AI worries and rising costs press on games from every side

Rob Fahey of GamesIndustry.biz opens from a simple premise: six years into the hardware generation, with GTA VI weeks away, this should be the moment platform holders widen their installed bases by converting long-time fence-sitters. His headline argues instead that a hardware market freeze could transform the industry permanently. The excerpt supplied sets up that expected second wind but not the full case for why it may not arrive.

Read alongside last week's coverage of analyst Mat Piscatella's warning about AI-driven memory costs, the piece frames price-driven stagnation as a structural risk, not a passing slump.

CounterpointPlatform holders, and analysts who expect a big launch to pull in buyers, could argue the freeze is temporary and that GTA VI will still lift hardware sales.

Previously: Analyst Mat Piscatella called the US console market the most precarious since the early 1980s, with AI-driven memory costs lifting prices. — Saturday October 10 edition.

Rock Paper Shotgun's Edwin Evans-Thirlwell reports that Alliance Arts, makers of Drunken Goddess Reflux, cancelled a public demo planned for 19 October and will run limited-access online sessions instead. The studio gave two reasons: it could not manage restrictions on posting and streaming with its current team, and it feared the demo could be used to replicate the game with AI tools and ship a copy before launch.

The author suspects this is the start of a trend. She points to a surge of quickly generated clones, including a needle-in-a-haystack game whose imitators crowded the Steam listings, and a March clone of the Japanese game Typing Magician made by feeding progress videos to a generative AI. Her conclusion is that developers may become less willing to show work in progress, which she finds sad.

CounterpointThe author herself concedes that anti-AI positioning has become a marketing tactic and that the AI reason may be a bid for attention. Developers who rely on demos to build wishlists could also argue that closing them costs more than the cloning risk.

Previously: Plunkett's critique tied the Shogun 2 remake's failure to AI-generated portraits and Mataboo's past AI accusations. — Friday October 16 edition.

PC Gamer's Harvey Randall covers an eight-minute YouTube critique by Chet Faliszek, who wrote on Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and Portal 2 before leaving Valve in 2017. Faliszek takes aim at Epic's announcement last week of a "vibe coded" launcher, which he says opens with a jab at Gabe Newell by calling it a speedboat rather than a yacht. He argues Epic was an engine company that bolted a store on, whereas Valve treats Steam as something like an MMO, with places for players to express themselves and gain standing. Epic's store, he says, feels sterile, and appealing to vibe coders offers nothing to people who just want to play.

Randall agrees the optics are poor, noting the announcement amounts to saying that building a store is hard and Epic has taken a shortcut. He adds that many players and developers are tired of AI being pushed into everything.

CounterpointEpic and its supporters could argue that being candid about cheap tooling is the point, and that the real issue is Steam's market dominance rather than the tone of the announcement. Faliszek is also a former Valve employee with an evident stake in the comparison.

Previously: Plunkett's critique tied the Shogun 2 remake's failure to AI-generated portraits and Mataboo's past AI accusations. — Friday October 16 edition.

Rock Paper Shotgun's Julian Benson revisits an interview former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah gave for the Summer Eternal Anthology, a 500-page book from Red Rooster, a studio of former Disco Elysium developers. Darrah says AAA development has become over-specialised to the point of "hyper-fragility": no one person can add anything alone, teams balloon, and a 500-person team slipping one month costs perhaps five to ten million dollars. Benson adds Saber's Tim Willits, who put 200 developers at over two million dollars a month, and applies the same arithmetic to GTA VI's delays, estimating a cost above $500m for a team of more than 4,700.

Darrah predicts a "bifurcation" in which GTA VI and perhaps Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty and Battlefield pull away with effectively unlimited budgets, while too many $100m games fail to earn back their costs. He cites Dragon Age: Veilguard, which EA said reached 1.5m players against a 3m plan, as a casualty. The headline says he also sees CD Projekt in a dangerous position because of these costs; the excerpt supplied cuts off before that section.

CounterpointExecutives at the largest publishers could argue that scale still pays off for hits and that cancellations reflect discipline, not fragility. The $500m delay figure is Benson's back-of-envelope extrapolation, and Darrah's own history with Anthem colours his view.

Aftermath's Nathan Grayson shares a live Aftermath Hours recording from the inaugural New York Games Week, with NYU Game Center director Naomi Clark and Half-Mermaid's Sam Barlow. Barlow argues that games are effectively three-to-five-year office jobs needing steady funding, unlike New York's freelance, scrappy film scene, and he recalls a Hollywood company balking at game budgeting when a consultant explained it. He says that beyond the indie level, you need a studio like Avalanche, which closed its New York location.

A colleague on the panel adds that Seattle and San Francisco court game companies, while New York's economy does not need them. Barlow says it may now be too late: his team's Unreal project needs people who have shipped two or three Unreal games, and none are local. Remote hiring is now the practical answer.

CounterpointLocal boosters, including organisers of New York Games Week, would likely argue it is not too late and that the city's indie output is the foundation for larger studios. The piece is a conversation excerpt, not a researched case.

Aftermath's Riley MacLeod rebuts suspicion that this year's Game Awards cutoff of 20 November was set to admit GTA VI, which launches 19 November. Staff at voting outlets say the deadline for publishers to supply code to voters is 30 October, and earlier cutoffs have all fallen between 17 and 22 November. Nominees are routinely announced before the cutoff: 17 November in 2025 and 18 November in 2024.

MacLeod notes a leaker's claim that review codes will go out before the end of October. She also notes Game File's observation that Rockstar has held no previews, but she finds it hard to imagine the company skipping reviews. Her wider argument is that the awards are secondary to the hype show around them, that GTA VI is already the presumed winner, and that limited pre-release code means nominations may reflect one reviewer's view.

CounterpointGeoff Keighley and developers who value the trophy would dispute that the awards are secondary to the showcase. Those who still find the timing convenient could point to Rockstar's unusual lack of previews.

Previously: Leak group Cyberleek is asking for crypto payments in exchange for leaking a playable build. — Sunday October 11 edition.