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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Where?
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.
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.
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.
And I would not be surprised if this formula comes crashing down hard and people simply stop paying $70 for the same crap.
It's happened before to too-comfortable corporate gaming companies and I won't be sad this time either.
Lovely description of current AAA drivel. Permission to reuse? :)
I used to call those "Battlefield of Honor of Duty", but I think that name combination isn't current any more.
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.
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.
If people are willing to pay $70 for what is essentially just a database update...
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.