When I read about 90s games I realize that I at least know about pretty much every single one. Obviously I was way more of a gamer then but the biggest difference is the sheer volume nowadays. I am sure steam sees as many releases in a quarter as all of the 90s
Yeah, some game companies will die, others will be (eventually) born, but in the meantime, we still suck at chess, never mind anything that's come out in the last 100 years.
The games industry has been due a correction for years. Too many people want to make games, relative to how many games the world actually wants or needs. Wages and working conditions are always going to be terrible.
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.
I mean as much as I love game dev I understand there is a lot of anxious dead wood in the AAA scene. Timothy Cain talked about it recently https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LMVQ30c7TcA
Jeez, anything that happened in 2023 is now blamed on AI? That's some great marketing for sama.
Unfortunately it misses the point - a huge number of these layoffs were companies purchased by Embracer Group, so a big part of it is overleveraged attempt at consolidation failing spectacularly. Secondly is just game industry cycle at big companies of overhiring and cutting fat. Thirdly is overall layoffs in tech industry in 2022-2023.
AI maybe had a small role in the unusually high number of layoffs in 2023 but it's far from the biggest factor, but the more banal truth is it was a combination of different events.
Oh yeah, my bad. I read "it is entirely self inflicted." and skipped to the conclusion to see what the self inflected blow and weirdly the name of the article comes from the part he's talking about AI.
> Gamers watch this video and think "Wow, that is some really trite and boring dialogue. Could we not?"
> CEOs watch this video and think "I can fire so many people next week."
> Designers? Just get the AI to shit out some dialogue, no one cares about it anyway. Artists? AI already pillaged all their work, no need for them to come in any more. Programmers? Feh, just slap some API framework together and call it a day, get an intern to do it.
> Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love, from indie developers or the few good AAA development houses still running, and piles upon piles upon piles of AI-generated vomit that will make people nostalgic for the days when most of Steam's catalog was Unity Store asset flips.
> And gamers won't buy them.
> And game development studio heads will ask what happened.
> And no one will answer, because everyone is gone.
> Ludum mortuus est.
So I guess the article is about the layoffs, and then switches to being about AI at the end and names the article after their point about AI? It's a very confusing article, not sure what it's trying to say other than everything sucks, this isn't normal (without explaining that), and AI is a thing.
The author has been in this business (and writing about it) since at least 2001, when Dark Age of Camelot released. This is hardly the first time he's seen an economic bubble
So he missed the dotcom bubble and lived through a... housing market bubble? The tech bubble popping now is obviously going to hit closer to home. Case in point: this hysterical blog post. Perusing at his past posts it's a lot of far-left political rambling, so the lack of economic literacy makes sense. I doubt that he was criticizing the massive irresponsible hiring that occurred through the pandemic and is now being corrected.
His recent posts are a pretty weird sample - that blog has been quiet for years and suddenly came back a month or two ago. All of his good, industry-relevant content is buried.
